By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2015 (IPS)

Increasingly gender equality, rooted in human rights, is recognized both as a key development goal on its own and as a vital means to helping accelerate sustainable development. And while the field of gender has expanded exponentially over the years, with programmes focused exclusively on women and girls and greater mainstreaming of gender into many development activities, a range of challenges remain.

Women are still facing unequal access to economic and environmental resources. They often face numerous barriers linked to clear discrimination as well as bear the burden of low wages or unpaid work, and are susceptible to gender-based violence.

So despite the significant advances for women, the fact is that unless women and girls are able to fully realize their rights in all facets of society, human development will not be advanced. The year 2015 is a crucial time to further equality and if the new post-2015 development agenda is to be truly transformative, women must be at the front and also at its centre.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contain a stand-alone goal on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. All the goals are intrinsically interrelated and interdependant – and ideally gender will be adressed and mainstreamed amongst all goals. SDG 5 calls on governments to achieve, rather than just promote, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

The proposed targets include ending violence, eliminating harmful practices, recognizing the value of unpaid care, ensuring that women have full participation – and equal opportunities – in decision-making, and calling for reforms to give women equal access to economic resources. The new post-2015 agenda is a universal idea with high hopes to “leave no one behind,” but to make this a reality, we must keep pressure on governments to follow through on their commitments.

The Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) has placed gender equality and women’s empowerment at the heart of its efforts to acceleterate progress towards the SDGs. By directly empowering women and by bringing a gender perspective to all development work we can build a more equitable, sustainable future for all.

Stemming from the comitments established in 1995 at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the SDG Fund adopted a dual strategy for advancing gender equality to support both gender-targeted programmes while simultaneaously mainstreaming gender as a cross-cutting priority. Gender mainstreaming entails transforming existing policy agendas by integrating a gender perspective into all policies and programming.

There is no set recipe to creating programmes that will solve gender inequality and perhaps it would be good if there was one single universally applicable and empirically proven method for achieving gender equality in every country around the world. A multi-dimensional issue such as gender inequality is deeply rooted in economic and cultural structures of society and it requires comprehensive approaches. Furthermore, one needs to explore the issue in the specific context of the country in question to effectively improve the quality of life for women and girls everywhere.

The private sector, together with NGOs and governments, are key actors in addressing the variable causes of gender inequality. In other words, achieving equality and empowerment for women is a challenge that requires the synergistic intervention of multiple actors.

For example, the Fund is working in Bangladesh, where women are employed at the lower end of the productivity scale. Labor force participation of rural women is only 36.4 per cent compared to 83.3 per cent of men. Creating employment and income generating opportunities for women as well as enhancing women’s access to social protection will help reduce gender disparities which are exacerbated by women’s poverty and vulnerability.

The SDG Fund programme entitled “Strengthening Women’s Ability for Productive New Opportunities” is led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), local governments and private partners with the overall goal to assist 2,592 women from ultra-poor households. As part of a pilot programme, women are trained in maintenance or rehabilitation of key community assets, public works and community service activities.

Furthermore, the programme is targeting 2,600 women in Kurigram District which has the highest incidence of poverty in Bangladesh. In particular, it aims to assist those who are alone because they are divorced, have been abandoned by their husbands or widowed and/or with low economic status including those with no assets or forced to beg due to poverty. The results will be replicated, targeting 1,900 women, in Satkhira district and the government is further committed scale-up this pilot in a further 20 districts. Overall, the 18 month programme is designed to:

– Helping primary beneficiaries permanently move out of poverty.
– Support human capital with activities to boost knowledge, skills, and confidence.
– Enhance economic inclusion with vocational skills training linked to viable job placement.
– Provide livelihoods options that are resilient in the face of climate change.
– Encourage wage saving or issued as a graduation bonus.
– Facilitate partnership linkages with small and medium enterprises and public-private partnerships to hire participant women after the programme ends.
– Integrate social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
– Enhance good local governance and develop the capacity of local government institutions.
Gender equality is often seen as the key to addressing the unfinished business of the Millennium Development Goals and accelerating global development beyond 2015. There is strong evidence that closing gender gaps accelerates progress towards other development goals. Poverty, education, health, jobs and livelihoods, food security, environmental and energy sustainability will not be solved without addressing gender inequality.

Urgent action is needed to empower women and girls, ensuring that they have equal opportunities to benefit from development and removing the barriers that prevent them from being full participants in all spheres of society. In the words of UN Women’s Executive Director, “equality for women, is progress for all” and so let us embark on this journey together.

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Excerpt:

Musah Razark Adams, 13, (r) shows the sling shot that he uses to hit birds with when he works in a local rice field. Adams and his brother, Seidu, 15, (l) work to so that they can pay for school materials and levies. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By Albert Oppong-Ansah
WUBA, Northern Ghana, May 30 2013 (IPS)

It is a school day but 13-year-old Musah Razark Adams, a Grade 5 primary school pupil in Wuba, northern Ghana, is standing in a rice field wielding a “koglung” – a sling shot to hit birds with.

He is not being a naughty boy. For a month of working from 7am to 6pm he is paid 10 dollars and given a 25-kg bag of rice or maize for every half hectare of land he protects by scaring the birds away.

Adams and other pupils like him have to engage in the arduous task popularly known in northern Ghana as “Away” – which means keeping birds from feeding on paddy farms. And this is usually done during school hours.

Schooling is nominally free in this West African nation, though each school charges its own additional costs. And children, ironically, are employed in “Away” in order to pay these additional school levies, such as Parent Teachers Association fees, and to buy school materials.“Although I feel ashamed forcing the children to engage in ‘Away’, I have no alternative means of getting money to care for them.” -- Iddrisu Adams

“When school started this year I asked my father to give me money to buy my educational materials and he told me to do what other people do to acquire the necessary items for school. He said he did not have money. So I have to do this (scare away birds) because all our farm produce has been sold to take care of feeding our family,” Adams tells IPS.

He dreams of being able to earn money for shoes and his basic educational needs – a school uniform, books and pencils. But right now, that seems like a far-fetched dream, since he does not have the 60 Ghana Cedi or 30 dollars to pay for them.

“Away” is a common cultural practice in Ghana’s Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions that keeps children out of school for at least a month from April to May, and then again from August to September.

Adams’ father, Iddrisu Adams, 45, has five other children and tells IPS that he is not financially stable enough to provide for them, which is why his sons engage in “Away”. Adams’ 15-year-old brother, Seidu, also works to scare birds.

“Although I feel ashamed forcing the children to engage in ‘Away’, I have no alternative means of getting money to care for them,” he says.

Robert Owusu, a rice farmer in Nyanpkala, Northern Region, tells IPS: “If people are not stationed to man the farm throughout the day the birds will eat the entire rice paddy.”

“Currently we don’t have any other method of scaring the birds although we know the children’s education is at stake,” he says, adding that adults are not employed to do this, as their labour is too expensive.

Though parents do not see it as being against the law, this practice is part of the many instances of child labour in northern Ghana.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) defines child labour as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development. This includes work that interferes with their schooling.

The Department of Social Welfare, Department of Children and ILO have initiated measures over the years to reduce child labour here, but they say these strategies are hampered by poverty in many communities.

Sanday Iddrisu, acting northern regional director for the Department of Children, tells IPS that the Children’s Act of Ghana states that no child should be deprived of access to education and prohibits parents and other individuals from subjecting a child to exploitative labour.

“Basically both international and national regulations are against such practices that expose children to this form of labour, which prevents them from having an education as any ordinary child,” he says.

He adds that many of the campaigns embarked on by his department and the Department of Social Welfare have proved futile. He says parents of children who work often use poverty as an excuse, stating that they cannot provide for their children’s needs without making them work.

While there is a National Plan of Action for the Elimination of Child Labour in Ghana, a survey by the Child Protection Unit at the Department of Labour says the nation has done little to eradicate the practice. About 1.27 million children between the ages of five and 17 in this country of 25 million people are engaged in activities classified as child labour, Emmanuel Otoo, an ILO representative in Ghana, tells IPS.

“Our focus and resources must now be on the operationalisation of the details of the many international and local conventions and laws Ghana has ratified, including the ILO Convention, the African Union Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Ghanaian Constitution and the Ghana Children’s Act of 1998,” he says.

Naa Alhassan Issahaku Amadu, the northern regional Ghanaian population officer, says the practice of child labour affects the intellectual, social and physical growth and development of children.

“Children need six universally-accepted teacher-student contact hours. And if they are kept out of class due to ‘Away’ they will miss out on all that has been taught,” he tells IPS.

Adams’ principal, Abdul-Salam Hamza Fataw, says children who engage in the practice are not able to follow lessons to their logical conclusion because of their absenteeism.

Fataw says that during “Away”, between April and May, a class of 50 children shrinks to about eight.

Umal Mohammed Farhim, the Kumbungu District Circuit supervisor of the Ghana Education Service (GES) in the Northern Region, tells IPS that children have the right to an education.

“Available statistics from Wuba Primary School for instance indicate that last year less than 40 percent of students passed their end of term exams,” he says.

A formal report will be sent to the GES head office in Tamale, the Northern Region’s capital, if a behavioural change approach for the next academic year fails to address the issue.

However, Afua Ayisibea Ohene-Ampofo, a project manager of the Northern Ghana office of the International Fertilizer Development Center, a public international organisation that addresses food security, tells IPS that the practice may not end due to its cultural dimension. She says the issue of child labour is closely linked to traditions that see no issue in encouraging children to work to meet their needs.

Ohene-Ampofo, who has worked as a development officer on various projects in the region for the past 10 years, says the poverty which was making parents force their children to continue the vicious cycle of “Away” could be reduced if parents were equipped with alternative livelihood skills such as bread baking, fashion designing, bee keeping or soap making.

Until then, Adams has to continue working.

“My dream of becoming a teacher may be dashed if I don’t support myself like this. I feel shy and bad engaging in such work, but I have to do it to secure my future … I don’t have a choice.”