Impact of Women's Poverty and ignorance

Last week I found myself glued onto the TV screen following a rebroadcast of the monthly press briefing by H.E. President Paul Kagame. In a peculiar coincidence, my attention was drawn to the President’s response to gender issues in the country.The President’s concern about the barricades of achieving gender parity was clearly punctuated. Ignorance, he noted, was a big setback to the fight against gender violence and suppression. The suffering of innocent women is untold. They suffer physical and sexual abuse but they remain helpless and confused about the step to take next.As African governments battle ignorance across all sexes, poverty is stealthily creeping in to waste the gains that education makes. The disparities in wealth distribution and property ownership in Africa particularly are threateningly wide apart. Women, who are the majority, are the poorest. The fight against gender imbalance should be two pronged. Educate women while empowering them economically.As the African Union report on gender (2004) indicates, a large body of studies have shown that gender inequalities have significant negative impact on economic growth in Africa.The goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 in the Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved without a concerted effort to improve womens access to economic opportunities and the returns to their effort. Social indicators such as high fertility, low birth weight infants, child mortality and high maternal mortality cannot be improved without reducing womens workload, their access to education and their access to and control of income.Increasing womens access to assets and income while reducing their workload has shown to result into increased spending on food, and childrens education, including increased spending on girls education. Studies also show that increasing womens income results in a higher rate of savings. Thus a gender-aware and pro-poor poverty reduction strategy is likely to result in higher growth rates and human development. Lack of Rights and Services In most African countries women lack property and inheritance rights which in turn restricts their housing security as well as economic options despite the fact that these rights are enshrined in a number of international and regional mechanisms.In rural Africa, womens lack of land rights is exacerbated by their lack of access to other productive inputs such as agricultural extension, credit, new technologies and training. Yet studies have shown that if women farmers had the same access to inputs and training as male farmers, yields could be increased between 10-20 percent.Poverty is also related to womens work burden. Women and girls suffer from time poverty as a result of their disproportionate responsibility for household maintenance and childcare. These responsibilities consume large amounts of time and energy due to low investment in basic infrastructure such as water and sanitation systems, energy and transport. In both rural and urban areas, women work longer hours than men. Rural women and girls are responsible for fetching water, fuel and fodder. But all this can change by following the various policies that not only empower women, but fight poverty as well.