By Amin Kef Sesay
President Bio at the Brookfields Hotel in Freetown on Thursday 3 December 2020 launched the country’s first Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy 2020.
Giving the keynote address, he said: “We are here this morning to set ourselves new challenges that will touch and transform the lives of 52% of our population. It will place them where they belong: at the centre of our nation’s development process with all due rights, access, opportunities, and resources…”
Women’s economic empowerment is central to realizing women’s rights and gender equality. In this light, let us look at some of the challenges facing women in Sierra Leone that holds them back from becoming economically empowered that need attention by Government and its development partners.
Women’s economic empowerment includes women’s ability to participate equally in existing markets; their access to and control over productive resources, access to decent work, control over their own time, lives and bodies; and increased voice, agency and meaningful participation in economic decision-making at all levels from the household to international institutions.
Empowering women in the economy and closing gender gaps in the world of work are key to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 5, to achieve gender equality, and Goal 8, to promote full and productive employment and decent work for all; also Goal 1 on ending poverty, Goal 2 on food security, Goal 3 on ensuring health and Goal 10 on reducing inequalities.
When more women work, economies grow. Women’s economic empowerment boosts productivity, increases economic diversification and income equality in addition to other positive development outcomes.
Critically, increasing women’s and girls’ educational attainment contributes to women’s economic empowerment and more inclusive economic growth.
Education, upskilling and re-skilling over the life course – especially to keep pace with rapid technological and digital transformations affecting jobs—are critical for women’s and girl’s health and wellbeing, as well as their income-generation opportunities and participation in the formal labour market. Increased educational attainment accounts for about 50 per cent of the economic growth in OECD countries over the past 50 years.
Women are more likely to be unemployed than men. Women are over-represented in informal and vulnerable employment. Women are more than twice likely than men to be contributing family workers.
Women are less likely to be entrepreneurs and face more disadvantages starting businesses. Globally, women are paid less than men. Unpaid care work is essential to the functioning of the economy, but often goes uncounted and unrecognized. Women bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. Women spend more time on unpaid care and domestic work than men.
Women have less access to social protection. Gender inequalities in employment and job quality result in gender gaps in access to social protection acquired through employment, such as pensions, unemployment benefits or maternity protection. Women are less likely than men to have access to financial institutions or have a bank account. Violence and harassment in the world of work affects women regardless of age, location, income or social status.
The digital divide remains a gendered one: most of the people that are offline are in rural areas, poorer, less educated and tend to be women and girls.
With land being the most important economic asset, women farmers have significantly less access to, control over, and ownership of land and other productive assets compared to their male counterparts.
Women and girls suffer most from the dearth of safely managed water and sanitation. Women and girls are responsible for water collection in 80 per cent of households without access to water on premises.
Women and girls carry the burden of energy poverty and experience the adverse effects of lack of safe, reliable, affordable and clean energy. They suffer from indoor air pollution from using combustible fuels.
Women often bear the brunt of coping with climate-related shocks and stresses or the health effects of indoor and urban pollution, which add to their care burden. As land, forest and water resources are increasingly compromised, privatized or “grabbed” for commercial investment, local communities and indigenous peoples, particularly women, whose livelihoods depend on them, are marginalized and displaced.
