The Plight of the Rural Woman

As we celebrate the international women’s day, it is easy to sink in the regurgitation of successes of the global gender equality movement, but life to an ordinary rural Rwandese woman or any of her colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa is a far cry from gender equality. In Traditional African culture man is the head of the home while the woman is literarily the beast of burden of the home. A morning drive through the volcanic nutrient-rich potato and vegetable growing region of Rwanda’s Northern Province will reveal women tilling the land with their children. The men keep themselves the fancy and easier chores like spraying pesticides and spend the rest of the day balancing huge bottles of locally brewed beer between their hands, from the sweat of their wives’ labor. The situation is replicated all over Africa. Women who usually do not have a say on the number of children they can bear, have to grapple with their husbands insatiable demands for children and an unequal intentions to fend for the growing brood. The woman of the home not only has to spend a significant portion of her productive time suffering from the reduced efficiency during pregnancy while their husbands brag in the bars about their virility. Women will spend the better part of the day with their children in the gardens to produce food for the family and for sale only for the man to claim overall responsibility of spending the family’s income as the family head. Instead they take the money to spend on their own entertainment and at worst with their concubines. According to the United Nations, in no country in the world do men come anywhere close to women in the amount of time spent in housework. Furthermore, despite the efforts of feminist movements, women in the core [wealthiest, Western countries] still suffer disproportionately, leading to what sociologists refer to as the “feminization of poverty,” where two out of every three poor adults are women. In combination with the other social and economic repercussions of femininity together with the workload, makes the life of a rural woman difficult. The disadvantages begin at the birth of the girl child. Due to the traditional culture which values a boy child as a proper continuation of a family lineage while the girl child is merely property to be ‘auctioned’ off to the highest bidder at marriage, girls are discriminated right from dispensation of parental love, have less priority for education and face social bias in incidences of premature parenthood, sexual violence and especially in Africa become prone to a dangerous death rate resulting from pregnancy. “It is estimated that each year more than half a million women—roughly one woman every minute—die as a result of pregnancy complications and childbirth,” 99% of which occur in developing countries. Yet “many of these women’s lives could be saved if they had access to basic health care services,” says the state of the world children report by UNICEF in 2007. According to another UN report “Female education affects family health and nutrition, agricultural productivity, and fertility, yet there is a wide gender gap in education” Families prefer to take the boys to school and prepare the girl fro marriage. Hence an uneducated wife is stuck in the cycle of poverty which they can hardly emerge from. Their family labors which has increased over the years goes unpaid and if a rural woman would like to start a business, the financial institutions favor her less in availability of credit unless if they are in groups or cooperatives. As a result of these stresses, rural women age prematurely. Womens burdens - heavy throughout the third world - are enough to break a camels back in much of Africa (Harrison 1983). In Rwanda, the story of women’s emancipation is a celebrated cause and a model case for the world, with women holding equal or in some cases more leadership positions than men. It augers well for the Rwandan woman but that can only be possible if the leaders are enacting a proper legal framework to reduce or eliminate barriers towards development of the rural woman, who is ignorant of her rights and is comfortable in the role which society has set out for her. Then they have got to lead a sensitization campaign that will enlighten the rural woman not to be content with what they are going through. Therefore, the plight of the rural woman can not be addressed fully by holding fancy Beijing style feminist conferences or protests where anti-men venom is predominant. Instead, it lies with workable solutions that will directly enforce gender equality measures in the rural community and encourage women to strike out confidently towards true self emancipation. Contact: kelviod@yahoo.com