International Women's Day

Submitted by Nicky Deasy on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 12:37

Hi guys, International Women's Day is next Monday, so I thought it would be opportune to blog about this theme in our work programmes in Nepal.  Our income generation programmes, which began in 2009 at a relatively small scale, increased household income by up to 27%, a fantastic result given that this is just the first year.  All of this income was earned by women, which gives them huge bargaining power in their own households.
 
Part of IWD is to think about the role of women in society, and how far we have come in such a relatively short time.  When my mother got married, she had to retire from work, not because she was pregnant - even if she had never had children, she would still have to retire simply because she was married.  She said that if you tried to continue working, it was quite frowned upon, and seen as a woman taking away a job from a man who needed it.  So women were entirely dependent financially on their husbands.  No wonder one had to honour and obey one's husband - if you didn't, your finances would be withdrawn.  So women had very little power, and because they couldn't work, there was very little incentive to educate them beyond the basics.  So because women were precluded from properly engaging in economic activity, they were also deprived of a proper education, and the combination of no money and poor education left them very much at the mercy of their husbands.
 
All this changed in Ireland when a woman challenged this at the High Court, and the ban on married women working was overthrown, about the time I was born, some 35 odd years ago.  A generation ago.  And in that time, we see women outperforming men academically, and flying up the career ladder.  Not to say that this doesn't in turn cause problems, as men struggle to adapt to new roles, and children struggle to spend time with their parents if both are working outside the home, and women find themselves overwhelmed with their workloads if they work long hours outside the home.  But at least we are fully free now to make those choices, as to whether we want to be primarily home-makers or career women.  People say that women now are forced to work outside the home to pay the mortgage, but I don't think this is always true.  I think many of us are seduced by advertising and think we have to have that house / new car / sofa / foreign holiday / clothes etc.  If we think of how much material goods we had as children ourselves, and what we have now in our homes, we have vastly more 'stuff'.  So I think if mothers want to stay at home, it is possible, but you have to accept a much more frugal standard of living, which may not appeal to everyone.  
 
Anyway, I digress, again!  Women in Nepal have dreadful lives where we work - they are the donkeys.  I will always remember watching a couple coming up the mountain path in Humla.  The husband was in front, walking along merrily, and trailing behind him was his tiny wife, dwarfed by an enormous wooden plough she was carrying over her shoulders.  It was a huge think, and looked horrendously heavy.  She reminded me of Jesus carrying the cross before his cruxification.  It is bad luck for women to plough the fields, so the men do this work as otherwise they believe that their seeds won't thrive if a woman did it.  But as the donkey, it's her job to carry the plough and a man would have no concept of giving her a hand.  Women do all the back-breaking physical work up there, even when they are heavily pregnant.  Domestic violence is legal and widespread, and women have no rights.  They can't even speak up in a public meeting - to do so would be considered massively rude to the men present.  She can only speak her mind to her husband at home.  With no money of their own, they are completely at the mercy of their husbands. 
 
So, to my mind, the upliftment of women has to start with their ability to engage in economic activity.  This is very much at the core of what we are doing in Nepal.  In 2009, the following took place for our women:

  • We recruited and trained up six animators, two women from three of the villages where we work, who will provide women's literacy classes.  The women's literacy classes began in January 2010. 
  • We ran training programmes on agri business opportunities, training women on how to grow seasonal and off-seasonal vegetables, eggs and poultry raising.  We had 780 women who attended these 11 training courses, of which 153 were Dalit (untouchables).
  • Unfortunately, due to resource constraints, we could only support 245 of these women with the necessary inputs to start these businesses and give them supplies.  I really hope that we can expand this programme in 2010, resources permitting.
  • We started these 245 women on first step of our micro business programme, which focuses on agri business opportunities.  Women are responsible for farming, so they don't need their husbands permission to engage in activities in this area, so it is an ideal place to start.  We supplied in the plastic sheeting required to build the roofs of the greenhouses for off-seasonal vegetable production, while the women supplied the stone and built the walls from their own resources.  We supplied the seeds and the training programmes on how to successfully germinate and grow a wide variety of high value vegetables.  We also supplied the chicks for the poultry raising, while the women build the chicken sheds from their locally available materials.  By co-investing in this way, the women have put in a lot of work themselves and are very committed to the programme.
  • We started micro finance, forming 12 women's groups with these 245 members, of whom 53 are Dalit (untouchable people, who are the poorest people in the villages).  These women are being trained up at present in how to set up and manage their own savings and credit groups.  There is no banking system where we work, so the ability to save and borrow is essential to underpin economic activity.  This year they are starting to save each month, and later this year we will be giving them small amounts of seed capital to manage.

The results of our income generation programmes are encouraging.  We ran the programme in three villages.  The average woman earned 8,750NPR in Bergaum village, while in Thehe the average earnings were 3,950NPR, and in Kharpunath 3,400NPR.  From our baseline survey in 2008, average non-farm (cash) income per household in Bergaum was 43,257R, in Thehe was 14,757R and in Kharpunath was 35,422R.  So this programme increased household cash income by 20% in Bergaum, 27% in Thehe and 10% in Kharpunath.  So a very positive start in the first year, and I know that once these programmes are scaled up and we expand the women into a much broader range of economic activities, I am very confident that huge strides can be made.  With income, women will be able to afford to keep their children in school, and our projects such as the planned water management system for Thehe will reduce their workloads by two hours per day.  With a lower workload, they will have less need to take their daughters out of school after Class 1 or 2.  Our healthposts provide them with family planning, so lower birthrates will also reduce their workloads.  If we can keep their daughters at school, which is now twice as big since we extended it in 2009 and built classrooms which can take 300 extra children in Thehe, we can really start to break this cycle of poverty.  So let's celebrate international women's day, and hope that the strides that we have made, as women here in Ireland, can also be enjoyed by women in developing countries around the world.
 
Until next week!
Nicky