Written by
Christiana Charles-Iyoha
The plight of women as an economically, socially and
politically disenfranchised community in Africa is aptly summed up by Mzee Mwalimu Julius Nyerere when he noted that “Women
in Africa toil all their lives on land that they do not own, to produce what they
do not control and at the end of a marriage through divorce or death, they can
be sent away empty handed”.
Women as a group account for over 70% of people living
in poverty particularly in developing and least developed economies and 50% of
the populace worldwide generally. In
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, women form nearly 50% of a population
that is under very heavy pressures from a social organizational pattern that is
inherently unprepared for sustainable development and the socio-economic
transformation of the poor, vulnerable and marginalized peoples, largely
located in the rural areas and peri-urban areas.
Women’s poverty is further heightened by limited or
lack of access to productive resources.
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recently noted that in
the rural areas where the majority of the world’s hungry live, women and girls
produce most of the food consumed locally.
Their contribution could be far greater if they had equal access to
essential resources and services, including information. Rural women have even less access to
information and technologies than men and are thus at a disadvantage when it
comes to making informed choices about what to produce and how best to market
their products. Lack of information also
limits their influence in their communities and their ability to participate in
decision-making.
Issues of access to productive resources often evoke
issues of power relations and marginalisation.
Women, an already excluded class by reason of customary practices and
religious practices that locate women in families as legal minors subject to
the authority of either the father or the husband in the private sphere are
further excluded from accessing
productive resources, usually located in the public sphere. Patricia McFadden captures this scenario
aptly noting that “Through rituals and
practices that have become euphemistically understood as 'cultural' and
'traditional', women's capacities and abilities to labour and to reproduce are
institutionalized in the patriarchal family as the private property of their
fathers and husbands”.
Emerging from women’s lack of access to productive
resources are far reaching poverty implications as they have to face a narrower
choice of economic options including engagement in high risk behaviour such as
vulnerability to being trafficked for forced labor or prostitution, involvement
in the informal sector with daily harassments, slave labor in export processing
zones and involvement in the global sex tourism industry as victims or
perpetrators of the crime against women and humanity.
