UN Women Discussion Papers

This paper traces the restructuring of rural families’ agricultural production, the intra-household division of labour, and land usage in the interim between the global oil price rise of 1979 and its precipitous fall by 2015. These decades witnessed smallholder export crop production becoming increasingly uncompetitive in the world market due to the high costs of transporting bulky crops over the vast expanses of rural Africa. With the decline of cash cropping, men, women, and youth were drawn away from farming towards off-farm cash-earning in a wide variety of non-agricultural activities. Now, male heads of household no longer monopolize cash earnings in rural households to the same extent as in the past. Women’s and youth’s earnings afford them more household decision-making autonomy. Demographically, the HIV/AIDS crisis has imposed strain on rural households, and impacted land usage and inheritance, affecting women detrimentally in some countries, whereas state reform of inheritance laws has improved women’s situation in other countries. Generally, officially published national-level rural labour statistics harbour gender bias and under-reporting of female labour expenditure. Domestic work continues to be the preserve of women. Marriage patterns are changing, with some women experiencing a reluctance to marry men due to men’s lost income-earning capacity and women’s increased wariness of contracting AIDS. In this context, matrifocal families have gained salience.

Few programmes for economically empowering rural women in India have focused seriously on farming—the one occupation in which the women have most experience. Hence, two state-level initiatives in the early 2000s stand out, both because they focused on improving women’s livelihoods within agriculture itself, and because of the innovative institutional form by which they sought to do so, namely group farming. The initiatives encouraged rural women to lease in land collectively, pool their labour and capital, and cultivate jointly on a voluntary basis. Hence they recognized women as farmers outside the domain of family farms under which most cultivation is done globally, and in which women are typically unpaid family workers with little autonomy. This paper, based on the author’s detailed primary surveys in the two states, examines whether group farming can enable women farmers to overcome resource constraints and gain economically. Can it also empower them socially and politically? Since the approach to group farming differs notably in the two states, the paper examines which approach is more effective, and why. To date there has been no systematic study of group farming, based on carefully collected quantitative and qualitative data, in either state. The lessons learned from these experiences can help not only in strengthening group farming further, but also in assessing how these models could be replicated in other regions.

Circular labour migration is frequently portrayed as a gender-neutral phenomenon. Despite the growing literature on the feminization of migration, scholarly and policy literature is often gender-blind. In Nepal, over the last decade, the share of women migrant workers has significantly increased. The National Population Census 2011 shows that about 13 per cent of the absentee population is composed of women. Due to prevailing patriarchal norms and values and skewed policy, female labour migration is traditionally stigmatized and associated with sex work or equated to trafficking. However, with rising demands for cheap labour (particularly domestic work) in destination countries (for example, the Persian Gulf), continued inadequacy of rural employment opportunities and changing aspirations, women are increasingly migrating independently. Pourakhi, an organization established by women returnees in 2003, has collected more than 1,700 case studies on returnee women migrant workers in Nepal. This paper delves into 307 of these, as well as a consultation with 14 returnee migrant women from 14 districts, to better understand the reintegration process. Rather than focusing on a (necessary) critique of labour markets and on the high human, social and financial costs of migration, this study aims at giving voice to the subjectivities of migrant women in Nepal, as less attention has been paid to this aspect. It unpacks their reasons for undertaking international migration and their struggle for capability to secure a livelihood in the context of globalization.

Using micro data from two recent labour force surveys collected in Cameroon and Mali, this paper explores gender differentials in labour market outcomes covering key areas such as occupational segregation, informality, part-time work and gender wage gaps. While women’s participation to the labour market is relatively high in Africa compared to other regions of the world, the examples of Cameroon and Mali suggest it varies significantly within the continent. The data also show that the differential between the two countries in terms of women’s participation is driven by the differential in education levels. The analysis also reveals that noticeable gender differences can be observed in the employment patterns: while men are more likely to be salaried workers, women are more often unpaid family workers. However, in both countries, informal employment is the norm for both sexes. Gender gaps in monthly earnings are found to be much bigger for self-employed than for wage workers, a result that is consistent with other studies. Although education of both women and men is likely to play an important role, social norms in general deserve to be studied more thoroughly in order to understand remaining differences and their evolution in a context of rising education levels.

This work develops an agenda for investing in sustainable development, with particular emphasis on local priorities, poverty alleviation and gender equality. Sustainable development can take many different pathways, even within the dominant ‘three-pillar’ paradigm (economy-environment-society) of sustainability. The author draws on the vast literature on access to basic services for the poor to argue that universal and gender-equal access cannot be guaranteed primarily by voluntary mechanisms (i.e., through market forces or through the non-governmental sector). Universal access needs a renewal of the civic contract between the state and its citizens. As we begin the post-2015 era, promoting public action towards gender-equal development should become a priority for the sustainable development agenda.

This discussion paper reviews the extensive literature on sanitation to show that inadequate access to this basic service prevents the realization of a range of human rights and of gender equality. This paper was featured at an event on Emerging Issues in Gender and WASH held during the 60th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women in 2016.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes a goal to achieve gender equality for all women and girls and a re-commitment to governments’ human rights obligations. At the same time, governments have agreed to a range of strategies for financing the Agenda that arguably undermine their ability to fulfil women’s human rights and advance a just and gender-equitable model of development. This publication critically evaluates this potential contradiction with a focus on the key financing strategies of trade and investment liberalization, sovereign debt resolution, international private finance, and public-private partnerships, as well as the role of the global partnership for development. Recommendations are made to better align financing targets with the objective of supporting the enjoyment of women’s human rights. Finally, the work reflects on the inherent limitations in the 2030 Agenda and the need for an urgent shift to a model of development justice.

This work provides an in-depth analysis of trends in labour outcomes of women in India based on employment-unemployment surveys. The publication brings out the gender differentials that exist in the employment status of women and men despite the existence of legal and policy framework for the empowerment of women in the country. The labour force participation rates (LFPRs) of women are not only less than half those of men but also declined in 2011–2012. Age, marital status, presence of children, socio-religious status, area of residence, level of education and relative affluence of households are some of the determinants of labour force participation of women and men in India.

This paper analyzes the gender dimensions of social protection in three countries in the Pacific region – Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu – and explores how best to approach social protection so as to promote gender equality rather than risk reinscribing prevailing gender inequalities. It was produced for UN Women’s flagship report Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 to be released as part of the UN Women discussion paper series.