Women and Girls: Employment Skills in the Developing World

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for raising this important subject today.

Tonight, one in nine people will go to bed hungry. In spite of much progress in recent years as a result of the millennium development goals, there are still 700 million people, mostly women and girls, who remain below the poverty line. It is women in developing countries who are often denied the opportunities to earn a living and thus lift themselves out of poverty. The OECD concluded in a 2012 study that greater gender equality in economic opportunities is key to sustainable economic growth and social cohesion. Thus, ensuring that more women are able to get into the workplace is crucial to helping transform developing countries. However, it is not just about building their skills; it is also about creating conditions that enable women to work.

At the core of inequality are entrenched cultural attitudes towards women. In some countries, it remains taboo for a woman to even talk to a man outside her own family or to walk down the street unaccompanied by her husband. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have a saying: a woman’s place is in the home or the grave. Thus, employment outside the home can be almost impossible.

In most countries women are expected to be the care-givers. On average, women do two and a half times more unpaid care work than men. Societies do not value this unpaid work, even though it is estimated to be worth $10 trillion a year globally, and it limits the time that women have available for paid work.

Access to basic infrastructure is often also a problem. It is estimated that women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa spend 40 billion hours a year just fetching and carrying water to use in the house. They may also be expected to collect the family’s firewood or to work in the fields—all unpaid.

Of course, the journey to employment begins with education. Girls’ education benefits the next generation as well, with children born to educated mothers being 40% less likely to die before the age of five. Although there have been improvements in recent years, there is still a long way to go. Girls in Africa are still much less likely than boys to start secondary education, and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate are women.

In 2011, UNICEF found that each additional year of primary school boosted girls’ eventual wages by 10% to 20%, and an extra year of secondary school by 15% to 25%. But too often girls fall out of school, frequently because of issues such as a lack of girls’ lavatories, insufficient numbers of female teachers and negative classroom environments.

I remember talking to mothers in a village in Sierra Leone. They did not want their girls to go to secondary school. The school was in another town and they were worried that their girls would be attacked on the way there or that they would be raped in the school by teachers or fellow pupils. Once a girl in Sierra Leone was pregnant, she was unmarriageable and a lifelong burden on her very poor family. Thus, they felt it was better to marry her off to protect her from sexual harassment and unwanted pregnancy. In developing countries, one in three girls is forced to marry before her 18th birthday. Child marriage restricts the lives and livelihoods of millions of girls each year.

To protect women, systems of law and order are required, with laws that are implemented at local level. Too often national laws are not known about in villages, with customary law being in the hands of the male elders. I remember hearing in a village in Liberia that a woman who had been raped was not able to report this to the police. The nearest policeman was in the next village and she could not go unless given permission by the village elders, who preferred to “sort things out themselves”.

So how can we help? DfID must continue to fund programmes that help address some of these issues. Developing countries must be helped to build their capacity to educate and encouraged to have laws that protect women and prevent early marriage. Women need to be trained in economic-generating skills and helped to gain access to microfinance and markets for their products.

We must, however, work with the men in these countries by explaining the benefits of caring duties in the home being more equally shared, which will release women to help bring income into the family. Employers need to pay women equally: the global gender pay gap is still 23%, with the gap higher in poorer countries.

To conclude, achieving greater female employment in the developing world, with the resulting positive economic growth, will help lift families, communities and countries out of poverty and contribute to the SDG aspiration to “leave no one behind”.