For Sub-Saharan Africa, Bridging the Gap Is Critical

	Mark Blackden talks about poverty and gender in Africa.

February 23, 2005—Women’s lack of equality in sub-Saharan Africa has exacerbated or, at the very least, made it more difficult to reduce poverty, according to Mark Blackden, the World Bank’s lead gender specialist in the region. 

Blackden describes poverty as a “serious, overarching problem for the region.”

“Poverty has worsened in Africa over the last 10, not to mention, 20 years. Very few countries have managed to reduce poverty in any real sense,” he says. “What is important is that there is a critical gender dimension to this.”

This is evident not only in health and education standards, very high rates of maternal mortality and infant and child mortality, but also in the fact women in many African countries aren’t well represented in either the central or local governments.

“There is no question that women’s lack of access to and lack of control of economic productive resources, property, and land rights do indeed play an important part in making it more difficult to reduce poverty in Africa.”

Women in Africa are a key economic resource. However, that hasn’t translated into greater equity between the sexes.

 “In Africa, the women are the farmers. Women do at least 70% of the agricultural work, and agriculture is by far the most important source of employment in many sub-Saharan economies. But much of the income that comes from economic labor is, in fact, controlled by men. Women do not have much say,” Blackden says.

To address the problem, he says, requires much more than just extra investment in health and education.

“You cannot get very far if you don’t have a well-educated and healthy workforce. So, clearly expanding effective access to education and health care are extremely significant for women’s empowerment to occur,” he says.

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“At the same time, there is a need for related infrastructure investments. The more you can invest in water supply and sanitation, the more you invest in energy – in helping households meet their basic energy requirements – the more you help save women’s time and therefore raise their labor productivity.”

Blackden says the challenge in Africa is that gender issues are not recognized as an economic issue. To raise awareness, the World Bank’s approach is to work with African countries to ensure that addressing gender issues forms a key part of their poverty reduction strategies.

“The Bank supported this process a few years ago by preparing a Poverty Reduction Strategy sourcebook, including a separate chapter on gender,  to provide guidance to countries on how they might integrate gender issues more systematically into their strategies,” he says.

Blackden cites Uganda as a promising example of a country where the government is committed to putting in place a national gender policy as part of its poverty reduction strategy.

“The Ugandans have already identified gender inequality as an obstacle to growth and intend to undertake a program of research and policy analysis that will allow them to come up with ideas for tackling gender in their growth strategy,” he says.

“They realize if the women do most of the farm work – if they are less productive than men because they have less access to assets – if they have reduced incentives to produce because they don’t control the income – it’s evident that output, growth and productivity will be lower,” he says.

It is an approach that has already led to the inclusion of guidelines to address gender and equity issues in Uganda’s budget preparations for 2005/06

Other aspects of the overall reform program for Uganda include gender-focused actions in the justice and law and order sector, such as a proposed domestic relations bill and a sexual offences bill, and more focused efforts to address women’s access to land and land rights.

“It’s because they have become very aware that gender-based violence is a very serious problem and requires both regulatory and other reforms to protect women. This is, regrettably, very strongly connected with the HIV/AIDS pandemic.” 

Blackden says Africa has pioneered some advances in respect to women’s legal status.

“They have passed a protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the rights of women in Africa, and there is a solemn declaration of the African heads of state on women’s equality,” he says.

In collaboration with its development partners, the Bank has mobilized grant financing for a “Gender and Law” program, aimed at building capacity and partnerships to reform laws, to strengthen legal literacy and education, and to expand the access of the poor to legal services. 

“This has been done in a number of countries in West Africa and now in central and southern Africa; and it has often been very strongly connected with addressing issues of women’s legal status in the context of HIV/AIDS,” Blackden says.