Women & Economy

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.
Mulkharka's women cleaning up the trekking trail that is an economic lifeline for the village. Credit: Arun Shrestha/IPS

Trekking Trails Lead Nepal Women to Empowerment

By Sudeshna Sarkar
Dawa Gyalmo Sherpa’s three sons went to look for blue-collar jobs in Malaysia, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, saying Mulkharka, their tiny village in Kathmandu valley, had no livelihood prospects.
Rani displays a fresh batch of the 'toy sweets' that lifted her family out of poverty. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Bangladesh Offers Lessons in Microcredit Management

By Naimul Haq
Phulo Rani Pal checks for loose dust around her open backyard kitchen. It’s time to prepare the sweets she supplies to vendors and it will not do for her products to be contaminated.

CUBA: Women Face Challenges in Growing Self-Employment Sector

By Patricia Grogg
"Coffee! Get your plastic bags here! Cream cheese, the very best...!" The voices blend in with the cries of other vendors and the noise typical of Cuban markets. Elisa, 64, was one of the hawkers until she was fined for selling her products without a permit. "I paid dearly for it," she says.
A beneficiary of the microfinance programme. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS.

BANGLADESH: Women Raise Own Funds for Microfinance

By Naimul Haq
Amidst despair and poverty, women in some remote villages of Bangladesh are raising money and lending it to each other through a unique microfinance programme launched by a local non-government organisation.
Victoria Mulunga is a participant in the CES programme in Namibia. Women take an interest in topics like conservation farming and drip irrigation. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

Women Keen to Ease Greenhouse Effect on Their Ability to Provide

By Servaas van den Bosch
A successful entrepreneurial programme in the north of Namibia that infuses farming practices with gender-responsive environmentalism may serve as a model for other countries on the African continent.
Forest users

NEPAL: Women Grow Carbon Money on Trees

By Sudeshna Sarkar
When Bina Tamang was told that she could earn money by not felling trees in the tiny forest that serves as the source of fuel and fodder for 65 families in her area, the 27-year-old was incredulous.

MIDEAST: Dancing in a Palestinian Bubble

By Mel Frykberg
It’s Thursday night, the beginning of the weekend in the Muslim world, and time to party and let one’s hair down in Ramallah, the occupied West Bank’s isolated bubble and de facto capital.
"The problems started during the 2008/9 rain season, when the water started building up around my house like never before." -Miriam Banda Credit: Ephraim Nsingo/IPS

ZAMBIA: “Every Year Flooding Makes This Place a Little Hell”

By Ephraim Nsingo
During the rainy season, and many weeks afterwards, home is never the best place to be for Miriam Banda. Until the end of 2008, she enjoyed living at her house in Kanyama, a high-density settlement bordering the central business district in Lusaka, Zambia's capital.
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