TRANSPORT: Women Carry Loads, Men Have a Choice in Poor Countries

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 26 1998 (IPS) - Women, young and old, weighed down with big bundles of firewood and fodder or balancing pots of water on their heads or on their hips are a common sight in the hinterland of the world’s poor countries.

Their men might own cycles, or bulls, maybe even horses for transporting goods and people, but women in many traditional societies are not expected to work with large livestock, precluding their access to animal-drawn carts for transport.

In Mbeya, Tanzania, 50 percent of the male farmers used ox-carts for water and firewood collection, for agriculture and other income generating activities — but these carts were hardly used by the women.

Priyanthi Fernando of the London-based International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD) said that traditional beliefs about what women should or should not do mitigate against women’s use of transport technologies.

Water and firewood collection by women are considered “burdensome activities” and largely “not remunerative and unproductive” she told a conference of transporters from many parts of the world in Sri Lanka last week.

The meeting in Galle, 115-kms south of Colombo, was organised by the Lanka Forum on Rural Transport Development, a private network that is promoting rural transport methods in Sri Lanka, in collaboration with the IFRTD.

Fernando who chaired the session on the gender bias in intermediate forms of transport (IMT), pointed out that men are more mobile than women in developing countries also because they have less access to resources.

Gender disaggregated figures reveal that women earn only about 10 percent of the world’s income and own only one percent of the world’s property, even though they do 66 percent of the world’s work.

According to Fernando, rural women tend to be more involved in producing food for subsistence rather than cash cropping, resulting in less cash for them and the inability to invest in IMTs unlike the men.

“Even when women are part of households that have sufficient purchasing power to be mobile, they often do not have sufficient influence on household investment decisions. Gender relations in most societies determine that it is the men who control the acquisition and use of transport technologies,” Fernando noted.

Sally Mulalu, programme coordinator on rural transport in Zambia’s Ministry of Local Government, argued that women’s role as house-maker should be seen as productive and cost-saving. “If she didn’t do it, the husband would have to do it or someone would have to be hired to do it,” she pointed out.

In large parts of Africa, the perception that women and girls can carry loads and sell their services, has inhibited development of transport methods that could be used to make it easier for them.

A 1993 survey by two Dutch experts found that African women frequently express the view that men, having paid the bride price for women, then expect women to perform load-carrying duties as part of their obligation to their husband’s household.

Fernando noted that access to IMTs can do more for women than meet their practical needs or help them to earn money. It can give them confidence and freedom and lead to changes in gender power relations. Citing a programme in Tamil Nadu, south India, Fernando said that women were given cycles to enhance mobility and within months, 50,000 women had learnt to ride cycles.

“The physical liberation that came with this increased mobility gave them the confidence to overcome cultural, mental and physical barriers to their own empowerment,” she said quoting from a study on that programme.

Zainab Latif, a Pakistani economist, said that a recent survey, revealed that rural women had no chance of going out even in her country, because men controlled their movement, and restricted their access to schools and education.

“Government schools are generally some distance from the homes … it was simply not socially acceptable for them (girls) to leave their homes and travel at all for the pursuit of knowledge,” she noted.

Latif said that the biggest problem women faced was that they would have to use public transport to reach schools. Public transport was often unreliable and unsafe and crowded, and women risked being physically harassed.

“The challenge, therefore, becomes one of creating a transport system which is dependable, indigenous enough for village elders and family members to support, and at the same time, affordable,” she added.

Prof. Paul Starkey of the British University of Reading suggested that in most parts of the world while animals with high status (cattle and horses) are mainly owned and controlled by men, donkeys tend to be more “gender neutral”.

“With donkeys at their disposal, women are often able to delegate some domestic transport (like water collection) to children,” he said.