Cairo conference: The only thing that matters is women

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): The secret key that unlocks the door on the impasse in Cairo at the world conference on population can be mouthed in one word: women, To be absolutely precise: poor women. Compared with this everything else is probably a time-consuming side-show.

One figure alone speaks of the magnitude of the issue. The number of rural women living in poverty in the developing countries has increased by almost 50 percent over the past 20 years to an awesome 565 million -- 374 million of them in Asia, 130 million in Africa, 43 million in Latin America and the Caribbean and 18 million in the Near East and North Africa. This is not just the consequence of over-rapid population growth. There has clearly been a sharp jump in the number of female- headed households. A combination of factors-changes in traditional values, the emigration of men, increased family break-up, the economic recession of the 1980s, high population growth; low productivity and a deteriorating environment -- all are working to reinforce each other.

The degree of the problem depends partly on the influence of culture and partly on the state of social instability as a consequence of war, civil disturbance or over-rapid urbanization. In most of the Middle East, North Africa, much of Asia and the western Sahel of Africa the proportion of households headed by women is well under 20 percent. In sharp contrast, in Central America, the Caribbean, Southern Africa and Vietnam it is over 30 percent.

But whether a women is alone or with a man, despite the fact that she is a critical element of production in the rural economy -- in Africa women produce three-quarters of their family's food supply -- she is to all intents and purposes given second or third rank by social custom.

First and foremost, women's access to land is severely constrained. Yet in the rural economy without land of one's own one has no assured access to the means of production.

In Islamic law women's land rights are clear cut. But in day to day life custom, the threat of divorce or other social sanctions all contribute to pressuring women to cede practical control of their land to the men.

In Africa under customary land systems married women often have the right to a certain number of fields themselves but they must give priority to their husband's fields and livestock.

Development has not been a friend to women. Most modern day crop and livestock projects are aimed at men. Project designers, banking and aid officials all to readily assume that women cannot afford to buy improved seeds, fertilizer and irrigation equipment. Nor can they repay loans.

These attitudes are more based on prejudice than fact. The repayment records of poor women are often much superior to that of better off borrowers.

Lack of education makes the day of reform even more distant. There are a billion illiterates in the world; two thirds of them are women. The rapid growth of educational opportunity in the 1960s and 70s slowed towards the end of the 1980s as deepening recession pushed many countries to cut their educational budgets. This is extraordinarily short-sighted. Investment in education is probably the single most rewarding activity for any government at any level of development. To underinvest in women is to compound the mistake even further.

With education and good economic opportunities women can progress from a situation where they are triply disadvantaged -- as poor, as women and perhaps too as single parents -- to where their work has a triple multiplier effect -- in the home, in society at large and, not least, in the development of the next generation.

We can in fact add a further benefit. If women are truly participating in economic life this is going to have a profound effect in bringing population growth under control.

There is a growing amount of hard evidence that a woman's income and her degree of control over household spending is positively correlated with her children's nutrition and health. Thus improving female opportunity and income will lower child mortality and morbidity. Over the long run this will inevitably encourage women to have less children.

This tendency is amplified once women have assured access to land. If a women does not have to bear several sons to be certain she will always be able to cultivate a piece of a son's land whatever happens to her husband, then clearly she is going to be more amenable to discussing the possibilities of family planning.

Tragically, in many parts of the Third World we are still seeing an opportunity lost. Instead of a countryside firing on all cylinders, what we are now observing is its increasing feminization, a society in which the men are either absent or not pulling their weight, the burdens of life and well-being thrown on the women, who are not equipped either by education, tools or advice to realize their abundant, unfulfilled potential.

I sense the Cairo conference is so badly polarized because too many delegates have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Message to Cairo: Take care of women's poverty and population will probably look after itself.