Sida Development Talks: Women's Economic Empowerment

Catharina Schmitz from Indevelop was featured at Sida's Development Talks on Integrating Women's Economic Empowerment in country programs. The three hour workshop dealt with experiences and lessons learnt from Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo and Serbia, the respective Swedish embassies also participated through video link.

After a brief introduction to Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) and Sida's work on this area by Lead Gender Specialist Annika Törnqvist at Sida, Catharina held a presentation on her experiences and lessons learnt from working as a consultant in the Balkans on integrating WEE perspectives into ongoing country programs.

In her presentation, she emphasised the problem that a large number of women today work outside the labour market in the Balkans, especially with unpaid care work. That in turn has a negative effect on their income levels compared to men, their pensions, their health care options and makes them more or less economically dependent on their husbands.

Working with WEE stems from a human rights based approach and she emphasised that for many Balkan women to be able to combine work and family, there needs to be a continuing building of a welfare society with increases in social security systems such as child care and parental leave.

Catharina also pinpointed several components in building WEE such as reducing gaps in access to higher education between men and women, to recognize, reduce and redistribute women's unpaid work, especially unpaid care work and also securing women's ownership rights of land and property.

According to her, one of the major hindrances to women's economic empowerment is the unpaid work women do to a larger extent than men. That is often where informal institutions come in, in form of social traditions and norms in the society. These traditions still prevail in many places and often the man is seen as head of the family, which in turn has a negative effect on women's land ownership rights and inheritance.

One positive message came from Albania, where the Swedish embassy has been instrumental in developing a chapter on WEE in the National Strategy for Gender Equality and reduction of Gender Based Violence for 2011-2015.

With regards to the timing of the World Bank's World Development Report 2012 on gender equality, and some successful attempts to integrate WEE perspectives in country programs, the embassies concluded that while many challenges still lie ahead, some ice has been broken. And through the continuous engagement and commitment of the people working on these issues, many are also optimistic about the future.

Reported by Stefan Granlund, intern at Indevelop

 

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