Women’s Right To Land, Assets,
And Other Productive Resources
Its Impact On Gender Relations And Increased Productivity
Nitya Rao*
It is often assumed that poverty reduction would lead to gender equality. Research points to
the opposite, namely, that increasing prosperity can have perverse gender effects . It is
therefore important to make a conceptual distinction between projects that seek to reduce
poverty and enhance productivity and those that seek to empower women, as the strategies
adopted could be different. Effective poverty targeting can ensure that short-term, material
benefits reach the poorest without necessarily leading to enhanced voice and equality, as
revealed by the review of several projects in this paper.
*School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ. Email: [email protected]
The objective of this paper is to assess progress towards gender equality and rural poverty
reduction through women’s control over land and other productive resources, through an
analysis of diverse experiences in five South Asian countries, namely, Bangladesh, India,
Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Based on this, policy options in terms of mainstreaming
gender in development programmes are identified, for governments to consider in achieving
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Following a critique of the MDGs by the women’s movement in terms of narrowing down
the agenda and areas of concern as articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action (Barton,
2005), the Task Force 3 Interim Report has adopted a three-dimensional operational
framework to assess progress towards the Millennium goal on gender equality. These include
the capabilities domain referring to basic human abilities as measured through education,
health and nutrition, the access to resources and opportunities domain and the security
domain that seeks to reduce vulnerability to violence and conflict. A key domain is then that
of ‘access to resources and opportunities’, which includes access to economic assets (such as
land, property or infrastructure) and resources (income and employment) as well as political
opportunity. To meet the goal, the Task Force has further identified six strategic priorities,
two of which are relevant to the discussion in this paper: guaranteeing women’s property and
inheritance rights and reducing discrimination in labour markets, as well as investing in
gender-responsive infrastructure to reduce women’s and girls’ time poverty [Birdsall et al,
2004].
While globally there has been a push for women’s property and inheritance rights since the
Second Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1980, following the CEDAW commitment
to equal access to land and other property (Articles 14, 15 and 16), progress has been slow.
All the South Asian countries have been reporting on the progress on CEDAW (with the
exception of Pakistan, which has not fully ratified the Convention) and note that women in
most instances do have legal rights guaranteed by the Constitution, yet usually do not
exercise them. In both Nepal and India the Convention has been invoked in relation to cases
filed in the Supreme Court,1 yet legal rights have been difficult to enforce. In India and Sri
Lanka, non-interference policies have been cited in relation to certain minority communities
and tribes [FAO/IFAD/ILC, 2004: 8] or personal laws invoked to counteract legal provision.
1
There have been several reasons for this lack of action and implementation of property rights
for women, a major one being the social embeddedness of land. Land inheritance, the major
form of land acquisition in South Asia, is a key element of family and kinship relations, and a
way of structuring social relations on the ground [Dube, 1997]. Land is valued not just for
material reasons or as a productive resource, but also for symbolic reasons in terms of
identity, status and hierarchy within a given social context. Policies therefore do not enter a
social vacuum, but rather influence the economic and social life of the household, and in this
process, conflicts cannot be ruled out [Gupta, 1997]. Women in South Asia are dependent on
men for at least one key agricultural activity – ploughing – and also for security and social
support, given the fragile nature of state-led social protection.1 Most women do have access
and use rights to land, though these are contingent on their relationships to men, so unless the
relationship breaks down, they often do not find a need to claim independent rights. One
therefore needs to distinguish between different kinds of rights in property – from use rights
to ownership rights as represented by a legal title – seeing these as key stages in the process
of empowerment and intra-household negotiation.
It is often assumed that poverty reduction would lead to gender equality. Research on sex
ratios in India, however, point to the opposite, namely, that increasing prosperity can have
perverse gender effects [Agnihotri, 2000, Rustagi, 2000]. It is therefore important to make a
conceptual distinction between projects that seek to reduce poverty and enhance productivity
and those that seek to empower women, as the strategies adopted could be different.
Effective poverty targeting can ensure that short-term, material benefits reach the poorest
without necessarily leading to enhanced voice and equality, as revealed by the review of
several projects in this paper. While keeping this tension in mind, I focus here primarily on
the implications of project interventions for gender equality.
In the next section, I set out a framework for defining assets and access to them. This is
followed with benchmark data on different kinds of assets based on secondary sources where
available, in order to develop some understanding of the state of affairs in terms of women’s
control over productive resources at present. Such contextualisation is extremely important
as a background to assess gains from projects and also gaps that remain, and thereby suggest
a set of practical priority policy options for governments and other agencies.
The Context: Structural Reform and Changing Livelihood Patterns
Most of South Asia has adopted some form of Structural Adjustment in the 1980s and 90s,
directed by the IMF-World Bank package. The objectives have been short-term stabilisation
and long-term growth by reorienting production towards the market system and cutting back
on state subsidies and interventions that encourage “market distortions”. The implications for
agriculture and the rural sector, which support more than 70 per cent of the population in
most of these countries, have however been far from positive. In three of them - India, Nepal
and Pakistan - there has been a slowdown in agricultural growth over the 1990s as clear from
Table 1.
2
Table 1: Growth Rates In Different Sectors
Country
India
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Nepal
Sri Lanka
Agriculture
1980-81 to
1989-90
2.85
5.4
2.29
3.59
2.4
1990-91 to
1997-98
1.41
4.4
3.29
2.57
2.4
Industry
1981-82 1991-92
1990-91 1998-9
7.8
5.8
8.2
4.8
3.64
3.89
7.8
7.2
4.2
7.2
Services
1980-81 1990-91
1989-90 1999.00
6.7
4.6
6.06
6.44
3.6
6.2
5.3
5.73
Source: Compiled from Human Development in South Asia 2001 (HDC, 2002).
In Nepal, the Agriculture Perspective Plan (APP) launched in 1996, underscored the need to
prioritise agriculture in the growth process. To accelerate growth, APP proposed substantial
increases in investments in irrigation, rural roads, fertiliser and technology. However,
ignoring the APP, both input and output markets in agriculture were deregulated, price
subsidies in fertilisers and capital subsidies in shallow tubewells abolished and subsidised
credit withdrawn, leading to the collapse of the agricultural sector, dominated by small and
marginal farmers. The share of agriculture in total output has declined, and benefits of
reforms seem primarily to have gone to the urban business community [Nepal HDR, 2004:
37]. Emphasis on free trade has adversely affected the poor, in the absence of institutions to
safeguard their interests. Nepal however did try to decentralise governance through the
adoption of the Local Self Government Act in 1999, yet effective devolution has yet to occur,
constrained further by the Maoist movement and political instability. Recently, DFID has
sought to support the implementation of the APP by channelling funds to the district-level,
and providing mechanisms to support group-based and individual-based service provisioning
for agricultural production in high poverty areas. The results are not yet clear.
India and Pakistan have had similar experiences. In India, the reforms of the 1990s laid
stress on competition and free trade (dismantling the system of licensing and encouraging
foreign equity investment in the Indian economy), subsidy reduction, a reduced role for the
state and economic stabilisation [Sundaram 2003]. While structural reforms have been
slower in agriculture than other sectors, since the mid-1990s, India has gradually opened up
its agricultural sector to international trade, signing the Uruguay Round Agreement (URA) of
the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1994. The URA commitments
require a reduction in level of tariffs in a time-bound manner to allow market access,
reduction in domestic support including subsidies to different crops and reduction in export
subsidies. In practical terms, some of the key fall-outs have been falling extension services,
less institutional credit and inadequate price support systems on the one hand and an increase
in corporate agriculture on the other. In states such as Andhra Pradesh, contract farming has
led to a virtual alienation of the land of small and marginal farmers who no longer have any
say or control on how the lands are to be used. Access to by-products from supplementary
crops and livestock too is thus restricted. There has simultaneously been a reduction in public
investment particularly in irrigation and a neglect of institutional reforms.
The major consequence has been a decline in the average annual growth rate of the
agriculture sector from 4 per cent in the 8th Plan period (1992-96) to about 1.4 per cent
during the first four years of the Ninth Plan (1997-2002) [GOI, 2002: 22].2 Real incomes,
especially for small and marginal farmers, have eroded as a consequence. At the same time,
consumer prices have not declined and with the tightening of the Public Distribution System,
the poorest consumers, who spend a bulk of their household resources on food grains, are for
3
the first time facing a decline in annual cereal availability to the extent of 10 kg per head
between 1995-96 and 2000-01 (156.6 kg to 147.3 kg per capita) [Patnaik 2002: 138]. The
connection between public expenditure and poverty levels may not be straightforward, yet
clearly despite all charges of corruption or inefficiency, the state has a role to play in
addressing issues of equality.
The withdrawal of the state is closely linked to a dependence on money and markets – the
new themes within development discourse [Zwarteveen, 1998]. This emphasis has had two
types of implications: first, treating assets such as land and water primarily as economic
goods (hence justifying a range of user fees and contributions), and second, devolution of
management control to overcome state inefficiencies as well as enhance incentives for more
intensive resource utilisation at the local level. While both these aspects, that is, local control
and engagement with markets, offer potential opportunities to women, participation
nevertheless involves challenging the status quo, overcoming a range of socio-economic
barriers, and implies the existence of considerable social risk and uncertainty. Women’s
strategies thus often involve the use of more indirect means to obtain access to resources, be
it land, water or trees. It is in recognition of this social embeddedness of productive resources
that many organisations working on the ground have in fact focused either on ‘creating new
assets’ for women in wastelands and other common property rather than claiming property
rights over existing resources especially land, or organising women into groups to better
enable them to face risks.
Given the policy framework and the nature of markets, one needs to carefully examine the
types of assets that can contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment. For a lot
of women, but also for the growing numbers of landless and marginal landholders, their
labour is their major asset. As Heyer (1989) found in her Tamil Nadu study, asset strategies
of the landless involved investing in human resources such as education and in social support
networks, rather than land. It is important therefore to also examine employment and
unemployment rates, occupational segregation by gender and identify areas of intervention
therein, that can enable women to access better employment opportunities [Mehra et al,
2000: 9]. Non-manual, skilled work are being seen as more desirable forms of ‘work’ than
agricultural activity by many rural women. In this context, the identification of reduction of
time poverty for women and girls by the MDG Task Force Report is welcome.
In a speech to Parliament on February 25th 2005, the President of India spoke about “A New
Deal For Rural India, which involves among other things, reversing the declining trend in
investment in agriculture; stepping up credit flow to farmers; enhancing public investment in
irrigation and wasteland development; increasing funds for agricultural research and
extension; creating a single market for agricultural produce; investing in rural healthcare and
education; promoting rural electrification and rural roads; setting up commodities futures
markets and insuring against risk in farming and rural business”. In contrast to the total lack
of investment in rural areas in the last decade, if this policy shift does indeed occur, it is
possible that land as an asset may once again become valuable as a material asset, and access
to land could lead to a range of opportunities for employment and income-earning as well as
accumulation.
4
1. Defining Assets
In 1995, out of 1.3 billion of the world’s poor, 515 million lived in South Asia, with 29-53
per cent of the population in Bangladesh, India and Nepal living below the poverty line.
During the 1990s, the incidence of poverty increased in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
[Mahbub ul Haq HDC, 2002: 48]. In terms of infrastructure provision, while the provisioning
of safe drinking water has considerably improved, sanitation and health services continue to
be poor, and malnutrition levels high, at over 50 per cent of children throughout the 1990s.
Except Sri Lanka, close to 50 per cent of children did not reach grade 5. Public expenditures
on education and health have either declined or stagnated over the last decade, and so have
expenditures on poverty reduction programmes, both asset creation and employment
generation.
Data from all over South Asia reveals that the share of agriculture to household incomes has
been declining over the past decade, land ownership is no longer the predominant source of
household incomes in rural areas, and more and more rural people have been driven to look
for alternate income and employment sources, largely in the urban, informal sector, in trade
and services. An example is provided from longitudinal survey data of two villages,
Aurepalle and Dokur, in Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh from the ICRISAT
database. This reveals that while agriculture contributed around 87-97 per cent of household
income in 1975-76, this had fallen to 27-32 per cent in 2000-01. Interestingly, the share of
non-agricultural income which was 3-12 per cent in the earlier period was now 67-72 per
cent [Rao and Bantilan, 2003]. In Dokur, there appears to have been a drastic decline in
income from agriculture, both direct crop income and that from casual labour. This has been
compensated for by an increase in income from migration and other non-farm sources.
Dipankar Gupta notes that this may also be a way of escaping caste subordination for those at
the bottom of the rural social hierarchy (2005).
While the above figures are not gender-disaggregated, much of this additional contribution is
likely to be constituted of male income, as women’s lower literacy status has disadvantaged
them in the labour markets. Studies reveal that while women may be employed for more
number of days, this is at the lowest level of informal employment, where the work is piecerate and lower paid. There is hence a decline in their net earnings.3 It is interesting to note
however that educated rural women are not just better able to secure formal employment than
men (Harriss-White, 2004), but are also resistant to undertaking agricultural work, except in
managerial-supervisory roles [Ramakumar, 2003]. Education and skills seem to be
contributing to differentiation, rather than just land-holdings in the rural context.4
If one then adopts a livelihoods approach that entails a mix of resources and strategies for
making a living, and not a sharply divided sectoral approach that defines primary and
secondary occupations in a rigid manner, it would be important to explore the plethora of
resources available in a given context, who has access to and control over what resource and
the implications of this for gender equality. Apart from land, in the rural context, which is the
focus of this paper, one could then consider livestock and labour as key individual/household
assets, and common property, whether forests, grazing land or water resources (including
marine and coastal) as community/state assets. For women particularly, public infrastructure
supports in the form of drinking water, electricity, health facility, are major assets, as they
directly reduce their burden of work.
5
Moser (1998) rightly points out, though in the urban context, that assets include the wellknown tangible assets such as labour and land (housing in urban areas), as well as health
status, skills and education that determine the returns to labour, and also the largely
intangible assets in terms of household relations and social capital. In the context of declining
state support, one sees an increasing reliance on extended family and other community-level
support networks, alongside shifts in household roles and responsibilities that include an
increase in the number of women working, reliance on child labour, and increased time on
processing cheaper foods and obtaining basic services. Interactions at the level of the
community, state and markets thus feed into interactions at the household level and influence
bargaining power therein.
Within the livelihoods approaches, assets have also been defined as a set of ‘capitals’ that
include natural, physical, human, social and financial capitals, all of which jointly play a key
role not just in poverty reduction, but also in reducing vulnerabilities to stresses and shocks
(Scoones, 1998). It would then be important to explore mechanisms for access to and control
over this range of assets, mediated as they are by diverse social relations and institutions.
Each of these interactions is likely to have implications for gender relations [Ellis, 2000] and
gender equality, as well as for livelihood security.
Assets then can be meaningfully understood as offering a range of ‘entitlements’: ownership
(through trade, production, own-labour or inheritance); exchange (through market-based
trade or transfers from the state, such as public works, social security and food subsidies) and
legal [Sen, 1981]. So, hunger and starvation can result from a fall in endowments (such as
land alienation)5, unfavourable shifts in exchange entitlements (as seen in food price and
wage fluctuations) and the difficulties of implementing legal rights. Property rights
particularly are fuzzy and mediated by family and kinship ties, and a strict focus on legal
rights, can jeopardise women’s rights to land, often unrecorded. The difficulties posed for
women due to the legal framework of individual titling followed in most developing
countries has in fact led to a rethinking of this strategy at the global level, with a shift
towards more locally negotiated rights [World Bank, 2001].6 While customary systems do
provide access and use rights to women, in rapidly changing rural environments due to
population growth, enclosure of common property resources, competition for irrigated land,
privatisation of land and water, and expansion of the market economy, they are no longer
able to ensure these rights. The UNRISD report on gender equality notes this trend towards
the ‘customary’ and ‘local’ to be a threat to gender equality as customary institutions are also
riven with inequalities based on gender, caste and class [UNRISD, 2005: 13].
An ‘entitlements’ approach is at its core a political struggle over negotiating power relations,
whether through legal recognition or manipulation of custom. In the case of land, this would
imply recognition of inheritance rights, but also other ‘secondary’ rights. What seems clear
then is the need to think about strengthening women’s bargaining power and control over
decision-making, not just through legal entitlements over physical assets, which is one
crucial aspect, but also by strengthening other sources of entitlements, as different assets may
have different meanings for men and women, and these too could vary with context. While
land is a major physical asset for most rural communities, it may become a non-asset if its
productive use is restricted. In the war zones of Sri Lanka, for instance, rather than investing
in land, households tend to invest in easily moveable items, such as jewellery [Korf, 2004:
289], take to migration and so on. It is only when access to and control over all the different
assets or ‘capitals’ collapse, that women or for that matter households, are unable to cope
with vulnerability and move towards destitution.
6
If one looks at resource rights as a range of entitlements, with different routes to access
(inheritance, markets, user groups, state transfers etc) and control, a helpful framework for
discussion of gender equality, is one developed by Sara Longwe. She sees empowerment as a
process that moves through five levels of equality, from welfare and access through
conscientisation to participation and control. The level of control within this framework
denotes a control over decision-making processes on par with men. This particularly
becomes important in the case of land as an asset, which apart from having a material value,
has considerable symbolic significance in terms of lineage and kinship relationships. Hence
demanding a legal title that threatens the symbolic elements of land ownership is likely to be
both resented and resisted, as land is sought for the status and political power it provides
rather than just survival. Instead, one might focus on ensuring rights which are already
considered socially legitimate such as over homestead plots, but also on strengthening
women’s control over the land in general by enhancing their relative bargaining position and
giving recognition to the value of their contribution, particularly in labour terms [Gupta,
2002]. Within local communities, such recognition and valuation does exist, and in fact,
particularly in rice-growing areas, where women’s labour is key to production, women do
share in decision-making, with any unilateral decision by the man evoking often sharp
responses including the withdrawal of labour [Rao, 2005: 357].
While claiming equal rights to land is important for the stability it provides (given women’s
low access to non-farm jobs), one needs to seriously think about strengthening women’s
control over other assets that can perhaps contribute more substantially to gender equality.
Just as men commonly seek to escape from manual labour, women do too. When I asked
female headed households in Dumka villages why they did not plough their land to facilitate
timely cultivation and hence enhance productivity, they clearly expressed an aversion to this
task – it was heavy work and the only task still men’s responsibility, hence they had no
intention of taking it over. It was also a way of demanding reciprocity from men in the
household or the community, who had made such social rules. Building up women’s skills
and human/body capital is crucial as well as enhancing their social capital, as for most
women resource access is dependent on a range of social relationships and connections,
whether with men in the household, kin leaders or extension agents.
The key implication of such an understanding would be to create an enabling environment
for control over a range of livelihood assets on the one hand, while also ensuring women’s
voices and rights in the new institutions that are being created to manage common resources
and assets. Despite a focus on gender mainstreaming within development projects across
South Asia, while separate institutions have been created for women within projects (usually
in the form of Self Help Groups (SHGs)), women continue to be under-represented in
institutions of resource control, whether Water Users Groups or Forest Management
Committees. It is almost a replay of the notion of small income generation projects for
women, which are predictably bound to fail in terms of realising the larger goal of gender
equality [Buvinic, 1986].
2. Benchmark Data On Access To Land And Other Productive Resources
Gendered distribution of land and water
Globally, data on women’s land ownership is sorely lacking. This is largely because of the
multiple legal and customary regimes governing land tenures and also the diversity of rights
in land – from ownership to access and use rights. In most rural societies, women do have
7
legitimate claims to land resources, however, these are usually contingent on their
relationships to their father, husband or son.
One of the problems of assessing the land ownership by women is that in most of patrilineal
South Asia, land is registered in the names of the head of the household, usually the eldest
male. While women then may have control over different qualities of land, such as the
homestead plots (bari), this is not reflected in the records. The limited data that is available
relates to women-headed households, usually households who do not have an adult male,
though definitions remain somewhat ambiguous. Male-headed households however usually
include adult females. Productivity is then likely to differ between the two, as women-headed
households or male-absent households often find it hard to secure labour for ploughing their
lands in a timely manner, resulting in low productivity. Alternatively, they lease out their
land, often on sharecropping arrangements, usually to male kin, who then hope to ultimately
gain control over this land. White (1992) notes in her study of a Bangladesh village that
rather than selling their natal property and buying land in their marital village, sharecropping to male kin was a strategy adopted by many women in order to retain some
personal income and autonomy in their marriage. Unni (1999) too notes that in Gujarat,
India, women refrained from claiming their inherited land as brothers were seen as a source
of social support.
Secondly, land is acquired principally through inheritance, though a small amount is also
available for adjudication by the state and purchase in the market. In all these domains, male
privilege and unequal gender relations operate, not just in the first [Deere and Leon, 2001].
While historically women have accessed land through their relationships with men, with the
growth of the money economy and commodification of land on the one hand and growing
scarcity with population expansion over generations, women’s claims are increasingly being
challenged. Chen (1998) shows from her study of widows in 7 Indian states that half of them
were able to claim their husband’s land, though this was conditional on forfeiture of
remarriage, continued residence in the village, dependence on a son etc. Yet the proportion of
women inheriting natal land as daughters was much lower at 13 per cent, despite some
regional variations [Agarwal, 1998: 22].
While a formal legal-institutional framework does exist to ensure property rights to women
in most of South Asia, the actual practice is thus complex, dependent equally on traditional
use rights, status in the domestic unit and engagement with the economy. While customary
tenures may be gender inequitable, especially as land symbolises status, power and hierarchy,
women also face strong barriers in operationalising the statutory codes and getting their
names included in the records.7
Bangladesh:
While gender-disaggregated data is not available, general landownership data too provides
some interesting insights. The average size of landownership in Bangladesh declined from
0.61 to 0.58 hectare (ha) during the period 1987-95 [Hossain et al, 2000] and the per capita
cultivable land available declined from 0.276 acres in 1987 to 0.229 acres in 1995. Not only
is land scarce, it is also extremely concentrated, with 50 per cent of rural households
functionally landless, owning less that 0.2 ha in 1995 and only 6.2 per cent of all rural
households owned over 2 ha. The number of smallholders increased from 75.4 per cent to
83.1 per cent from 1983-4 to 1996-7 and not surprisingly the incidence of migration to urban
centres in search of work is largely constituted of the landless and marginal farmer
households. Unlike India and Nepal, land-rich households prefer not to migrate perhaps
8
because of the increase in labour productivity in agriculture in Bangladesh due to
investments in irrigation and modern rice varieties.
While crop sector incomes are skewed due to inequality in landownership, one finds a similar
pattern in incomes from trade and services. The relatively high-income groups, due to their
better access to capital and credit, and improved human capital due to investments in
education of their children, are also able to capture a large share of better-paid nonagricultural employment opportunities [Hossain et al: 4635]. As the table below reveals, land
ownership is a key determinant of rural consumption and poverty.
Table 2: Determinants of Rural Poverty, HES 1995/96: Results for Poverty-Gap Index
Variables
Log of land owned
Log of total household workers
Share of non-agricultural workers in
total workers
Share of female workers in total workers
Dummy for female household head
Household head:
Primary education
Secondary education
Higher secondary +
Spouse of household head:
Primary education
Secondary education
Higher secondary +
Whether household receives remittance
Whether household has electricity access
Dummy for villages with good transport
Log of average thana-level income
No. of cases
All households (Consumption data)
Regression coefficient
t-ratio
-0.300
-19.67*
0.012
0.88
-0.061
-4.28*
0.040
-0.019
2.17**
-1.06
-0.072
-0.115
-0.055
-4.41*
-6.54*
-3.45*
-0.025
-0.043
-0.016
-0.063
-0.092
-0.024
-6.01
4341
-1.67**
-2.70*
-1.18
-4.74*
-6.68*
-1.81***
-9.63*
Source: Bangladesh Human Development Report, 2000, BIDS
Bangladesh has 2.1 million ha of government-controlled surplus (khas) land, and even if
equally distributed to the 10.5 million landless households, each would get less that 0.5 acres,
not considered viable as an insurance mechanism [Khan, 2004: 85]. But as Barkat et al
(2001) demonstrate in their study of khas land in Bangladesh, less than 50 per cent has been
distributed and of this, less than half to the landless. Many genuine people are not listed due
to both the lengthy paper-work required and corruption, and even from those who got listed
and land allocated, more than half (56 per cent) could not retain it due to physical threats,
false deeds, corruption and so on. Only 45 per cent of beneficiaries of khas land noted an
improvement in their economic condition, for the others not only did they continue to labour,
but their vulnerability in fact increased due to threats of violence. Instances of successful
claims to land can be found where the landless beneficiaries have organised themselves and
struggled to retain control over the land, with assistance from trade unions, NGOs and other
civil society actors, but also where support in terms of credit, inputs, marketing and pricesupport has been forthcoming (ibid: 155).
In such a context, for women to claim rights to land appears even more problematic. Kabeer
(2002) has pointed out in her documentation of Nijera Kori (an NGO focusing on social
9
mobilisation and the empowerment of women), the struggle around land rights is only
concentrated in areas where khas land is available, elsewhere the key economic issue for
collective action has been around wage entitlements. They have also focused on community
mobilisation as a strategy for empowering women rather than focusing on women’s groups.
White (1992:133) finds that 10 per cent of women in her sample held some land (varied by
class status), yet formal entitlements did not necessarily imply actual possession. Further,
rights over and usage of assets change with time: what begins as personal women’s property
invariably ends as a household resource, used in the interests of the nuclear family. While
one could be tempted to attribute this to false consciousness, it can also reflect an exercise of
agency, with women seeing their own interests in terms of security, best assured by investing
in the well-being of the family.
India:
A detailed analysis of three villages in Tamil Nadu by Harriss-White and Janakarajan (2004)
reveals that while landlessness amongst female-headed households varies from 47 per cent to
82 per cent, it ranges between 71 per cent and 90 per cent for female only households. This
brings out both the definitional problems surrounding female headship and the sharp
enhancement of vulnerability due to absence of an adult male in the household. Only one of
the female only households out of 65 such households owned more than 2 hectares of land.
Several village studies have found that women own approximately 10-12 per cent of land,
though this may include both recorded and unrecorded holdings. The following table, drawn
from the NSSO 50th and 55th round data, presents data on land ownership for male and
female headed households through the 1990s.
Several interesting conclusions emerge from the table. First, for both male and female headed
households there is a decline in average area of land possessed, revealing in a sense that with
growth of population and a larger number of people demanding land, the average size of
holding is declining. This points towards the growing wage dependence of small farmers and
raises questions about how much land can actually contribute to household livelihoods
[Krishnaji, 2001]. With larger numbers seeking agricultural work, it also provides
justification for stagnation in growth rates of agricultural wages. Secondly, while 94.3 per
cent of female-headed households were small/marginal landowners (less than 2 hectares) in
1993-94, this increased to 95 per cent by the 1999-00 (the number of marginal farmers
increased from 88.5 per cent to 91 per cent during this period). In the case of male-headed
households, there was in fact a sharper decline from 14.9 per cent being medium/large
farmers to only 11.9 per cent. Thus, average size of landholding has declined for both male
and female-headed households, though the quantum of land owned by women is about half
that of men.8 A third interesting point, is the much more rapid growth in the number of
female-headed households over the period, 23 per cent as against 13.5 per cent for maleheaded households, and an increase in the proportion of female headed households to total
households from 10.7 to 11.7 percent. Perhaps one explanation for this trend is the growing
out-migration of men from rural areas to earn a living, thus reflecting in a sense the
‘feminisation’ of agriculture and the rural economy.
Table 3: Average area of land possessed and average household
size by size class of land and sex of the head of household
(rural areas only): 1993-94 and 1999-2000.
10
Male
Per 1000
distribution of hh
93-94 99-00
Female
Average area
Average
Per 000
Average
Average
of land
hh size
distribution of area of land hh size
possessed (ha) (0.0)
hh
possessed
(0.0)
93-4 99-00
93-4 99-0 93-4
99-00 (ha)
93-4 99-0
0.00
122
70
0.00
0.00
4.1 4.1 190
83
0.00
0.00 2.4 2.5
0.01-0.40
391
492
0.11
0.09
4.6 4.8 527
668
0.09
0.07 3.1 3.3
0.41-1.00
192
197
0.69
0.67
5.1 5.3 143
137
0.66
0.63 3.8 4.0
1.01-2.00
146
121
1.43
1.39
5.6 5.7 81
62
1.41
1.4 4.0 4.1
2.01-4.00
94
77
2.72
2.64
6.0 6.2 36
34
2.68
2.64 4.2 4.4
Above 4.01
55
42
7.49
7.23
6.8 7.0 21
16
6.92
6.78 4.7 4.8
Total
1000
1000
1.05
0.85
5.0 5.2 1000
1000
0.50
0.42 3.2 3.5
Estimated hhs 1078893 1227336 116403 143461 Source: Report no. 409: Employment and Unemployment situation in India, NSSO 50th round, 1993-94; Report
no. 458: Employment and Unemployment situation in India- 1999-2000 (Part I), NSSO 55th round, 1999- 2000
Table 4: Per thousand distribution of households by household
type for each size class of land cultivated for female headed
households in rural areas (1993-4 and 1999-00).
1
0.00
0.01-0.40
0.41-1.00
1.01-2.00
2.01-4.00
4.01
&
above
Total
Estimated
hh (00)
Self employed
In
In
nonagriculture
agriculture
Sub-total
(2)+ (3)
Agricultural
labour
Other
labour
2
4
5
6
3
Others
Per 1000
distributio
n of hhs
9
8
93-4
48
406
689
819
831
889
99-00
16
321
614
720
815
905
93-4
101
59
51
30
30
26
99-00
105
66
41
16
15
38
93-4
149
464
740
849
861
915
99-00
121
388
656
736
830
943
93-4
400
328
135
90
61
0
99-00
391
276
160
114
16
0
93-4
106
55
39
18
7
8
99-0
88
61
26
9
0
23
93-4
345
152
85
43
71
77
99-00
397
275
156
141
154
34
283
3295
6
221
31637
79
9176
81
11661
362
42131
302
43298
317
36887
310
44526
78
9048
68
9750
243
2833
7
318
45668
93-4
573
193
119
71
28
16
99-0
561
245
103
56
23
11
1164
03
1434
61
Source: Report no. 409: Employment and Unemployment in India, NSSO 50th round, 1993-94 and Report 458:
Employment and Unemployment situation in India- 1999-2000 (Part I).
Another interesting trend, as revealed by Table 4, is the decline over the 1990s of femaleheaded households, particularly those in the marginal farmer category (less than one ha of
land), engaged in own account agriculture. The overall extent of agricultural labour has
increased by about 20 per cent, but there is a substantial increase in the category of ‘others’
(over 60 per cent). This refers to those not dependent on self-employment, agricultural labour
or other wage labour, or those who have multiple sources of income, where no one category
dominates. Women clearly appear to adopt more diversified strategies, drawing on a range of
entitlements and assets for their livelihood. This could partly be a result of lack of access to
inputs, technical services and credit due both to the male bias of development institutions
[Elson, 1992] and discrimination of women in markets (financial, labour etc). Hence even
where women do own land, as in parts of Kerala in India, they are unable to control its use
[Arun, 1999].
While the NSSO data on livestock ownership is not gender disaggregated, it is interesting to
note that the possession of both milch and draught animals increases with size of land11
holding, the critical point determining the ownership decision appears to be in the size class
of 0.41-1 hectare. If one looks at Table 2 above, 75 per cent of female headed and 56 per cent
of male-headed households have less than 0.40 ha of land and hence are unlikely to own
either milch or draught animals. This is partly related to the need to provide fodder to such
animals, a large part of it being the stalks and hay from foodgrain cultivation. What then
seems clear is that there is a minimal level of land ownership required to encourage both
cultivation and the maintenance of larger livestock. Smaller livestock on the other hand are
much more manageable for the landless or near-landless and are often assets controlled by
women [Rao, 2002, White, 1992]. At the same time, even amongst all small landowners, it
was only those with non-farm employment who were able to enhance productivity and in
turn invest in more land. Engagement in non-farm employment appears to provide the crucial
additional resources required for enhancing the productivity of land, pointing to the
complementarity between different assets.
Nepal:
As in the rest of South Asia, land in Nepal is a major productive asset, but also a source of
power and a symbol of status. There is a wide disparity in distribution of land, with 29 per
cent of rural households being landless, and another 47 per cent owning less than 0.5 hectares
each. Land ownership reflects both caste and gender disparities, with most dalits being
landless. Women own around 10 per cent of land as revealed by Table 5, and similar to the
case of India, the average size of their holding is two-thirds that of men. Even if she has
property in her name, she cannot sell, rent or otherwise transfer it without the consent of her
spouse or sons [Nepal HDR, 2004: 55]. Land reform has been on the government’s agenda,
but has been largely unsuccessful. Apart from bypassing women completely, this is perhaps a
contributory factor to the present political insurgency. In the mid-1990s, encouraged by
analysis of local conditions as part of Actionaid’s Reflect programme in Sindhupalchowk
district in the mid hills, a movement of landless tenant farmers for rent receipts and claiming
more rights as tenants has arisen.
Interestingly, while women are largely responsible for care and maintenance of livestock,
they own only 6-7 per cent. Livestock is potentially a key asset for women in terms of
promoting gender equality, but does not seem to have received the attention it deserves, as
revealed also by an analysis of development projects.
Table 5: Households reporting female ownership of land, house and livestock, 2001
Total households
House, land, livestock
House and land
House and livestock
Land and livestock
House only
Land only
Livestock only
None
Number
4,174,374
32,766
161,204
3,709
39,257
32,518
219,196
226,320
Percent
100
0.8
3.9
0.1
0.9
0.8
5.3
5.4
83
Source: Nepal HDR 2004 Table 4 page 174.
Pakistan:
12
The Pakistan Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA)(GoP, 2003) reveals that women
continue to be denied inheritance rights, adequate food and nutrition, freedom of mobility
and influence in decision-making. Enhancement of both dowry and brideprice in different
parts of the country has further served to commoditise women. They are subjected to sexual
harassment and violence both within and outside the household. Of course, the experience of
powerlessness and subordination varies with region, class, age and ethnicity, with better off
women having some say in decision-making, yet perhaps required to maintain stricter
purdah. In the NWFP, land ownership was seen as the major source of political power. Even
where women had legal rights over land and forests, they had no control over the use of these
assets. For example, ‘women in rural Swat had equal rights to forest royalties but only men
had the power to decide how to spend the amount received’ [GoP, 2003: 107].
What emerged also during the PPA was the lack of access to justice for the poor and
subordinated and the continuing dependence on informal rather than formal safety nets.
Public utilities and state extension services have tended to ignore the poor. While it was
acknowledged that land reforms have generally failed, there was an emphasis on putting land
back on the anti-poverty agenda, alongside addressing issues of water scarcity and equitable
distribution, forest conservation and improving livestock management. At the same time, the
public provision of basic services of health and education as well as social safety nets needs
to be strengthened. Most important perhaps was the identification of the need to enhance
employment opportunities in both rural and urban areas through investments in
infrastructure, public works, skills training or credit provision. At the same time, it was
important to ensure some protection for the rights of workers, whether it be minimum wages
for women’s work or the elimination of child and bonded labour.
Sri Lanka:
While Sri Lanka, with a high level of human development, rural-urban and gender equity, is
seen as a leader amongst developing countries, poverty persists, with 20-30 per cent of the
population seen to be below the poverty line, 90 per cent of them living in rural areas. While
Sri Lanka scores well on the UNDP’s Gender Development Index, its GEM value is lower
than the average for developing countries, reflecting limited participation of women in
politics and in senior positions in the public and private sectors. While targeted at the poorest
groups, most development interventions, being land or agriculture-based (irrigation)9, have
tended to exclude the poorest – the landless. They have by and large been unable to deal with
the issue of multiple sources of income as well as the presence of multiple workers in such
households.
War and civil strife in the 1990s has posed an additional challenge for initiatives to reduce
poverty, leading to recognition of the importance of social capital and working with NGOs to
mobilise societies if projects were to succeed in their objectives. The most vulnerable group
tends to be young Tamil men, who face a twofold threat: on the one hand, the army may
suspect them of being rebels, and on the other, the rebels are keen to recruit them into their
ranks. Within the household, responsibilities and roles then change, with women, particularly
in Tamil society, taking a more active economic role, especially in marketing activities
[Korf, 2004: 287]. Perhaps it is this context of insecurity that has led to a specific emphasis
on targeting women in terms of providing access to economic opportunities both in
agriculture and non-farm activities and highlighted the importance of flexibility to adjust to
local needs and tensions [IFAD, 2002].
13
Conclusion
A key point to remember when considering either land or water as productive assets is that
they are rarely considered individual property by either men or women, but seen as a joint
household resource, whose use is subject/open to negotiation. Women do not act as
autonomous individuals in relation to these resources, but neither do men, as both have
gendered roles to play and gendered ideologies to live up to, be that of home-maker or of
provider. Further, differences in caste, class, age and regional context make a huge difference
to women’s aspirations as well as access to and control over assets. The problem for women
in terms of ownership arises when the marriage breaks down. In a context of resource
scarcity and declining per capita land holding, women lacking a legal title are then threatened
with destitution, and this is where the existence of an enabling legal framework becomes
critical.
A second important point is clearly the complementarity between assets – land, livestock and
labour – that tend to mutually reinforce each other. This also points to the possibilities of
different starting points, rather than a single blueprint for South Asia. While group
approaches for women in terms of joint land use may be problematic due to caste-class
intersections apart from gender differences, new institutional approaches for control of
equipment and inputs, infrastructure (such as irrigation), enhancing the level of skills to
engage in new forms of production etc, may lead to improved gender equality outcomes.
Labour as an Asset:
Labour is a key asset for the rural poor, in particular landless and near-landless households,
constituting roughly 30-50 per cent of the rural population in South Asia. In keeping with the
global context, there has been a growing informalisation and casualisation of labour in south
Asia. While the work participation of women has increased over the last decade, with the
exception of Pakistan, constraints on mobility due to reproductive responsibilities and social
norms imply that women tend to be absorbed at the lowest end of the labour market, in lowwaged, casual and flexible jobs. While these mostly lie in the informal sector and
traditionally this has been seen as a ‘female sector’ [Scott, 1991], with structural reforms and
the expansion of global value chains, the social valuation of men as ‘workers’ has
contributed to their getting the better jobs in the informal sector too. The feminisation of
labour here refers then not just to greater female employment, but rather the devaluation of
working conditions for men too.
What seems to emerge from several studies is that labour market options are influenced as
much by the existing class and gender position and the social networks these entail, as by the
quality of human capital as reflected in education status [Mosse et al, 2002, Harriss-White
and Janakarajan, 2004]. Interestingly, educated women have been better able to secure
formal employment than men, pointing to a key policy issue, namely, the need to invest in
education (at least secondary level) and development of marketable rather than traditional,
feminine skills. ICT interventions particularly highlight the potential of access to
‘knowledge’ as a tool for empowerment of women.
Bangladesh:
In Bangladesh, the market integration of women has increased rapidly in the past decade. A
longitudinal study over the period 1987-95 revealed an increase in female participation
outside the homestead from 7 to 11 per cent [Hossain et al, 2000: 4632]. Though female
14
participation in non-agricultural employment had been gradually increasing, Bangladesh saw
a spurt from the early 1980s with a rapid expansion of the export-oriented garment industry.
In 1985-86 only 11 per cent of working women remained in agriculture as compared to 63
per cent of working men [Kabeer, 2000:69]. The dependence of export-oriented work,
whether in agriculture or industry, on women workers, while giving women a source of
income, appears to have also led to growing work burdens, as there is little evidence of men
taking on a larger share of reproductive work10 [Elson, 1999, Pearson 1998]. In such a
context, key assets that could enhance women’s earning potential and bargaining power
could be seen in terms of enhancement in education levels, but also access to housing and
other support services. These could potentially reduce dependence on extended family and
kinship networks as well as burdens of domestic work.
India
NSSO data on the sectoral distribution of rural workers between 1977-78 and 1999-2000
presented in Table 5 below reveals that while there has been diversification, this has not only
slowed down considerably in the 1990s, but has mostly been confined to male workers.
While male participation in the rural non-agricultural sector has increased by 9.4 per cent,
female employment has more or less remained stable and confined to agriculture. The main
sectors of growth in the non-farm sector appear to be construction, trade, hotels and
restaurants, transport and storage, all of which have shown a preference for men.
Construction, manufacturing and services have been the sectors where women’s employment
too has increased marginally [Bhaumik, 2002]. Livelihood diversification in rural areas
seems therefore to be offering opportunities to men – as small businessmen and as employees
in better paid jobs, whilst for women it involves extremely lowly paid work which is a last
resort when agricultural wage work is absent.
Table 6: Broad Sectoral Distribution of Workers in rural India: 1977-78-1999-00
Year
Primary
Secondary (1)
Tertiary (2)
Rural
NonAgricultural (1+2)
Rural Males
1977-78
80.7
8.8
10.5
19.3
1983
77.5
10.2
12.2
22.4
1987-88
74.5
12.3
13.4
25.7
1993-94
74.1
11.3
14.7
26.0
1999-00
71.4
12.7
16.0
28.7
Rural Females
1977-78
88.2
6.7
5.1
11.8
1983
87.5
7.4
4.8
12.2
1987-88
84.7
10.0
5.3
15.3
1993-94
86.2
8.3
5.6
13.9
1999-00
85.4
8.9
5.7
14.6
Source: Various rounds of NSS Employment and Unemployment Surveys from Dev (2003).
While the All-India evidence points to a decline in the share of agriculture in GNP, coexisting with a more or less unchanged share of the workforce, the case of Kerala appears to
be an exception. Along with a decline in contribution to the state domestic product, the
population dependent on agriculture has also been steadily declining. Interestingly, the
decline of women in the agricultural workforce in Kerala has been much greater than that of
men. Between 1961-91, the ratio of male to female agricultural workers in Kerala increased
from 16 to 21, while at the national level it fell from 20 to 16. There are several reasons for
this. First, there appears a strong link to the changes in cropping pattern. Taluk-wise data for
the period 1976-77 to 1989-92 reveals a significant decline in the area under paddy
15
cultivation, directly leading to a decline in female agricultural workers. This is corroborated
by a detailed village study in the northern Malabar region showing a decline in paddy land
from 2039 acres in 1936 to 1075 acres in 1996 [Ramakumar, 2003: 17]. The main reason for
the shift in land use in this village appears to be the demand for land for construction
purposes.
While both the Census statistics for Kerala and the village data thus show a marked shift in
occupation in favour of construction and other services such as transportation and
communication, the opportunities for women in non-agricultural manual work was much
more limited than for men. While the proportion of women in the agricultural sector declined
by 9.5 per cent between 1961 and 1991, the share of female workers in other sectors
(construction, trade and commerce, transport, storage and communication) rose by only 5 per
cent. That more women may now be unemployed is corroborated both by the Census and
NSSO data, which show a reduction in female work participation rates from 18 to 16 per cent
(Census 1991 and 2001) and 29 to 24 per cent respectively [NSSO 1987-88 and 1999-2000]
for Kerala.
Despite high levels of human development, declining work participation rates have generated
a recent debate on declining gender equality in Kerala. Very few young people below the age
of 30 years were found engaged in agricultural work, yet lack of suitable employment
opportunities has made it the state with the highest level of suicides [Pat, 2005: 2393].
Migration to the Gulf and other states is a growing trend, but as Gulati (1993) in the case of
Kerala and Thangarajah (2003) in the case of Muslims from eastern Sri Lanka note, both the
migrants and their families at home sought to consolidate their middle class status by
consumerism, and emulation of orthodox Islamic codes including the withdrawal of women
from agriculture.11
Ramachandran et al (2001) in their study of a Tamil Nadu village find that the work women
have moved into from agriculture is of two types. The first is that which pays more than daily
rated cash paid agricultural work (such as plantation work, construction, brick-kilns, road
construction and other public works projects). The second is worse paid and mainly tamarind
processing. Quite a lot of the better paid work is however for activities which make great
physical demands on women’s bodies, and the character of these jobs therefore may make
women who are nutritionally challenged unwilling to engage in them [Jackson and PalmerJones 1999]. The degree of choice as implied by such a list could then be more illusory than
real. The first report of the National Commission on Farmers (2004: xiii) confirms the need
to rethink the concept of ‘work’, especially for rural women in ongoing food for work
programmes. These should include not just hard, manual labour, but also a range of other
community activities in which they are involved such as preparation of noon meals, running
of crèches and day care centres etc.
All rural livelihoods involve domestic labour to maintain and reproduce the household over
time. Women play a central role in providing these services; child care, food preparation,
fuelwood and water collection, care of the ill and elderly, and a range of activities that move
into food production and income generating work, such as livestock care, homestead
gardening and so on. Livelihood research pays lip service to these activities and there are still
too few studies that routinely collect data on domestic work alongside descriptions and
analysis of occupations, employment and farm production [Jackson and Rao, 2004], or
provide them equal recognition as legitimate forms of work.
16
A few that exist such as by Sarin (1997) note that the closure of forests for protection by
community based Joint Forest Management groups (JFM is a widespread programme within
rural India) has led to firewood collection now involving greater time and longer journeys to
more distant forests by women. This is also a finding in Agarwal’s (1997) study of JFM in 8
Indian states.12 Yet, a study in Nepal by Cooke (2000) found that while women still spend
more time than men in collection, the increased collection time comes almost equally from
women and men.
Water scarcity similarly has an adverse impact on women’s work. In a study of women’s use
of bicycles in the drought-prone Pudukkottai district of Tamil Nadu in 1997, Rao (1999)
found that one of the major uses of cycles by women, introduced as part of the literacy
campaign, was in the collection of drinking water from distant sources. A later study in the
same region notes that ‘fetching water’ was no longer perceived as a major task (Saraswathi,
2004: 147). After the panchayat elections in 1996 which ensured women a third of the seats
in local government, the provision of borewells and handpumps in every hamlet was pushed
as a priority agenda, somewhat easing women’s domestic work burdens, even though there
were no shifts in divisions of labour.
An indirect effect of liberalisation on women’s domestic work operates through the ways that
market-driven agricultural growth produces a high demand for water, and this often gets
prioritised over domestic water needs. Bela Bhatia (1992), writing in the period following the
Gujarat drought of 1985-88, noted the co-existence of ‘lush fields’ growing water-intensive
crops such as sugarcane by farmers who could afford to drill deep borewells, alongside a
serious drinking water crisis faced by the majority of marginal farmers and agricultural
labourers. She found that this was not so much due to the lack of rainfall as due to the rapid
expansion of water extraction to support shifts in cropping patterns in favour of cash crops.
Similar to the contradiction between gender disparity and economic prosperity, one finds
here a contradiction between service provision and gender equality. In a context of growing
commoditisation and rising foodgrain prices, where it is imperative for both men and women
to engage in paid work to make a living, public investment in such essential services can
serve to improve livelihoods by contributing to a reduction in domestic work burdens.
The utilisation of women’s labour in paid work as a part of livelihood strategies is thus
affected by a range of factors: shifts in cropping patterns including the social organisation of
agricultural production (e.g contract farming), technical change, availability of alternative
opportunities, and not least of all, the burden of domestic work. Some of these changes might
imply increased demand for women’s agricultural labour. Corporatisation and contract
farming in recent years for instance seem to seek women and children out.
Nepal:
Women’s labour force participation in Nepal is high, though concentrated in unpaid and lowwage activities, that lack any form of social security, as evidenced from Table 7 below. 93.6
per cent of workers are engaged in informal employment. Migration has increased
substantially and remittances have become essential for the survival of many rural
households.
17
Table 7: Usually economically active population over 10 years of age, 2001
Activity
Agriculture and forestry
Fishing
Mining and quarrying
Manufacturing and recycling
Electricity, gas, water supply
Construction
Wholesale and retail trade
Hotels and restaurants
Transport, storage, communications
Financial intermediation
Real estate
Public administration
Education
Health and social work
Other community, personal services
Private households with employed persons
Extra-territorial organisations
Not stated
Total
Both sexes
6496222
8467
16048
872254
148218
286418
863773
120889
161638
46765
29922
301024
228381
61797
72575
105139
58273
22395
9900196
Male per cent
52
85
64
52
22
82
60
65
96
85
86
88
74
71
85
60
94
59
57
Female per cent
48
15
36
48
78
18
40
35
4
15
14
12
26
29
15
40
6
41
43
Source: Nepal HDR 2004, Table 5 p174
Between 1991 and 2001, women moved gradually from agriculture to the non-agricultural
sectors, especially to the carpet and garment industries, Nepal’s major exports. Yet, the lack
of education, skills and vocational training and an informalisation of the labour market
through piecework, homework and other types of outsourcing have increased the exploitative
working conditions for women and maintained low wages. Where projects such as the
USAID-funded Women’s Empowerment Project have focused on raising women’s technical
skills, they have contributed both to enhancing women’s income and raising their status in
the household.
Pakistan:
With declining incomes and outward mobility of men in search of non-farm incomes, overall
workloads for women have increased. In complete contrast to other countries in South Asia,
however, labour participation rates for women across provinces reveal a steady decline from
6.3 per cent in 1972 to 2 per cent in 1981 and 1.9 per cent in 1998 in rural areas. The labour
participation rates for urban women have halved during this period from 6 per cent to 2.9 per
cent. Apart from domestic work and farm work, they have taken up piece-rate, home-based
work in Multan, Faisalabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi districts. Yet, literacy rates have
doubled from 16 per cent to 32 per cent for women (7.3 to 20 per cent for rural areas), though
once again revealing considerable regional variations [GoP, 2002].
18
Table 8: Changes in labour participation rates 1972-98 (urban and rural) [per cent]
1972
Urban
M
F
Balochistan 53.5 8.0
NWFP
50.5 6.0
Punjab
51.1 6.5
Sindh
50.6 5.1
Islamabad 0.0 0.0
Pakistan
50.9 6.0
Rural
M
63.9
52.2
56.8
59.6
0.0
57.1
F
4.9
5.9
6.3
7.1
0.0
6.3
1981
Urban
M
F
39.4 1.8
43.8 2.5
45.8 2.4
45.1 2.5
47.3 4.4
45.2 2.4
Rural
M
53.2
49.7
52.8
55.5
48.7
52.8
F
1.5
1.6
2.3
1.6
1.0
2.0
1998
Urban
M
F
----------57.5 2.9
Rural
M
67.8
56.2
49.7
59.7
52.4
60.2
F
2.0
1.1
1.9
2.5
1.9
1.9
Source: Table 38, Government of Pakistan, Statistics Division, 2002
Table 9: Changes in literacy rates 1981-98 (urban and rural) (per cent)
Lra1981t
Balochistan 10.3
NWFP
16.7
Punjab
27.4
Sindh
31.4
Islamabad
47.8
Pakistan
26.2
Lra1998t
24.8
35.4
46.6
45.3
72.4
43.9
Lra1981m
15.2
25.8
36.8
39.7
59.1
35.1
Lra1998m
34.0
51.4
57.2
54.5
80.6
54.8
Lra1981f
4.3
6.5
16.8
21.6
33.5
16.0
Lra1998f
14.1
18.8
35.1
34.8
62.4
32.0
Source: Table 19 Government of Pakistan, Statistics Division, 2002
A study by Fafchamps and Quisumbing of over 1000 rural households in 44 villages (1998)
revealed that income sources were varied, with crops accounting for a fourth of average
income, livestock for about 15 per cent, non-farm income (crafts, trade and services) about
30 percent and rental income and remittances another 30 percent (almost 60 percent thus
coming from labour). Men performed 84 per cent of the crop work, 99 per cent of herding
and 95 per cent of non-farm work. As Ballard (2003) notes for Mirpur and Seddon (2005) for
South Asia in general, migrant remittances now constitute a large part of the incomes of rural
households, and with the exception of Sri Lanka, much of this is provided by male migrants.
This is largely a result of purdah, which restricts women’s mobility to the home and keeps
them from going to public places.
Looking at human capital variables in relation to productivity, Fafchamps and Quisumbing
(1998) further found that male education and nutrition had significant effects on non-farm
and total incomes, particularly access to government employment. “One additional year of
schooling for all adult males raises household incomes by 4.5 per cent” (ibid: 49). It however
results in an opting out of farming work. The relationship of female education to productivity
is however not robust, largely due to the exclusion of women from the markets and formal
workforce. Increasing incomes perhaps leads to a greater withdrawal of women from the
workforce as revealed by the declining labour force participation figures for rural women.
19
Sri Lanka
With the Structural Adjustment and liberalisation package since 1977, Sri Lanka has
promoted export-oriented industrialisation, which like in other parts of south east Asia, has
been based on cheap and young female labour. Unlike the rest of south Asia, informal sector
employment, while increasing, forms a much smaller proportion of total employment
[CENWOR, 1998].
Female labour force participation has been steadily increasing in all sectors in the 1990s at a
faster rate than for men, with a majority of women with higher levels of education being able
to access service sector jobs. A majority of migrant workers from Sri Lanka are women, a
large number going to the middle-east to work as housemaids, sending home regular
remittances for both consumption and investment purposes. This growing visibility of
women, while not fully taken into account in state-run projects and programmes including
land distribution and skill development, has led to an increase in domestic violence at the
household level, with husbands feeling frustrated about losing a part of their ‘provider’ role
as household head.
Conclusion
Given the social and legal restrictions faced by women in acquiring land, they often resort to
accumulating other kinds of assets – a major one being livestock, especially smaller, lower
status animals like goats, sheep, ducks and chicken, access to which is gained through gifts,
purchase, share-tending or breeding from existing stock, depending on the class and status of
the household.
While Pakistan reveals a decline in female labour force participation, in the rest of South
Asia, household survival has been ensured by an increase in the number of female workers.
Labour is a critical asset for women and investment in their human capital is likely to have
positive impacts as in Sri Lanka, but also India, where rural educated women are better able
to access regular employment than men. Yet, as wage earnings are increasingly casual and
fluid, land in comparison does provide a degree of stability, even if not sufficient for survival
[Gupta, 1997].
A most crucial asset is perhaps ‘social capital’. Rather than autonomy, one may then think
about strategies to enhance women’s centrality in the household. Choices about resource use
clearly signify relationships of power and attempt to manipulate them in order to improve
their own lifetime outcomes. A study by Quisumbing et al (2001) shows that even though
women had individualised rights to cocoa land in western Ghana, they still had lower yields
as a result of other constraints. Estudillo et al’s (2001) study in the Philippines similarly
found that given better labour market options for women and the masculinisation of paddy
cultivation, parents gave more education to their daughters and more land to their sons, with
a view to equalise lifetime outcomes. Often women do not therefore distinguish the personal
from the household, as their own interests seem best served by doing so. Clearly then
different assets can have different implications for women’s status and well-being.
20
Implications Of Lack Of Assets
While the lack of assets clearly enhance vulnerability and also poverty in its larger sense, I
briefly examine a few issues, related in particular to land, that implicate gender relations in
different institutional sites.
a. Violence:
Violence against women is a global violation of women’s human rights, with its roots lying
in the unequal balance of power between men and women. While the lack of productive
assets puts women at a structural disadvantage and can thus be seen to contribute to violence,
there is at the same time considerable evidence of violence against women who are making
claims to property rights, an extreme example being that of branding and killing women as
witches [Kelkar and Nathan, 1991]. While there is still a tendency to establish a direct
relationship between control over economic resources and women’s autonomy both in
household decision-making and in public participation, a more nuanced gender analysis
would tend to grant women greater agency, allowing for a greater degree of negotiation and
interdependency in household relations. In her paper on measuring empowerment, Kabeer
(1999) notes that this process needs to take equal account of resources, agency and outcomes,
and using just access to resources or outcomes alone does not give a true picture of gender
equality or empowerment. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that violence or the threat of it
does inhibit participation, and economic vulnerability is a major reason for women’s
acceptance of it in their daily lives [Lloyd and Taluc, 1999].
Based on a study of 500 households spread over 10 wards (6 rural and 4 urban) in Kerala,
Panda notes that more than 35 per cent of women reported experiencing either physical or
pshychological violence within their marriage (2003: 34-5). This is despite the fact that
Kerala has high levels of female literacy, favourable sex ratios and a generally enabling
environment for women. Apart from reasons relating to gender roles such as cooking and
looking after the children, sexual control and dowry were identified as major reasons for
conflict in the marriage. The regression analysis to identify major causal factors finds a
strong negative correlation between property ownership, particularly house ownership, and
violence (see Table 10), followed by the husband’s employment status. Property, being a
tangible asset, provides a sense of stability and security unlike employment, which is subject
to the “vagaries of the labour market” [Panda and Agarwal, 2005: 824]. Further, even if a
woman does not use the exit option, the very existence of immovable property in her name
could deter the husband from violence. Growing alcoholism in Kerala (leading to increased
levels of violence) points perhaps to a crisis of masculinities, with men increasingly unable to
fulfil their provider roles with shrinking employment opportunities following recent
economic reforms in the state. Other significant factors restraining the extent of violence
include the household’s economic status and the existence of social support from both the
natal family and neighbours.
21
Table 10: Ownership of property by women and lifetime physical/psychological
violence (per cent)
Ownership
of Beaten
Any physical Threatened
Any psychological
property
violence
violence
None
44.8
49.1
44.8
84.2
Land only
17.9
17.9
25.0
53.6
House only
9.9
9.9
5.6
29.6
House and land
6.8
6.8
9.6
16.4
Adapted from Panda (2003), Tables 13 and 14, p 61-2.
While the relationship between women’s property rights and the risk of HIV as well as the
ability to mitigate its impacts have not yet been investigated in the South Asian context, if
property rights are seen to be key in terms of intra-household bargaining as emerges from
Panda’s (2003) study of violence, then one can almost assume this relationship to persist in
the context of HIV as well [Strickland, 2004]. If women have a secure home, a site for
economic activity and collateral for credit, they could potentially reduce risk factors
(violence, risky behaviour) and if infected, can better cover costs and cope with the infection
(ibid: 11-12).
Inheritance of the widow through levirate has been a common way of ensuring that the
property remains in the control of the patriline. Yet, where a woman is widowed due to
HIV/AIDS infection, the social stigma attached to this may disrupt such communal
arrangements and deny her any social or economic protection she may have been entitled to.
Examples from Kenya and other African countries reveal that such women are often left
destitute and denied their customary rights, especially if they are blamed for their husband’s
death. Despite this, given the withdrawal of the state and the problems in operationalising
legal rights in South Africa, Walker (2003) notes that women prefer to nurture and strengthen
their social support networks in a context of HIV rather than making legal claims to land. It
is important then to find the most beneficial fit between statutory law and customary rights in
order to strengthen women’s position [Rao, 2002]. At the same time, there is a need to make
the judicial system both more accessible to women and responsive to their needs. Addressing
the issue of violence as well as HIV through addressing its various correlates is clearly
important in terms of enhancing women’s well-being, freedom and ultimately promoting
gender equality. Strategies to address violence then need to simultaneously strengthen
women’s access to property, especially house and land, as well as their social support
networks.
b. Intra-household allocational disparities
Fafchamps and Quisumbing (1999: 4) argue that activities are organised into gender-specific
spheres of influence, with males responsible for market work and women for home
production activities. While there is not much crossing over between these spheres, within
each group, tasks are allocated according to status and human capital differences. So, for
instance, daughters-in-law were found to work systematically harder than daughters of
comparable age, build and education, though not in activities that involved travelling outside
the home (crop work, firewood, carrying meals to the fields) or earning an independent
income (non-farm work, going to the market). Like men, female members with more
schooling have a strong tendency to perform fewer household chores, even though their
participation in non-farm work remains minimal in rural Pakistan. In much of South Asia,
however, such educated rural women are increasingly absorbed into employment with both
22
NGOs and government agencies [see, for instance, Harriss-White and Janakarajan, 2004, in
the case of India].
Akram-Lodhi’s analysis of time allocation data by class and gender across activities based on
the baseline survey of the Salinity control and Reclamation Project (SCARP) of Mardan in
the North West Frontier Province, funded by the World Bank, CIDA and Government of
Pakistan, provides insights into the intersections between class and gender, and the
difficulties of understanding gender relations in isolation from women’s other cross-cutting
identities. While the middle, small and poor peasants tend to work harder than the rich
peasant class overall, he finds that women of the rich peasant class work longer than any
other group. A reason for this is the need to prepare food for hired-in labour as well as
enhanced livestock maintenance tasks, both within the household compound, in a context
where it is not possible to hire-in female labour to assist with these tasks (1996: 97). The
need to entertain guests more frequently to demonstrate their economic position further adds
to women’s domestic workloads.13 Papanek (1986) has termed this ‘status-production’ work,
where women work harder to improve household status as this has long-term pay-offs in
terms of family welfare, thus contributing to their own future security. However, AkramLodhi also finds that rich peasant women are more willing to question absolute male
authority than poor peasant women, related partially to their better educational status. In the
case of the latter there already appears to be a greater sharing in tasks (1996: 102).
Cameron (1995) discusses the intersecting of caste and gender in terms of the division of
work and the valuation of different kinds of work in far western, rural Nepal. She notes a
process of ‘feminisation of agriculture’ with male migration to India, whether through the
control over production by the wives of the male landowners or the labour of female hired
workers [See also Mencher 1988 for India]. Secondly, with growing land scarcity and the
import of cheap mass-produced goods from India, artisanal work of the lower castes declined
and with it the secure patron-client ties. Low caste women therefore tended to provide labour
to a range of upper caste households, not just their traditional patrons, while their men
migrated for work. Third, extensive male migration led to a relaxation in norms of female
behaviour with upper caste women taking on more activities that were earlier prohibited to
them on the one hand, while lower caste women exercised some economic power in terms of
rejecting demeaning work. Given the status value of land, even though most of these low
caste households had no inherited land, by the joint effort of men’s remittances and women’s
local earnings, women were able to negotiate and rent in land. This was not seen as a threat,
unlike in the upper castes that saw women’s land claims as disrupting patrilineal cooperation
(Acharya & Bennett, 1983). Despite this complementarity in production roles between lower
caste men and women, given the lower wages for women’s work and the shorter duration of
jobs available, women end up working longer and harder to bring in cash and grains to the
household. There appears here a trade off between greater freedom on the one hand and the
performance of casualised, low prestige and insecure work on the other.
Another interesting example of class/caste and gender intersections, with particular reference
to the land question, comes from Gupta’s research on land transactions and dowry payments
in a West Bengal village (1997). Given the tight monitoring of land sales, mortgages and
transfers by the state, especially of redistributed land post 1977, dowry has become one way
of informally accessing land. Dowry demands may be either in land or cash, though there is
more pressure on landed households for payments of dowry in land. In a later study, Gupta
(2002) found that 33 per cent of 870 households across 4 villages had lost land due to dowry
demands, more valuable now due to technological innovations, hence the fear of loss of land
and potential impoverishment is a real one. This has in turn led to a devaluation if not
23
outright ill-treatment of daughters in these families. In landless households, dowry
transactions are usually in cash, to invest in small businesses or improvements in labour
quality. Further, since contributions of both men and women here are clearly measurable,
women tend to be valued more than in landed households.
Deshpande (2002:27), however, uses NSS data on per capita expenditures and NFHS-2 data
on autonomy and decision-making to challenge the existence of a trade-off between
autonomy and material prosperity in contemporary times. Comparing data across major
social categories in India, namely, SCs, STs, OBCs and others, she finds that while dalit (SC)
women are materially worse off than upper caste women, they no longer seem to retain an
edge in terms of autonomy and decision-making either (investment in health care and
purchase of jewellery are the indicators used), though adivasi (ST) women seem to be
slightly better off in this respect.
Quisumbing and Maluccio (2003) analyse evidence from four countries (Bangladesh,
Ethiopia, Indonesia and South Africa) to conclude that control over economic resources and
education are two key determinants of bargaining power at the household level. Based on
household survey data from 47 villages across three sites in Bangladesh (where programmes
for dissemination of new agricultural technologies in relation to vegetable cultivation and
fishpond cultivation were in place), Quisumbing and Briere (2000) note that for both
husband and wife, parents’ landholdings are a consistent determinant of both assets at
marriage and current assets. For the woman it reflects a continuous source of support for her
lifetime, financial or otherwise, rather than an immediate gain. While wives owned only 3-4
per cent of the land, they owned between 30-50 per cent of livestock (including poultry,
sheep, goats and cattle) across the three sites. More than land, livestock appears to have the
potential to be a key asset for rural women [Bouis, 2003: 77].
What seems clear is that assets under the control of men or women have different effects on
the allocation of work and also expenditures within the household, with the wife’s assets
contributing more to the education of children and their clothing (perhaps her most important
insurance for the future), while the husband’s contributes to food expenditures, as in the
Bangladesh study cited above. Using the same dataset, Hallman (2000) notes that resources
held by mothers reduce the number of morbidity and illness days of girls and those by fathers
of boys. Current patrilineal inheritance seems to favour boys over girls, but if daughters did
have more resources at their disposal, it is likely that they would be valued more as potential
sources of livelihood security. It is important therefore to continue to disaggregate data by
caste and the household’s economic position to monitor the influence of these factors of
women’s decision-making ability and in turn level of empowerment.
c. Feminisation of agriculture
Despite an overall decline in women’s crude work participation rates suggested by the NSS
data for India, women are however an increasingly important part of the casual labour force
in rural areas [Deshpande and Deshpande, 1998], and some authors have claimed that rural
India has been witnessing a ‘feminisation of agriculture’ as men withdraw from agriculture
into other occupations and it becomes increasingly dominated by women [da Corta and
Venkateshwarlu, 1997]. Coppard (2004) reaches a similar conclusion in his West Bengal
study where labour debts taken by male household members were often transferred to female
members while men sought better waged employment. Similar is the situation in Bangladesh,
where 77.5 per cent of the economically active female population is engaged in agriculture as
24
opposed to 54 per cent of male population and in Sri Lanka where this is the case for 41 per
cent female and 34 per cent male population [OED, 2002: 49, 52].
With slowing down of agricultural growth rates in general and a decline in investment in
agriculture, non-farm employment does in fact provide better returns to labour than
agriculture, hence whether to repay debts or to accumulate capital, some member of the
household, usually the man, diversifies into non-farm work. If this is the case we may indeed
see agricultural labour becoming a low wage ‘sink’ for women, and a relative feminisation
taking place, despite declining days of work in farm labour. The feminisation of agriculture
is a term that needs unpacking, since it does not obviously fit with either the all-India data
referred to in Table 6 or the statewise data for areas such as Kerala or West Bengal [Duvvury
1989].
In their study of a Tamil Nadu village, Ramachandran et al (2001:10) remind us that
feminisation of agricultural work is indicated by a rise in the proportion of female
agricultural workers in the female work force, a rise in the ratio of female to male
agricultural workers, and a rise in the proportion of female work force in the female
population. They find that the days of overall work of women in hired labour households
amounted to 147 on average, a figure that has remained remarkably stable since 1976, but the
agricultural component of the total has dropped from 65 per cent in 1976-77 to 37 per cent in
1998-9. Most of the non-agricultural work is low paid tamarind processing. This mirrors the
position for India as a whole, where the total days of employment available to a woman in a
rural labour household has risen from 233 days in 1983 to 265 days in 1993-4, but days in
agriculture have fallen steadily. The nature of alternative employment available to women
has meant harder work for more days, but earning less. The study location had seen overall
intensification of agriculture due to the development of groundwater, but the specific
cropping changes from cotton and vegetables to banana, coconut and grape were from crops
using considerable female labour to those using little. They conclude that the period from
1977 to 1999 was ‘one of significant deceleration in female labour absorption in agriculture’
(2001:22) which somewhat challenges the feminisation of agriculture suggestion. Even if
women’s labour is retained, the shift to cash crops often implies the control over decisionmaking by men, even in the north-eastern states of India and in Bhutan, where women have
property rights and are not denied market access [Pain and Pema, 2004, personal comm. from
Patricia Mukhim].
While mechanisation is seen in general to displace female labour, the impact of technical
change however depends on which parts of production processes are mechanised and how
these relate to gender divisions of labour. Kapadia (2002: 195) found that while there was no
mechanised ploughing in her Tamil Nadu study in 1979, now it is all mechanised, and men
have been stripped of this task. She says that no women’s work has been similarly
mechanised and that women now have more work available to them than men, which
produces a feminisation of agricultural labour. A study by Venkateshwarlu and Da Corta
(2001) of hybrid cottonseed production in three districts of Andhra Pradesh found the largescale use of the labour of young girls, extending over long periods of time. Men were
withdrawing from work and there was growing responsibility on women and girls to earn
incomes. Hard work coupled with lower wages was leading to health problems and girls were
being withdrawn from schools.14 Ota (2002) also found in her study on child labour in
Andhra Pradesh that in several poor households men were increasingly unable to contribute
to household income due to ill-health or unwillingness to work. It was the women, with help
from the children, who were earning for survival (2002: 229). Her analysis of secondary data
25
also reveals that child participation rates were positively linked to female labour
participation.
There is clearly a need to periodise changing labour market conditions carefully, since earlier
studies show increased demand for women’s labour as a consequence of irrigation and
technical change, and overburdening was a concern. The post reform period however has
seen general stagnation, but a continuing relative rise in women’s casual labour (from 40.2 to
46.1 per cent). While male employment follows a similar pattern, due to a somewhat higher
level of regular employment among men (9.0 per cent), the proportion of those in casual
employment is less than that of women (36.6 per cent). While casualisation per se is not a
problem, poverty data from India reveal that those having the principal employment status of
casual labour have the highest ratio of poverty in 1999-2000 (around 42 per cent). For those
who were self-employed and occasionally engaged in casual labour or for those with regular
employment and occasional labour, poverty was considerably lower at 37.22 and 30.66 per
cent respectively [Dev, 2003].
We may thus be able to anticipate gendered effects of lack of assets by considering what
factors explain the variations in women’s involvement in agricultural labour - growth in the
agricultural economy, changing technology and cropping patterns since gender divisions of
labour are fairly clearly marked and different crops have different requirements for women’s
labour, the expansion or contraction of other labour markets and wage differentials in those
competing markets, as well as factors which are deeply embedded in gender relations within
households such as the incomes earned by spouses which affect the need for women to work,
the variable desire by women for employment, the attitudes of spouses and in-laws to women
working, and the practical constraints of child care [Jackson and Rao, 2004]. Rising
education levels can also affect engagement in agricultural work as in the case of Kerala. A
beneficial outcome in the longer-term would depend on the overall employment demand, the
quality of the new jobs relative to those from which displaced, and changes to forms of wage
control.
3. Assessing Gains And Gaps In Project Experiences
In line with the multiple dimensions of poverty as identified by the poor themselves, namely,
lack of income and assets; sense of voicelessness and powerlessness in the institutions of
state and society, and vulnerability to adverse shocks [Chambers, 1995], most international
agencies have in the last five years modified their strategic objectives to reflect this broader
understanding of poverty. IFAD, for instance, has now identified three strategic objectives:
strengthening the capacity of the rural poor and their organisations; improving equitable
access to productive resources and technology; and increasing access of the poor to financial
assets and markets [IFAD, 2003]. I will focus on the first two in this paper, as community
organisations and user groups have now become a widely accepted strategy for
implementation of projects concerned with asset creation and management.
Recent reviews and assessments across agencies reveal less than satisfactory performance in
relation to these key objectives, from a gender perspective. An evaluation of the gender
dimension of World Bank assistance in 12 countries (including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in
South Asia) notes that while satisfactory results have been obtained in the health and
education sectors, the Bank has been weak in promoting the economic participation of
women [OED, 2002].
26
Gender equality in most cases does not feature as an explicit goal or objective of the project,
and this may be because of the assumption that gender has been mainstreamed into the
project design, yet in practice it leads to the exclusion of women, particularly from decisionmaking and control positions. New groups and institutions are set-up without any
consideration for existing structures and organisations and how they would relate with these.
In the IFAD-supported Orissa Tribal Development Project, for instance, Self Help Groups
(SHGs) were organised for women, while the Water Users Society and Village Committee,
from which they were excluded, were taking the major decisions. Women therefore soon lost
interest in the SHGs, and the numbers did not increase beyond three!!
There seems to have been much more emphasis on the technical-managerial aspects of the
projects rather than the ‘software’ or social aspects, leading to exclusion of the poorest,
including women, and resulting in modest gains in terms of poverty reduction or income
enhancement. It is only in recent project documents that female headed households have
been recognised explicitly as a vulnerable group, to be targeted by project interventions,
alongside a focus on developing institutional structures that build on existing institutions
where possible and enable a more equitable distribution of resources and benefits. Analysis
in the previous sections has revealed considerable difference between female-only
households and female-headed households, as well as the vulnerability of women within
male-headed households,15 and the variations across castes/classes. However, these
differences are still not explicitly addressed in project analysis. I analyse below a few project
experiences with a view to drawing lessons for the future.
Bangladesh: fisheries and homestead cultivation
Bangladesh has a high level of rural poverty, but also a network of NGOs implementing
varied sets of interventions for poverty alleviation. It therefore offers some valuable insights
in terms of enhancing development effectiveness. The findings from a study of the impacts of
vegetable production and fishpond management technologies on household resource
allocation, but also on women’s empowerment, raise some interesting issues (Hallman et al,
2003). First, a certain level of material and non-material assets is a precondition for the
adoption of new technologies, hence while a majority of the adopters were ‘poor’ (55 per
cent owned between 1-4.5 acres of land), the very poor (landless) were largely excluded.
Secondly, while poor women were targeted for both the vegetable intervention (Manikganj
district) and fishpond intervention (in Jessore), the former, based on individual households
was found to be more successful than the latter, based on group action. This was because of
lack of coordination and trust amongst group members, and misappropriation by the group
leaders, who had been trained by the NGO, but not the other members. Further, while the
vegetables were generally grown on the bari or homestead plots and labour inputs could be
flexibly timed, the ponds were at a distance from the homes and hence the women were not
always able to go there regularly. A common constraint, however, was the public/private
space dichotomy, with women not always able to retain control over the marketing of these
products.
Yet, adoption of these new technologies itself and the consequent access to cash incomes
(especially from vegetables) was seen as a pathway to empowerment by several women,
enabling them to visit friends and relatives outside the village, and largely able to withstand
verbal abuse though not physical beatings. As reported earlier, women’s control over assets
contributed towards increased investments in the education of their children. While the
nutritional levels of children have improved in some instances, male-female gaps in
consumption persist across age categories. In sum, the vegetable project was seen to have
27
significant impacts both on poverty and female empowerment. Projects such as the group
fishpond however could also enhance vulnerabilities such as through theft of the fish,
coercion of women to pass on resources to other household members and so on.
In a similar vein, a review of BRAC’s Income Generation for Vulnerable Group Programme
clearly revealed that many households who were desperately poor, but seen to have little
prospect of becoming economically active were excluded from most NGO and state antipoverty programmes. This programme therefore sought to build on the World Food
Programmes’s Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF) scheme, hence targeted widowed or
abandoned female heads of households, households owning less than 0.5 acres of land and
earning less than 300 taka per month. While only 8 per cent of rural households and 10 per
cent of the hardcore poor were headed by widowed, divorced, or abandoned women, they
formed 44 per cent of the programme’s target group in 1994 (Matin & Hulme, 2003: 655).
Hence, while the programme did provide benefits to those likely to be vulnerable to shocks
over a period of time, the targeting was influenced greatly by factors of sympathy towards
women, especially as mothers of young children, by social networks and by BRAC’s
organisational needs – to expand its own membership. What emerged in the evaluation was
that for the poorest, the provision of food aid for a limited period of time (18 months), skills
training, savings schemes and microcredit was insufficient to help them improve their
situation. Some extent of asset transfer (could include a range of material and financial
assets), health care and sustained social support and development was essential.
What appears clear is that self-help and entrepreneurial strategies can only succeed in
poverty reduction when the programme participant already has an initial asset base. For the
poorest, a much more long-term, supportive and differentiated strategy is required. For
women particularly support is essential to help them engage in the public space of markets
and state institutions.
India: land and poverty reduction
In line with the new understandings of poverty and the focus on local institutions, 40 per cent
of World Bank aided projects in India now depend on local organisations and user groups for
their implementation. A study of three such projects (Sodic Lands Reclamation Project, UP;
Forestry Project, MP; and the irrigation component of the Economic Restructuring Program,
AP) in 2000 sought to understand the levels of inclusiveness and effectiveness of groups in
these projects in terms of achievement and functioning indicators. While it is often assumed
that user groups would foster inclusion of the disadvantaged in decision-making, equitable
distribution of the resource in question and democratic governance and accountability, apart
from being a cost-effective delivery mechanism, this is not necessarily the case (Alsop et al,
2002). Participation appears to be highest amongst those already well connected and
generally low amongst women, though this does not necessarily mean that they do not
receive immediate benefits.
It is not the short-term, material gains, but the broader goals of equity, inclusion and
ownership that seem difficult to achieve, as communities are not homogenous entities but
networks of complex power relations. So, while two-thirds of those interviewed gave a good
rating to the achievement of formal objectives, whether distribution of inputs, forest
protection or maintenance of the irrigation system, asset creation and equitable distribution
got lower ranks. This also varied by gender and the economic position of the household, with
men and richer people having higher expectations of the projects. In terms of representation
in user groups, less than 10 per cent were women on average, and even these women were
28
hardly involved in decision-making. Transparency was limited and members were not aware
of how funds were managed or decisions made, and in the event of any conflict, external
backstops were needed to resolve it.
What these experiences reveal is that poverty targeting and equitable distribution of shortterm benefits can be achieved even without higher levels of inclusion. Another good example
of this comes from the Girijan Cooperative Corporation (GCC), formed as part of the Andhra
Pradesh Tribal Development Programme (APTDP), financed by IFAD between 1991-2001,
which focuses on the marketing of non-timber forest produce (NTFP), particularly gum, a
major income generation activity for tribal women. While the GCC has contributed
considerably to women’s employment and income, it does not have a specific gender
dimension built into its programmes. On the contrary, the general perception of the APTDP
has been in terms of provision of irrigation and plantation of orchards, rather than securing
rights to forest produce or forest lands. One negative impact of these latter interventions in
terms of equity has been that men now concentrate more on work in the irrigated areas,
whereas previously they had helped women on the podu land (slash-and-burn cultivation on
the hill-slopes). This focus on irrigated cultivation has also enhanced vulnerability to drought
conditions. Further, irrigation does not help almost half of the tribal families who possess
little or no land and rely on NTFP, wage labour, or podu cultivation, subject to seasonal
variations and harassment by forest guards.
This last brings up the issue of legal titles to own or use land designated as ‘forests’. In a
speech to Parliament on 25th February 2005, the President of India noted: “Adivasis in this
country have been leading a life of insecurity in many areas since their property rights have
remained unsettled. It is necessary to recognize their need for assured property and land
rights in areas they have been residing in for several generations. It is an irony that tribals
who have been living in "forest villages" and have been practicing agriculture on these lands
for several generations, have not been given due recognition of their rights. Their problems
are engaging the attention of the Government and we will try to settle the issue of land rights
of tribals. The outcome will be beneficial both to tribals and to the goal of forest
conservation” (point 12) http://presidentofindia.nic.in/scripts/palatest1.jsp?id=7. This has
recently become a point of dispute between the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and Ministry of
Environment and Forests. Clearly resolving the issue of forest rights can serve the interests of
adivasis, but in particular adivasi women, in whose domain the collection and sale of NTFP
lies. Particular attention however needs to be paid to recognising their rights when the titles
are eventually distributed.
Group organisation can serve to deliver material benefits more or less equitably, and even
contribute to the reduction of vulnerability to sudden shocks, as seen in the Tamil Nadu
Women’s Development Project, wherein only 4 per cent of SHG members witnessed
deterioration in status as against 10 per cent of non-members [Murthy, 1999]. Yet, if one is
serious about meeting the longer-term goals of equity and collective action, then
organisational processes need to be strengthened. If empowerment of women is a goal, then
this needs to be made explicit and the rules of engagement defined accordingly. People
participate in accordance with their perception of benefits, hence if the focus in resource
management programmes is primarily on physical works, as appears to be the case when one
looks at monitoring formats, then it is no surprise that the better off would participate more
actively than the landless or women, who have less to gain [Alsop, 2004: 44].
An exception seems to be the AP District Poverty Initiatives Project [Velugu: 2000-05], the
starting point of which is social mobilisation, including forming federations of women’s
29
groups, some of them organised earlier under a government programme known as DWCRA
(Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas). These have then identified livelihood
support activities, including linkages with credit and input delivery institutions, as well as
collective marketing, but also ensure food security through the provision of rice on credit
(www.velugu.org/progress/project_status.html accessed on 28/2/05). A combination of
economic and social approaches has clearly contributed to better results, though participation
does vary between NGO-supported and state-organised SHGs. State and district level Gender
Resource Groups have been set up to institutionalise gender sensitivity across project
activities, however, in the absence of gender-disaggregated data and the use of genderneutral language such as ‘poor’, ‘people’, ‘community’ etc in the reports (SERP, 2003), it is
difficult to comment on the success of this strategy. Yet the importance of forming
federations or higher-level organisations for claiming rights clearly emerges from this
experience.
David Mosse (2005) provides a different interpretation of participatory development in his
analysis of the DFID-funded Western India Rainfed Farming Project. While development
professionals premised the project on goals of empowerment, self-reliance etc, the Bhil
villagers, given their own historical reality, saw it in terms of relationships with outsiders as
patrons or exploiters, and the resources they could bring. Women and the socially
marginalized were unable to participate in public planning exercises and village plans came
to reflect the needs of the dominant, but also external priorities. So, project funds given to
SHGs were preserved rather than used, to serve both as a form of social protection and for
accessing further resources. Autonomy here was not an objective for the villagers, though
securing maximum material benefits was.
Nepal: forests and livestock
While women are not excluded from the labour force, a major problem in Nepal has been in
terms of geographical/regional exclusion, with the mid-western and far-western regions
lagging behind the rest of the country in terms of all human development measures.
Interestingly, while the GDI lags behind the HDI all over the country, the gap intensifies in
these regions pointing to the compound effect of low incomes, lack of gainful employment
and access to productive assets as well as limited coverage of social assistance and social
security programmes. Ways of confronting both regional barriers, and those of gender, caste
and ethnicity, then need to be found.
While groups have always existed within village communities, post-1990, there has been a
spurt in group formation for specific development purposes, be it natural resource
management, agriculture, livestock and fisheries, savings and credit, education, health,
infrastructure development, enterprise development and so on. One rough estimate puts the
number at nearly 400,000 village-level groups, with savings and credit topping the list
(initiated by the SFDP in mid-1970s and PCRW in the 1980s), followed by agriculture, nonformal education, irrigation and natural resource management mainly forestry. Yet this is
likely to be an underestimation given that these do not include the traditional groups, those
not registered with the concerned department, and the existence of multiple groups covering
the same households. Combining the groups as one ‘mother group’ to coordinate all activities
may be a good way to minimise group fatigue, yet it is equally likely to marginalise the poor
and women (Biggs et al, 2004). In its analysis of the specific outcomes of group-based
development in terms of social inclusion and the empowerment of women, the Nepal Human
Development Report (2004: 73) found that the UNDP-supported Village development
Programme (VDP), DFID-supported Livelihood and Forestry Programme (LFP) and several
30
others, rate well in terms of enhancing livelihood conditions. Yet their impact on social status
is low. The main problems have been the exclusion of the ultra-poor, limitation of capacitybuilding to the group leaders (often the educated elite), lack of resources for scaling up, or
indeed to ensure sustainability following project withdrawal.
Further, most of these groups are concentrated in the hills (highest HDI), rather than the
mountains or terai, hence not dealing with geographical exclusion. These are also mostly low
absentee areas, as it is likely that in high absentee ones, women’s workloads would be higher
and they would be unable to spare time for group activities and meetings.
If one looks at the gender composition of groups, one finds an almost equal number of men
and women, even though forestry, agriculture, micro-credit and water lie essentially in
women’s domain. One of the well documented group types are the community forestry user
groups (CFUGs), registered with the Department of Forests. The community forestry project
in Sindhupalchowk district revealed 76 per cent male membership and 24 per cent female,
given that membership is generally in the name of the household head (only 663 out of
13125 groups are female groups). At the level of the executive committee, where decisions
were made, female membership was lower at 20 per cent. While these groups may have led
to meeting environmental goals, they have not necessarily led to an improvement in gender
relations or the empowerment of women. Inferiority based on illiteracy, gender or caste
status, vulnerability and the lack of transparency in functioning facilitates elite dominance in
these groups. Similar was the experience of JFM in India, where women, responsible for
collection of fuel and fodder, came to be treated as ‘thieves’ [Sarin, 1997]. The growing
realisation of this male bias, has now led to moves to change membership guidelines to
include all adults, reserve 33 per cent of executive positions for women and so on16.
While attempts have been made to form federations and coalitions at meso and macro levels,
these have not always succeeded, being often imposed from the top rather than emerging
from the bottom. Yet they carry the potential to influence decision-making at the macro
levels. Further, unlike traditional groups, dominated by the elite, there is a growing
recognition and effort to include the marginalised in the new groups. Several women’s
groups have formed cooperatives/federations in order to have better access to inputs and
marketing support. The Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal has advocated for
changes in forest policy, benefiting even groups that are not formally affiliated to it. The
Production Credit for rural Women (PCRW) and Women’s Empowerment programme
(WEP) are two interventions that have had mixed results overall. But where groups have
been homogenous, local women willing to take leadership available and the staff of the
Women’s Development Office/NGO enthusiastic, motivated and open, remarkable
achievements have been made, and tales of success (micro-enterprises, community advocacy,
household decision-making) are frequently heard (Biggs et al, 2004).
Livestock development programmes, which did not simultaneously focus on fodder
development, such as the Nepal Small Farmer Development Project (IFAD website) failed to
meet their goals. In the later Nepal Hill Leasehold Forestry And Forage Development Project
(HLFFDP, 1993-2003), livestock and fodder development were jointly undertaken, while
also specifically targeting the landless, female headed households and disadvantaged tribal
groups. Unlike the community forestry programmes, the leasehold forestry programme
involved a redistribution of assets to the poor by leasing degraded sites to specifically
targeted groups of resource-poor households, identified jointly by NGO partners and
supportive government officials. The objective was to enable forest rehabilitation while also
31
increasing the supply of fodder and forage for livestock that would provide incomes to these
households.
The evaluation of HLFFDP [IFAD, 2003] found the poverty impacts to be uneven, varying
with location, dynamism of groups and potential of the plots, yet there was a significant
increase in the ownership of goats, rather than milch animals, due to improved access to
forage. While two-thirds of the targeted households earned some income from goats, the
impact of other income generating activities was insignificant. Women’s collection time for
fuel and fodder was also reduced substantially. While usufruct leases on these forestlands
have been granted to them for 40 years, it is important now to clarify the conditionalities and
secure the tenures.
Despite the fact that both forest and small livestock activities are essentially in women’s
domain, it is interesting to note that only 27 per cent of group members were women and 11
per cent of leasehold groups all-women groups, with others participating as wives of
members (Lama, 2005). Yet the appointment of 46 women Group Promoters and gender
training for forest rangers is gradually leading to enhanced gender sensitivity [IFAD, 2003]
and even where women are not decision-makers, they do attempt to influence decisions. The
leasehold forestry project has been expensive to implement, and one of the key lessons
emerging is to allow a bottom-up and participatory process of self-identification of the
poorest, while also targeting a critical mass of households within a given area/cluster as
remote locations particularly need sustained support. There is need to actively encourage the
participation of women and organise them into cooperatives, rather than identifying
households to join groups, as this can enhance self-esteem, confidence and help resolve
disputes. Despite the slow progress due to the state of emergency in the country and the
lengthy disbursement procedures, given its potential for poverty alleviation and empowering
the poorest, NGO partners and women group promoters are now demanding the continuation
of this project. Clearly, people take interest in group activities when it visibly contributes to
their livelihoods. They then try to work collectively to protect their resource, and maintain
their income, in the process further strengthening their group and also themselves.
Land, livestock and labour constitute the productive assets for the poor in the hills of Nepal;
deforestation adversely affects female agricultural labour supply, household production and
childcare. Community forestry focuses on the community rather than targeting the poor or
women. Benefits however will not trickle down, hence proactive policies are needed to
address the needs of the disadvantaged groups, and women within them. Skills in livestock
management, production of forage seed and livestock improvement need to be provided
specifically to women, along with market linkages, if equity goals are to be met, alongside
poverty goals. Few qualified women may be available in these groups, hence specific efforts
need to be made in this direction, as done by the Integrated pest Management /Farmer Field
Schools project supported by the FAO.
Further, the importance of adequate support to women in both their productive and
reproductive roles cannot be stressed enough. An analysis of the Vegetable and Fruit Cash
Crop (VFC) Project in the Rapti Zone in the mid-western development region revealed that
an increase in time spent on this activity by both men and women had a time trade-off with
the care of pre-school children. In the short run, this could be made up by cutting down on
leisure time, but in the longer run, overwork had negative effects on both the mother’s health
and the nutritional well-being of the child (Paolissa et al, 2002). Women’s time is clearly of
essence, and interventions need to be sensitive to this. If one considers the woman’s labour –
32
her body – to be a key asset, then the intensification of labour beyond a point could deplete
her body as an asset.
Pakistan: Natural Resource Management
Given the specific constraints faced by women in Pakistan, the PPA recommended gender
mainstreaming across all levels of anti-poverty policies and programmes.Yet there have been
problems in implementing such an approach, raised clearly in analyses of the work of Aga
Khan Rural Support Programme in the Northern Areas and Chitral over the last two decades.
Despite the use of the ‘gender’ language in the 1990s, activities of the Women’s
Organisations have focused on ‘income generation at the household level’ (involving socially
acceptable activities such as poultry, livestock, vegetable/fruit production and processing,
stitching and embroidery) rather than involving women in ‘physical infrastructure schemes
and common property management, which could have involved the women in local
governance’ [Husain, 2003: 47]. AKRSP has helped increase incomes and enhanced social
capital, yet as far as women are concerned, it has addressed their practical needs, rather than
enhancing their public profile [OED, 2001]. It was only after 1996 that a policy of positive
discrimination was used to recruit more female staff, yet the number has remained relatively
constant at 15 per cent. As of December 2002, across the programme area, almost an equal
number of male and female entrepreneurs had been trained (2309 and 2409), however, the
differential treatment is visible when one looks at figures for loans disbursed, with the
amount going to men almost 12 times that to women entrepreneurs [Afzal, 2003: 123]. This
raises the key role of marketing and the inadequacy of providing vocational training, without
access to suitable markets. Marketing advice has been targeted to individuals rather than the
women’s organisations [OED, 2001: 22]. I discussed earlier that in the case of the IFADsupported APTDP, perhaps the most important intervention has been the development of the
Girijan Cooperative Corporation for the purposes of marketing the local NTFP.
Yet, over the long term, even though not planned, these activities do seem to have had a
strategic impact through skill development and confidence building for women. Despite
continuing constraints on mobility, women’s roles as income earners have led to partial shifts
in the household division of labour, though the question of enhanced work burdens persists in
many parts. A young educated woman noted, “education and the ability to earn money have
brought new respect for women” (quoted in Gloekler and Seeley, 2003: 15), and the
participation in women’s organisations have demonstrated their leadership potential. It is
often the only collective space for women within their village context and the only
experience of self-management. While village services like water supply or literacy classes
were channelised through the women’s organisations, there appeared insufficient attention to
help men understand the reasons for the shift in policy in favour of women, and support this,
for the sake of the larger good. Yet, under the Local Ordinance 2001, which allowed for 33
per cent seats for women in the district and union councils, several WO activists and
members have come forward to fill these seats. Experiences from Bangladesh and India, in
similarly patriarchal settings, reveal that pursuing gender equality goals at all levels require
policy commitment and programmatic leadership as “there is little built in incentive to pursue
gender objectives – in fact the reverse, since concern with gender equity significantly slows
implementation progress [Mosse, 1999: 39]. There is need therefore to bring together and
make coherent the women’s and men’s programmes in order to achieve objectives of poverty
reduction and integrated development [OED, 2001: 44].
Experience from 18 projects supported by IFAD, jointly with the World Bank, ADB and
United Nations confirm the above-mentioned problems. First, reaching the poorest, who lack
33
voice in the general Village Organisations is difficult; and second, mainstreaming gender
concerns is a slow process and without concerted efforts, progress is inevitably slow. While
these problems may be rooted in conservative cultural traditions and poor education levels,
where projects have specifically sought to route services through women’s groups, it has
served to improve their self-perception, confidence and sense of connectedness to the outside
world [COSOP, 2003].
Sri Lanka: Water Resources
The Integrated Rural Development Projects in Sri Lanka, with their focus on social
mobilisation and the group approach, have been effective in enhancing women’s
participation, providing visibility and acceptability to women’s mobility and triggering
attitudinal changes in the direction of greater gender equality. Despite the potential for
gender mainstreaming, however, this has not happened adequately, with women largely
missing from infrastructure and agriculture components of projects – despite women’s active
involvement in both - a similar pattern to projects in India and Nepal.
Most development interventions dealing with water as a resource have focused on irrigation
and enhancing agricultural productivity. Evidence from water users associations in India,
Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka reveal that women’s participation is much lower than men’s
despite women’s involvement in irrigated agriculture. This is partly a result of membership
rules (based on the household as a unit) and the individuals’ ability to participate. While
ownership of land and household headship are two factors that tend to exclude women from
membership, this is intensified by factors relating to appropriate norms of behaviour and the
domination of men in public decision-making. Yet this does not necessarily imply that
women’s needs are not met as women use informal means of negotiation to access the
resource, and while dependent on male links, their needs, in terms of irrigating homestead
land and watering livestock, do get reflected in the actual pattern of resource use [MeinzenDick and Zwarteveen, 1998: 343].
In fact, non-participation offered women certain strategic advantages in water use in the
Chhatis Mauja area in Nepal. Women could break rules to ‘steal’ water as they were not part
of the groups. They could also use discourses of vulnerability to make claims to water. Water
rights, like land rights, are social, in that access is defined on the basis of socially sanctioned
principles. They are more than just material assets. Their symbolic meanings as well as the
embodied experiences of particular kinds of work matter in terms of visibility of access and
control [Jackson, 1998: 316]. This really raises the issue of purpose: benefits can be
distributed equitably even without equal participation by all groups in public institutional
spaces, given that gender relations are hierarchical, but also reflect interdependencies
between men and women.
Apart from irrigation, a second major aspect of the water resource has been in terms of
fisheries development, both inland (e.g Bangladesh) and coastal (e.g. Sri Lanka and India).
This is seen to contribute both to improving nutrition levels of the poor and providing a
source of livelihood by marketing the fish. In the coastal areas, there has been much recent
debate about the commercialisation and export-orientation of the fisheries sector, the coming
in of large trawlers, which in fact deprive the poor of their livelihood. Inland prawn
cultivation has caused land salinity and a destruction of other environmental resources, and
has been challenged legally in both eastern India and parts of south-western Bangladesh.
Despite an increase in incomes for some women (though the bulk of profits go to the rich
entrepreneurs), prawn culture projects in Puttalam district in west-central Sri Lanka, for
34
instance, have aggravated the degradation of agricultural lands, devastating the livelihoods of
the poor, particularly women, dependent on coconut and paddy lands and the homesteads
[Rasanayagam, 1999]. Gains have been adhoc and unintended, rather than planned. For
instance, leadership roles in some project activities have led to women taking initiative to
develop other activities. While aquaculture is a readily accessible activity for women, they
generally participate in low-skilled and low-paid hobs, have marginal access to training and
extension services and are excluded from decision-making and control over resources. A
gender-responsive policy would focus on ensuring shifts in their socio-economic status as
well, and not just involving women and enhancing their workloads [AIT, 2000]. As Agarwal
(2001: 1624) notes, participation can mean many different things from nominal involvement,
activity-specific participation to playing much more active roles in decision-making.
A third element is drinking water and in most projects, a range of line departments, elected
local government organisations and project organisations are mandated with implementation.
While the Panchayats or local government organisations are able to pass on benefits, they are
generally not capable of technical or collective action support. NGOs performed better in
social support functions and line departments in technical ones, though the scope of NGOs is
often circumscribed by restrictive contracts and their capacities limited to specific regions or
sectors. Also, while panchayats are often given monitoring roles, they lack control over the
staff of both line departments and NGOs, hence find it difficult to effectively perform this
role. Drinking water projects raise questions about institutional roles and their
appropriateness. Rather than devolving all functions to the community, as is the current
orthodoxy, the state may have better capacity and technical skills to perform certain
functions compared to other institutional players.
While most projects relating to water resources have been largely gender-blind in process,
they have enabled women to diversify and enhance incomes, especially through the adoption
of non-agricultural activities, yet they also report an increase in workloads (IFAD,
2002:19).17 The Sri Lanka experience particularly highlights the need to pay attention to nonland-based opportunities if women and the poorest are to benefit equally.
4. Gender Mainstreaming: Some Institutional Lessons and Policy Directions
An assessment of the gender dimensions of World Bank assistance revealed that while the
Bank appears to have done the right things in Bangladesh over the last decade, consistent
with national policies, the gender relevance of its policies in Sri Lanka were at best modest
[OED, 2002:3]. This is perhaps because the starting points have been education and health
disparities, linked to maternity (important in Bangladesh though not so much in Sri Lanka),
rather than labour market interventions or a holistic analysis of gender inequality. The
evaluation of 53 Project Appraisal Documents reveals that only a third had both a gender
analysis and gender-disaggregated monitoring indicators, in the others, adhoc WID
components had been added on, predictably with mixed results. O’Reilly (2004) notes a
similar disjuncture in an Indo-German funded drinking water supply project, which on the
one hand sought women’s participation, but at the same time marginalized them in practice.
In such instances, targeting does serve a purpose in terms of building decision-making
capacities and leadership skills. Yet such targeted approaches need to be
nested/mainstreamed within a holistic strategy, to avoid marginalisation of women as
evidenced in the Indian example.
While gender has been included as a specific criterion in data collection and analysis relating
to all projects, other forms of exclusion, such as caste and ethnicity, apart from locational
35
factors, continue to be overlooked. In some instances, caste and ethnicity may play a greater
role in social exclusion than gender. Despite the collection of gender-disaggregated data,
monitoring and evaluation however continues to focus on traditional input and output level
assessments, rather than on process and impacts. If targeting women and the poor and
enhancing their participation in the development process are institutional imperatives for
multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank, ADB, IFAD and UN agencies, then the
failure to document the participation of and benefits to these groups can be considered an
institutional failure. It also raises yet again the need for the collection of disaggregated data,
focusing not just on outputs, but also on process factors – critical for women’s
empowerment.
Despite their lack of voice in many institutions, women belong to households, and as much
research has demonstrated, while there are conflicts of interest between men and women,
there are also substantial levels of cooperation and interest in mutual well-being. So even
where women have been excluded as members, their needs are often met. Yet, underlying
most successful cases are the opening up of employment opportunities, as well as access to
productive resources (such as forests and livestock) and viable market opportunities. In a
context where money and markets dominate, access to assets alone is not enough, but holistic
support is required to enable women to overcome a range of constraints in different
institutional sites to make these assets productive. The National Commission on Farmers
notes in its first report (2004: 82-3), that agriculture when seen from a gender perspective
involves not just crop production, but dairying, small animal husbandry and natural resource
management in its widest sense. Women’s engagement cuts across sectors; hence
interventions too need to cut across sectoral divisions if they are to achieve their objectives.
Donors, government departments and NGOs need to learn from the experience and respond
accordingly, collecting and sharing both disaggregated data and positive case studies, helping
federate, collaborate and build capacities where needed. A gendered approach should be
based on a holistic gender analytical framework, with systematic monitoring and adequate
training and resources allocated for this purpose. I summarise below some policy options for
enhancing both programmatic and institutional effectiveness.
i.
Women’s legal entitlements to land need to be clarified to provide an enabling
environment for gender equality in a context where social recognition is largely
missing. The Indian government has recently approved amendments to the Hindu
Succession Act 1956 to remove the clauses that disadvantaged women (Reddy et al,
2000). Yet specific references and incentives are needed to ensure the entitlements of
single women as individual beneficiaries and married women to have joint titles to land
and houses with their husbands.18 While ownership rights (even joint titles) are usually
absent, women are expected to be responsible for returning debts incurred by their
husbands as noted by Sainath (2004) in the context of farmer suicides in Andhra
Pradesh, India. Land is generally treated as a joint resource within households, hence
the inclusion of women’s names in the land records, as done in Assam in 1989 (GOI,
2004: 91), could help them meet such exigencies. It is also important to clarify rights to
common property such as forests and village grazing lands, as these are key resources
for certain groups such as tribes and nomadic pastoralists.
ii.
Mechanisms for implementation of laws and policies too need to be clarified along with
the relationship between different institutions. Societies are governed by plural systems
of rules that influence behaviour and interactions at different levels. They are not
‘autonomous social fields’ [Moore, 1978], but are constantly being influenced by and
36
influencing each other. In the case of land in particular, as already mentioned, a large
part of available land is acquired through inheritance. Apart from being a material
asset, it thus has symbolic value in terms of kinship links and lineage name, resulting in
problems in the process of implementing legal rights awarded to women. Village level
customary institutions, increasingly unable to deal with property disputes due to the
multiple vested interests involved, are trying to influence court processes, often in
women’s favour [Rao, 2002]. ‘Culture’ and ‘tradition’ can then be a constraint but also
a resource. It is important therefore to harmonise land, marriage and inheritance laws to
ensure congruence and social acceptability on the one hand, while ensuring plurality
and openness in terms of mechanisms of enforcement, as revealed also by Menon et al
(2005) and Mosse (2003) in the case of irrigation institutions. This would involve
strengthening local conflict resolution mechanisms, while also making legal rights and
services available.
iii.
Access to khas land and water resources: It is true that in most of south Asia land is
scarce and the amount of khas or state-owned land available for redistribution is
relatively small (less than 1.6 per cent of total land in India [Agarwal, 1998]. To this
extent, its overall impact is likely to be marginal. Yet, at least for symbolic reasons and
to reiterate the value of women in the land sector, it is important that khas land is made
accessible to women as also water for a range of productive tasks such as homestead
cultivation, livestock watering etc and not just irrigated agriculture. Even though the
quantum of the resource may be nominal, the recognition of women’s position by the
state itself contributes to strengthening their bargaining position within the household.
In India, while policy commitment to this agenda has been affirmed since the Sixth
Plan period (1980-85), lack of monitoring information limits any analysis of progress,
which qualitative village studies show to be tardy.19 They also vary by region as state
governments are responsible for implementation rather than the centre.
iv.
Focus on human capital: A key lesson is perhaps to enable women to move away from
low-income, low technology activities to more skilled and better paying tasks. Related
to this, it is also important to identify assets that are competitive in changing economic
contexts and strengthen women’s control therein. The Malaysian example is a case in
point. In a context where the rural sector was completely neglected by the state and the
focus was on industrial development, confining women to the land meant confining
them to a ‘backward’ sector. Despite having rights to land, several young women
therefore preferred to work in the industries and join the higher paid and valued
mainstream rather than being seen as ‘conservers’ of the rural sector [Stivens et al,
1994]. There is hence a need to identify market trends, acquire information on new
opportunities and constantly seek to upgrade women’s skills and generate new income
earning options that can compete in the markets. Training, including agricultural
extension services, thus needs to focus on developing technical as well as
entrepreneurial, marketing and organisational skills. Skill development should be a
priority as labour is a key asset for women and the landless. If one goes back to the
notion of ‘capitals’ as explicated in the livelihoods approaches, then human and social
capital appear to take priority over physical and natural capital for these groups. An
important policy lesson here is to ensure equal wages for labour to men and women, as
even projects often either pay women less than men or demand more free labour from
women in relation to men.
v.
Organising women appears as a key strategy for helping women gain access to assets.
Naved (2003) in the case of Bangladesh notes that organising was key in the fishpond
37
project, as women have few support networks and the group is an essential means for
building their confidence as well as bargaining power. The Nepal experience too
reveals the importance of group organisation for enabling women to effectively stake
claims to assets. Homogenous groups which are flexible and able to take up contextspecific issues however appear to be more successful than others [Rao, 2005]. This is
because the process of claiming assets implies challenging the status quo with its
consequent social risks, which becomes possible only when women have substantial
common interest and social support to take such action. Higher cluster level federations
become important for ensuring not just forward and backward linkages, but also
structural change.
vi.
Livestock and fodder development should be prioritised as this again is a key asset for
rural women, an insurance against risk, a form of savings and capital. Rather than
attempting to ban goats as environmentally destructive as was tried by the Andhra
Pradesh government in India, it is much better to recognise their value for the poor
especially women and try to overcome the negative environmental effects through
provision of fodder and forage as done in Nepal.
vii. Infrastructure development: A key lesson that seems to be emerging from the review of
projects is that while most of them have focused on enhancing the productivity of
natural resources (land, water, forests) or develop assets such as livestock and also
human capital through education and skill training, they have not always developed
infrastructure that could best serve the interests of the poorer target groups. There is a
need to recognise the premium on women’s time and provide appropriate infrastructure
support to ease their burdens. Transport to the markets or from the fields and forests are
major areas that affect women’s well being, as also the access to water and fuel.
Performing these reproductive tasks in addition to a growing burden of productive work
– longer hours at lower wages – is likely to ultimately deplete women’s body capital
and negatively affect their capacity to work. Simultaneously, there is a need to
encourage men to share in reproductive work, an essential part of livelihood strategies.
viii. Focus on dealing with competitive markets is essential to help women overcome the
structural constraints to their equal economic participation. While women are often
engaged in a range of productive tasks, restrictions on mobility prevent them from
accessing the best markets directly, and if this has to be done, they then become
dependent on their male relatives for this purpose. The example of the GCC in Andhra
Pradesh clearly illustrates the benefits of market access for women.
ix.
Monitoring and evaluation should include quality and process factors and not just
inputs and outputs. There is need to specifically monitor how far gender has been
mainstreamed in each programme component and performance therein. In a context
like Sri Lanka, where women have had for a long time equal access to education and
are integrated in the economy, having special women’s components, marginal to the
main project, makes no sense. But a similar message seems to emerge from Andhra
Pradesh, India as well, as women were interested in joining the mainstream water users
groups rather than forming separate SHGs, seen as marginal to the main intervention.
x.
Need for adequate resource investments: One needs to get away from the notion that
poverty reduction and gender equality can be achieved on the ‘cheap’, with ‘microinvestments’ and small-scale interventions. This is a lesson that has emerged again and
again from a range of sectoral interventions (literacy, for example), and is one that
38
needs to be taken seriously. The Leasehold Forestry Project in Nepal, for instance, was
seen to be expensive, yet its impacts are likely to be more sustainable in the long run.
Conclusion
Progress towards gender equality through development interventions ultimately raises issues
of sustainability of gains. Sustainability however needs to be seen in at least two ways: of a
benefit stream and of a group as an organisational entity. The two need not always be tied
together and it may be important to accept that sustainability of the benefit stream can be
more effectively delivered by some other organisation. Most natural resource management
projects are now based on the formation of user institutions, whether common land, forests or
water. If these groups are to sustain and meet equity and collective action objectives then it is
important to clarify their purpose, provide external support to build requisite capacities, form
links with other local organisations and also address gender needs in the core activities of the
project. While most projects set up infrastructure or invest in resource development, there is
often not adequate investment in developing grassroots institutions with the capacity and
resources to manage these newly created assets. It is common to find irrigation sector
investments including check-dams and other water harvesting structures, roads, input
provision, collapse when the funding period ends.
Further, development interventions often do not keep pace with the changing context of a
globalised, competitive and market-driven world. In the case of women in particular, they
continue to be pushed into traditional activities and micro-enterprises, with not much thought
to market demand or sunrise activities. One needs to think afresh about rural women’s work,
about upscaling innovations, linking them with the knowledge economy and focusing equally
on economic-structural concerns as on social-agency/capacity concerns.
Women and communities do not exist in a vacuum, but in a social space, hence it is
important to carefully examine the existing community structures before introducing new
institutions. The role and purpose of these new institutions should be clarified as well as their
relationship and linkage with the existing structures, if they are to sustain. It is important also
to ensure women voice and a role in decision-making and explicitly recognise the form,
boundaries and time frame for empowerment, as this is unlikely to happen automatically.
What seems critical then is the need for an enabling institutional environment as reflected in
the presence of clear and flexible rules and regulations (including of membership),
enforcement mechanisms, nesting and networking of such institutions and an able and fair
leadership [See Menon et al, 2005 for case studies from Kerala].
While several projects have encouraged women to participate in development and decisionmaking processes by specifically targeting them, it is now recognised that a more genderfocussed approach is necessary [Flintan, 2003]. Women’s groups do provide a forum for
women to come together, share ideas, exchange information and develop a support network.
Yet strategic shifts in access to resources and benefits (linked as they are to responsibilities
for maintaining them), can only emerge if men too support such a shift, and take on a more
equal share of both productive and reproductive work. In a context of structural reform, poor
men too are facing a crisis in terms of accessing productive assets, markets and income,
leading to a crisis of masculinities that is often reflected in growing trends of violence against
women. If gender equality is indeed to be achieved, there is need to pay attention to the
interests of women, but also to men and to shifts in gender relations occurring on account of
contextual changes.
39
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1,2,...
1
2
3
Dhungana vs Nepal, where the Forum for Women, Law and Development asked the Supreme Court to
overturn a law that gave sons a share of ancestral property at birth, but not daughters; Madhu Kishwar and
others vs State of Bihar that challenged customary law that excluded tribal women from land inheritance.
The Pakistan PPA as well as the Nepal HDR clearly reveal the reliance on informal social safety nets due to
the failure of formal ones to reach the poorest and most vulnerable.
Growth rate for agriculture declined in 12 out of 15 states in the 1990s as compared to the 1980s and three states,
namely, Bihar, Orissa and Gujarat showed negative growth rates.
See, for instance, Ramachandran and Swaminathan’s (2001) study of shifts in labour patterns in a village in
rural Tamil Nadu.
4
Estudillo et al (2001) arrive at a similar conclusion from their study in the Philippines.
5
The Right to Life and Livelihood was the underlying theme of the Supreme Court in its judgement in the
Madhu Kishwar vs State of India, 1982, and Juliana Lakra vs State of Bihar, 1986, cases, awarding land
to two tribal women in Jharkhand (Rao, 2002).
6
O’Rourke (1995) shows how despite the passing of the Land Act in 1963 in Tanzania, the Chagga in Mt
Kilimanjaro continued to determine land rights through the local lineage-neighbourhood complex.
Similar is the case of Ethiopia, where despite the Civil Code of 1960 that invalidated customary law,
communities continued to apply them to negotiating personal relationships (Gopal, 1999). The major
lesson seems to be that legal systems too operate simultaneously at multiple levels and within a web of
social institutions, hence to be practicable, legal rights have to be moored in the cultural context of
communities and address the underlying justification of the custom they seek to replace.
7
Unni (1999) notes in the context of urban housing that procedural and legal difficulties make it
important for women to secure rights of residence as a first step towards gaining ownership rights.
8
See also field study in Gujarat by Vasavada (2004).
9
The per person availability of arable land is only 0.05 hectares (OED, 2002).
10
11
12
Time use data from two villages in rural Jharkhand across seasons revealed first that women spend much more time
than men on household maintenance tasks. During certain seasons, such as the monsoons, when paddy transplantation
is at its peak, however, men do increase their contribution to domestic work. This is however restricted to certain
activities such as water collection, food processing and child-care and rarely extends to cooking, cleaning, washing
utensils or clothes. These remain exclusively female activities (Rao, 2002).
Ballard (2003) finds in the case of migrants from Mirpur in Pakistan to the Gulf and Britain that while construction has
boomed in the home area and the consumption of foreign goods, little development has been made in agriculture or
industry, similar to the situation in Kerala.
Agarwal (1997) notes that women who prior to protection spent 1-2 hours for firewood collection, now
spend 4-5 hours. Some need additional help from daughters, with negative effects of the latter’s schooling.
13
Agarwal (1982) made similar observations with respect to upper caste women in the Green
Revolution villages of the Punjab.
14
Sukhpal Singh (2003) notes that in 1999-2000, Andhra Pradesh had the highest incidence of child labour in the country
(25 per cent as compared to 9 per cent for India), higher rates of casualisation (47 per cent of rural employment as
47
15
against 36 per cent for rural India) and higher rates of casual employment for female labour at 53 per cent compared
with 43 per cent for male labour.
See also Jackson 1997 on this point.
As per the Irrigation Act, 2003, in Nepal, the Water Users Associations too need to reserve 33 per cent seats
on their executive committees for women. See also Agarwal (1997) on forest user groups.
17
On average, women were working about 6-7 hours on financially remunerative work and 4-5 hours a day
on unpaid household work.
18
While bari (homestead) is often recognised as women’s plots, the rights to bari is not recorded in
women’s names (Rao, 2002). Nepal offers a 10 per cent reduction in registration fee when land is
registered in women’s names (personal comm. from Kanchan Lama).
19
Rao (2002) found that while women were included as a category in the land distribution monitoring
formats in Dumka district till 1997-8, lack of any entry in this column has led to its disappearance from
the format itself subsequently.
16
48