JAMAICA: Women’s Groups Feeling Hard Times Too

By Zadie Neufville Reprint | | Print |

Zadie Neufville

KINGSTON, Mar 13 2001 (IPS) - Afolashade is facing the “toughest time of her life”. At 44 years old and in what she considers “her old age”, she is for the first time ever dependent on a man for her day to day existence.

“My independence is gone, I can’t even pay my own rent, I can’t go to the gym any more, and I have to overlook the nasty things he says,” she said.

The last four years have seen a steady erosion of her lifestyle, and a huge blow to her pride and beliefs.

Afolashade is one of five remaining members of the internationally acclaimed Jamaican grassroots women’s group Sistren. She meets stories like hers every day, and there is nowhere for women like her to turn to for help.

For like Sistren, many of the groups promoting women’s rights and equality have fallen on hard times caused by the deteriorating Jamaican economy and the lack of overseas funding to the region, says Michelle Golding, national co-ordinator of Caribbean Association for Feminist Research.

She pointed out that agencies that provided funding for the work such women’s organisations undertook, have turned their attention to Eastern Europe and Africa.

Added to this, is a scarcity of volunteers as women are now working longer and harder to make ends meet, Golding said.

One of the groups which have had to adjust to the changing economic situation is the Women’s Construction Collective (WCC) which began by training unskilled women in Jamaica to work on construction sites. In its 17 years of operation the WCC has trained 500 women locally and others across the region.

When money became scarce the group was forced to merge many of its training programmes with government ones and now recruits women for the programmes offered. It also runs an accredited basic programme, targeting those who would not otherwise qualify for the traditional training institutions.

WCC managed to stay in operation by serving a niche, says administrator Millicent Powell Reid.

The Women’s Media Watch, a media watch dog formed 13 years ago to counter the negative images of women in the media, has fared better than most women’s groups, although it too has problems. What started out as an aggressive six-woman group, has shrunk to three members.

Group member Judy Wedderburn said the funding situation has not had too much impact because the group remained largely voluntary.

In addition, they managed to use available resources and organisations to their advantage. Their work is now more focused, she said. While they still conduct workshops, they have begun teaching at tertiary institutions. Media Watch gets some of its work done by conducting courses at the Communications and Media Institute at the University of the West Indies here.

With the economic downturn and its effects on the services women’s groups provide, it is the poorest women who are most affected – those with no jobs, skills or education, says the government’s Women’s Bureau. For others like Afolashade and her fellow Sistren colleagues, experience without formal education is not enough to find new jobs.

The Planning Institute of Jamaica says that more than 113,000 Jamaican women are unemployed. This is nearly twice the number of unemployed men, although women account for only a little less than half the labour force. As the economy worsened between 1998 and 1999, close to three times more women than men lost their jobs.

The downturn in their fortunes have devastated women’s self- esteem. This low self-esteem is endangering their lives, because it has pushed them into risky lifestyles, says Golding.

One of these risky lifestyles is multiple sexual partners. It is the reason more women are now getting infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes AIDS, head of the National HIV/STD Programme Dr. Yitdes Gebre said.

“Women are now seeing sex as a means of economic survival,” he said. The result is a continuing increase in the rate of HIV/AIDS infection among women and teen-age girls.

“Women are now having multiple partners, and the young girls too are having sex with older men to support themselves,” Gebre pointed out.

This has pushed the rate of infection among 14 to 19 year old girls to nearly three times that of boys of the same age. Women up to age 39 are now almost twice as likely to get the disease than men are.

The weakening of women’s organisations has come at a bad time, just as men and women in the country were beginning to accord these groups and their missions some respect.

Sistren’s research officer Lillian Foster-Marshall said some women who attended meetings in the old days, were beaten when they got back home and many middle-class women were simply too afraid to turn up. The messages of women’s rights, independence and opposition to domestic violence were regarded as threats to the ‘manhood’, she said.

“We are at a point now when even women from the rich homes are speaking out against the abuse,” Foster-Marshall said.

Sistren came out of the much-maligned 1970s’ street cleaning crews project known as the Impact Programme or by its street name Crash Programme. The 13 women forming the group in 1977 were selected from inner city communities and trained in theatre arts to entertain the children left in holding areas by the women in the work gangs.

For the group members this was a well deserved break, a chance of full-time employment, travel, and work in the performing arts. It was also an opportunity to “speak to” the oppressed woman, Afolashade said.

“Sistren was my salvation, The Impact Programme was my first job but I was only filling in for my stepmother who had another job.”

Now looking at the situation the groups find themselves in, Afolashade is optimistic that the skills women have honed during their long battle for economic and emotional empowerment will give them the strength to weather the harsh economic conditions.