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Nurturing women's human capital
Studies of a wide range of societies find that women are an important engine of
growth and development.29
Their ability to save and invest in their families is well documented. As the
family's nutritional gatekeeper, women fight hunger and malnutrition. Their
largely unrecorded role in agriculture explains the survival of many
traditional subsistence communities on marginal lands. Yet in many places,
traditions, limited mobility, and lack of voice or access to information make
women the most marginal group. With the men seeking work elsewhere, women tend
the fields and look after the children, the elderly, and the farm animals.
Traditional communities depend on women and girls to fetch fuelwood and water,
and to produce and prepare food. Are national and local institutions investing
in this engine for growth, or are they handicapping it?
Some 80 percent of economically active women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South
Asia are in agricultural activities-largely subsistence farmers in
female-headed households or day laborers on larger commercial farms. These
economic realities are beginning to give women more influence. Forward-looking
institutions are responding with changes in attitude and service delivery.
Bangladesh's Grameen Bank and Morocco's Zakoura Foundation offer microcredit
for women and schools for girls; women contribute to the design of water,
health, and education projects in West Africa, Central America, and
Baluchistan. Agencies and communities, recognizing the high returns from
raising women's status, are teaming with NGOs, local anthropologists,
sociologists, and economists to reach women directly-with information,
education, and access to credit.30
By tailoring service delivery to local circumstances and empowering remote
rural communities, some countries are finding affordable ways to improve
services and help people get out of poverty traps. This starts with a good
understanding of a community's values and capabilities. It requires people who
can marry an appreciation of modernity with an understanding of local
traditions (cultural translators).
Tunisia illustrates the combination of national leadership, long-term
commitment, and cultural understanding to achieve broad-based improvements in
the quality of life of all citizens. Soon after independence in the 1950s
Tunisia's President Bourguiba began introducing legal reforms to improve the
status of women. He routinely visited villages, explaining the changes he
wanted. The education ministry transported boys and girls in remote areas to
school, and the health ministry sent midwives out to villages to discuss
preventive health care and family planning, and to inform women of their
rights.
Decades later Germany's technical assistance agency, Gesellschaft für
Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), recognized that one of Tunisia's public
agencies would be a good candidate for its participatory development approach.
The Sylvo-Pastoral Development Authority (ODESYPANO) had been administering a
tree-planting program, with mixed success, along the barren hillsides in
northwestern Tunisia to reduce the erosion that silted up dams farther
downstream. GTZ wanted to fund a project that would incorporate women. The idea
of having female outreach workers accompany male agents had not previously been
considered. The director of ODESYPANO was supportive of the idea, but saw many
risks that are difficult for a civil servant to assume. The experience showed
that persistence, grant funding, and partnership can overcome an agency's
deep-seated aversion to risk taking (box 4.5).
Box 4.5
Addressing risks, changing institutions, and reaching subsistence families in
Tunisia
The families in the semi-arid mountainous region of northwestern Tunisia are
poor, with an annual average per capita income of $220. In the mid-1990s GTZ
approached the Tunisian government with a $1 million grant to finance a project
that integrated female participation at the village level. The director of
ODESYPANO saw several problems and risks in introducing female agricultural
outreach workers.
There were few, if any, trained female agricultural specialists. Families would
not want young women to go with male agents to villages in remote, rugged
areas. And the villagers would have difficulty accepting female agents. GTZ
argued that this approach had brought good results in other countries and that
the women in Tunisian villages had important farm responsibilities. After a
year of discussions on how to minimize the risks, in 1995 the director hired
seven women for a staff of 40 outreach workers. One of those selected, Leila,
25, was an unemployed university graduate in Arabic literature. GTZ put her and
the others through a six-week training program and teamed her with Ali, an
agent with a degree in animal husbandry who had already been working in the
villages. On her first visit to a village, Ali requested the men to allow Leila
to talk with their wives. They refused. She sat quietly listening to the
discussion and continued to accompany Ali to his meetings with the village men
once every two weeks, but never spoke, only listened to the men discuss the
problems of the village.
After their third meeting the men brought along their wives and told Leila they
trusted her. The barrier had been broken. Leila taught the women animal
hygiene, better milking methods, and how to make cheese, plant caper bushes,
cultivate saffron flowers, and plant and braid garlic-all products they are
beginning to sell in the local market and to resort hotels along the coast.
Several activities were introduced as team efforts for the men and their wives,
including rabbit husbandry, improved poultry pens, and better water harvesting
techniques. Having the women hear the same messages that were being given to
their husbands reinforced the know-how and application of new
ideas-significantly improving outcomes.
A development dynamic is changing traditions, increasing family incomes (up 7
percent a year from 1996 to 2000), and promoting social cohesiveness. It is
also reinforcing partnerships between husbands and wives and among families who
are starting to pool resources to create larger commercial activities. The
number of female agricultural workers has nearly doubled, from 7 women in 1997
to 13 women in 2001.
Source: Bank staff field visits, interviews with ODESYPANO staff, June
1997, and World Bank (2001d).
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