Women & Economy

CUBA: Women’s Department Draws Attention to Inequality

By Dalia Acosta
Continuing its mission to promote gender studies and use academia to demonstrate the inequalities between women and men in Cuba, the Women’s Studies Department is celebrating 20 years of work with new challenges in terms of researching and drawing attention to the disadvantages faced by the female population.
Basket-weavers in Kerala, funded by microcredit. Credit: ESAF/IPS

INDIA: Microcredit Fights to Regain Credibility

By Manipadma Jena
As microcredit institutions - once touted as the vital ‘last mile' in extending credit to poor rural women -fight a government backlash that has encouraged honest borrowers to turn defaulters, hopes for revival hinge on a new bill awaiting passage in India's parliament.
Marina Rosales proudly shows off her organic guavas. Credit: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

Salvadoran Campesinas Go Organic

By IPS Correspondents
The guavas grown by Mariana Rosales are big and bright green, and the best thing about them, she says proudly, is that she does not spend a single cent on fertilisers to produce them – something extremely rare in a country like El Salvador.
Lavender cultivation offers a viable alternative to Kashmiri farmers facing crop losses from climate change. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

INDIA: Facing Climate Change With Flower Power

By Manipadma Jena
Gazalla Amin’s office on the outskirts of this city, capital of Jammu & Kashmir state, is redolent with the fragrance of lavender wafting up from heaps of the dried flowers in a corner bowl.

Rwanda Wins Gold for Forest Conservation Blueprint

By Stephen Leahy
Government policies are seldom lauded, yet Rwanda's forest policy has resulted in a 37-percent increase in forest cover on a continent better known for deforestation and desertification.

Give Women the Seeds and They Can Feed the World

By Melanie Haider
If women farmers were given more tools and resources, the number of hungry people in the world could be slashed by 100 to 150 million.

Grassroots Women Urge Rights-Based Development Path

By Kanya D'Almeida
The streets around the headquarters of the world's leading financial institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – have been transformed into a canvas over the last three days.

Women Hung Out to Dry in Global Labour Market

By Kanya D'Almeida
Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force.

Accessible Micro-Loans Help Poor Women in Rural South Africa

By Correspondents
While women still lag grossly behind men in terms of bringing home the bacon, a new entrepreneurship organisation, Financial Independence Through Entrepreneurship (FITE), is working to swing the balance of economic power in South Africa by providing micro-loans to hard-up women.

NORTH KOREA: Women Wear Pants, Revive Markets

By Ahn Mi Young
North Korea's communist government frowns upon women wearing pants, seeing it as a mark of ‘rotten bourgeois lifestyles.' Yet, wives, literally wearing pants, are selling goods in the local markets to supplement their husbands' meagre pay packets.

World Bank, IMF Face Shifting Development Paradigm

By Rosemary D'Amour
Amid a global financial crisis that has shown little signs of reversing, next week's fall meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are crucial in setting the tone for rebounding world markets, to which leaders of the Bretton Woods institutions offered optimistic, yet ultimately vague, solutions in speeches this week.
Charimaya Tamang (holding certificate), who received the U.S. government

NEPAL: No Brakes on Sex Trafficking

By Sudeshna Sarkar
While a Nepalese campaign to stop human trafficking gains recognition by the White House and Hollywood, Nepal continues to be a prime source for sex trafficking, thanks to unsettled conditions created by a protracted political crisis.
A vegetable vendor in Bangalore using a solar lamp to light her stall. Credit: SELCO/IPS

INDIA: ‘Women Make Good Business Sense’

By Keya Acharya
Harish Hande believes that involving women in design, manufacture and sales pays dividends in any business, but especially in those making products that women ultimately use.
Raquel Coello, expert on gender responsive budgeting. Credit: Courtesy Raquel Coello

Q&A: “Democracies Must Ensure Fair Gender Redistribution of Resources”

By Marcela Valente
No matter how progressive laws to promote equality between men and women may be, without budgets with a gender perspective that allocate resources differentially, inequality will persist in Latin America.
Kadian Edwards and Lucille Taylor meet to teach each other new stitches, and discuss marketing and other plans. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

JAMAICA: Women Coffee Farmers Seize a Plastic Lifeline

By Zadie Neufville
Jamaica's Blue Mountains are coffee country. Here, up among the clouds, farmers produce one of the world's most exclusive brands of boutique coffees.
San Felipe Mayor Adlemi Marrufo at work, on her boat. Credit: Adriana Vargas León /IPS

Mexican Fisherwomen Organise Against Climate Change

By Emilio Godoy
Every night, Adlemi Marrufo goes out to catch bait crabs used to fish for octopus in this small seaside town and others along Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, as part of a women's cooperative that is working to adapt to and fight climate change.
A boy in Pibor County, Jonglei state, takes a cow to graze. In South Sudan cattle are valued for their intrinsic wealth. Credit: Charlton Doki/IPS

SOUTH SUDAN: Inter-Ethnic Clashes Become More Frequent and Deadly

By IPS Correspondents
Thousands of women and children are being abducted and over 1,000 people have died this year as communities in oil-rich South Sudan war over a precious commodity – cattle.
Scale model of a small-scale Tecbio biodiesel plant. Credit: Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

BRAZIL: Biofuel Production – Local Development or Social Breakdown?

By Mario Osava
Biofuels are an alternative energy source that can drive local development by generating jobs, know-how and technology. But they can also cause social damage, as locals fear in the case of industrial-scale exploitation of babassu palm trees, which grow abundantly in the wild in central and northern Brazil.
Shantimaya Dong Tamang's bid to earn money as a domestic worker in Kuwait ended with her becoming a quadriplegic. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

NEPAL: Peace Fails to Stop Female Workers’ Exodus

By Sudeshna Sarkar
Six years ago Shantimaya Dong Tamang went to Kuwait to work as an illegal domestic worker, falling for brokers’ tales of how she could earn good money and stand on her own feet.
High import and customs tariffs have become a huge stumbling block for second-hand clothes traders. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

ZIMBABWE: Bleak Future for Second-Hand Clothes Traders

By Ignatius Banda
It is becoming increasingly difficult for second-hand clothes traders like Susanne Jabavu to do business because of rising costs to import bales of clothing from neighbouring countries.
Rwanda wants women to access financial services and to gain skills to play a role in managing and allocating these resources. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

RWANDA: Women Parliamentarians Outnumber Men, But Gender Budgeting Still Needed

By Aimable Twahirwa
Rwanda is the first country in the world where women outnumber men in parliament, with women occupying 45 out of 80 seats. However, despite this, experts say that the country still needs a gender equality perspective on how national resources and programmes are implemented.
« Previous Page — Next Page »
*#*