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AFRODAD Focuses Gender and Debt
African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (Harare)
DOCUMENT
August 1, 2002
This paper contributes to the debate about gender and development (GAD),
specifically looking at how the Debt burden of most African countries
has contributed to engendering gender disparities and ultimately led to
stunted economic development.
Although gender looks at both aspects of men and women, this paper takes
a connotation of gender in relation to women alone. It brings to the fore
the intrinsic link between Debt and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)
and the impact of such policies on women. It also looks at the dichotomy
between the role of the state in providing social services and women's
role as caretakers.
Women play an important role in the market economy and all the other aspects
of society. The market economy is not just about profit; it encompasses
the totality of human condition, including the interrelationship between
races, cultures and gender.
At this stage, it is important to re-visit the notion that the market
economy has no effect on women, or that when there are major shifts in
the market these have no potential to affect men and women differently.
The inequality of the position of women has benefited the market and
the capitalist system greatly. Women not only represent a cheap labour
force, but they also contribute to the survival of the economic systems
though their unpaid labour. The market is not neutral, rather it benefits
from the inequality of those who contribute to it and yet are powerless
within the system.
In terms of the issue of gender and debt, the link between them is explicitly
seen in the manifestation of market failures, their impact on women and
the responsiveness of these effects by women hitherto.
This paper safely concludes that as long as external Debts are not
cancelled to free most of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) from
any form of debt-relief conditionalities such as adherence to SAPs, women
will continue to bear the brunt of the effects of these policies thereby
compromising all the efforts of combating poverty.
It is imperative that priorities for meeting human needs, especially those
of poor women, in the areas of education, health care and essential social
services be set above financial and monetary objectives and the drive
towards development of markets.
Debt and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)
Since the early 1980's, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or the World
Bank, have implemented macroeconomic policies known as Structural Adjustment
Programs (SAPs) in most African countries. Designed to assist developing
countries to emerge from the debt crisis, SAPs were established as conditionality
for the re-scheduling of existing loans as well as granting further loans
to developing countries.
This conditionality is a set of targets or obligations undertaken by developing
countries in order to obtain aid or loans. There are two types of policies
established as prerequisites for access to loans: stabilization and structural
adjustment.
Stabilization involves short-term measures to restore balance of payments,
while structural adjustment measures are implemented on a longer-term
basis, to 'restructure the economy and generate economic growth'. These
policies are closely linked and usually involve devaluation of currency,
cuts in public spending, elimination of subsidies, cuts in the civil service,
privatization of state owned industries, opening of local economies to
foreign investment and an emphasis on export promotion in order to earn
foreign currency to apply to debt servicing.
Both the IMF and the World Bank claim that SAPs will ensure that countries
grow out of their debt but with decades of adjustment, there is not one
case, which proves this point. The "logic" behind SAP's is:
the IMF and the World Bank grant developing countries loans, to pay interest
on outstanding loans which they cannot pay because they are assumed to
be bankrupt.
The Debt burden creates inequalities manifested in the gap between the
developing and the developed world and between men and women, which has
become one of the issues where the impacts on women are extremely strong.
Gender and Debt
The link between Gender and Debt is inextricable. It can be explained
in the impact of the macroeconomic policies such as Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPs) on women's activities in various sectors and human endeavours.
The very things that can help raise their status - education, health care
and employment - are being decimated as governments struggle to meet crippling
debt repayments to the creditors, which include both bilateral, and multilateral
lenders. According to the Africa Fund, sub-Saharan African governments
owe foreign creditors an average of almost US$400 for every man, woman
and child on a continent where the average annual wage for most countries
is less than US$ 400 per person.
SAPs continue to affect the standard of living of people particularly
the poor women in the following different ways:
i) Credit is cut for local manufacturing, resulting in loss of local industry and jobs (where women are the majority employed in these industries and are the ones to lose jobs first, Cuts in wages, where women earn less than men), yet transnational companies have access to cheap credit in their home countries and cheap labor in developing countries.
ii) Increase in food and medicine prices, which women are responsible to provide for their families. When families cannot afford hospital fees, it is women who have to care for sick relatives at home. When families cannot pay for all their children to be educated it is usually the girl-child who lose out.
iii) Decrease in subsistence agriculture, where women are traders and growers, while men control all the cash crops.
iv) Government deficits are seen as part of the problem, and as a result social services are cut but government resources have shifted from social spending to debt servicing. Reduction in health spending ranges from cuts in employees, to closure of hospitals and clinics, particularly in the rural areas, leaving rural women with no access to badly needed healthcare and medicines.
Studies suggest that deterioration in already poor living standards is often expressed in violence, family breakdown and mental health disorders.
Distortions in the family as well as in the economy limit women's access to resources, productive activities and participation. They create the feminization of poverty and violence.
Some examples of how debt repayments have affected women in some African countries are shown below:
- In Ethiopia, where only 16% of the population of women receives antenatal care, debt repayments total four times as much as public spending on health.
- In Niger, where less than 20% of young women are enrolled in schools, more is spent on debt repayments than on education and health care.
- In Zambia, where parents have to meet 80% of education costs, parents are reaching their limit, and serious drops in attendance have been observed, disproportionately affecting girls.
It is clear that the results of structural adjustment programs have been far from beneficial to the social welfare and economic condition of developing countries and their people particularly women.
Rather than alleviate poverty in the recipient countries, which implemented adjustment policies, SAPs have contributed to further sinking them into economic crisis.
The poor majorities living in the developing countries that have followed and implemented World Bank and IMF programs have found themselves with few options for survival. Women have been disproportionately socially and economically damaged by these policies. This added hardship may be invisible at the economic level, yet they become visible once one begins examining the declining health standards, rising unemployment among women, and even high fertility rate since there is a direct correlation between education and population growth.
Development goals have been compromised because standard debt servicing cost analysis leaves out the social costs of loan and debt relief conditionalities and debt servicing in terms of health-related problems, discontinuities in children's schooling, intensification of women's paid and unpaid work and increased crime and violence, particularly against women.
Worldwide, women are half of the world's population, head one-third of all households, are responsible for half of the world food production, receive 1/10 of total income and own 1/100 of the world's property. Indeed, in their unequal social and economic status, women earn less, own less and control less, and thus are in a fragile and unequal situation.
The dichotomy - government's role of being service providers and women as caretakers
Underlying these policies (SAPs) is a set of assumptions about women's work: those women are housewives, do not work and therefore, that women can fill the gap created by cuts in social services. These cuts in health have also meant that women have been forced to assume greater responsibility, for the family and even the community, which stretches them to the limits of endurance.
Of course, (the policy) is labeled privatization in the open market liberalization under taken by most developing countries today. The governments must not spend money on health, education, and human infrastructure, this must be left to the private sector or the household, meaning to women. The foundation is that women's time and labour can be exploited.
In this light the government's responsibility of care for children, elderly, and ill, and even education is transferred over to women who are already overburdened by other preoccupations.
In Africa, where 33 out of the 41 HIPC countries are located, HIV/AIDS has had a devastating effect on families. Women carry a disproportionate burden in this crisis, as their role as caregivers intensifies, thus presenting new obstacles to income generation.
The way forward
The United Nations (UN) Millennium Summit provides the international community with a clear set of development goals that need to be fulfilled. They are so vital because they represent a vision of a world freer from want, freer from fear.
Any meaningful development requires the removal of major sources of "unfreedom" including institutional arrangements that deny people especially women the means of expanding their opportunities and increasing their capabilities.
Women are key stakeholders in the whole development process. Alleviating poverty, ensuring food security, reducing population growth, improving the quality of a country's future labor force, and properly using the natural resource base all depend substantially on women, and thus major gender policy analysis should not ignore this fact.
Without gender analysis, there is little chance that any efforts to reduce and manage external debt will bring about substantial poverty alleviation for both women and men (Twenty-Third Special Session of the General Assembly, June 2000).
More concretely, the following recommendations would be vital to redress the Gender and Debt disparity:
1) Governments should generate economic policies that have a positive impact on employment and income of women workers in both the formal and informal sectors and adopt specific measures to address women's unemployment.
2) In accordance with the commitments made at the World Summit for Social Development, governments should seek to mobilize new and additional financial resources in form of grants and not loans that are both adequate and predictable and mobilisedd in a way that maximizes the availability of such resources and uses all available funding sources and mechanisms with the view to contributing towards the goal of poverty eradication and targeting women living in poverty.
3) Explore effective structural and development-oriented solutions to the external debt problems in order to help, including the advancement of women, inter alia, through debt cancellation and the establishment of a fair and transparent arbitration (FTA) mechanism on Debt.
4) Develop by means of gender-sensitive social impact assessments and other relevant methods, in order to develop policies to reduce their negative effects and improve their positive impact, enduring that women do not bear a disproportionate burden of transition costs, complement adjustment lending with enhanced, targeted social development lending.
5) Explore more effective ways of integrating gender into debt management negotiations and monitoring processes.
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