Moalims

If you are a woman and you have an education, you are either from a privileged background or are simply lucky. There are 796 million illiterate people on this earth; women comprise two-thirds of them. Each year a girl spends in school can boost her future income by 10-20 per cent. A lack of education, in turn, will translate into lesser economic empowerment.
Let’s get specific. If the women of the world had primary education, there would be 15 per cent fewer child deaths, saving 900,000 lives a year on the planet. Excitingly, if all women had secondary education, child deaths could be reduced by 49 per cent, saving 2.8 million lives. There would be 64 per cent fewer early marriages and 59 per cent fewer early-age pregnancies. But poverty is relentless, especially when it comes to women. Some 800 women die every day the world over from complications in pregnancy or childbirth. In the absence of any reliable data, experts estimate that Pakistan loses 30,000 women every year under the title of maternal mortality.
Rightly considered the most vulnerable community, women, along with their children, suffer most at the hands of conflict, natural disasters, and especially, poverty. Much more than their male counterparts. Even if statistics are to be left aside, a few facts are obvious. From the son being preferred when parents decide which child to send to school to who gets the better piece of meat at dinner, the disparity among the underprivileged strata in Pakistan is obvious. Women, though they carry out strenuous work and bear children, are neglected even in terms of their nutritional requirements being met. A big percentage of our population is unregistered and has no CNICs, the number of females with identity cards is even fewer. This is indicative of a clear social tilt. In the absence of the CNIC, these women have little hope of attaining higher education, being owners of property, having a bank account, or even having a personal mobile phone and access to digital technology. Illiteracy and poverty go hand in hand, and a lack of education breeds a culture of violence against women.
Statistics, however, cannot be left aside. Talking of gender inequality, poverty definitely has a woman’s face. Women, on an average, get 40 per cent less salary at workplaces in the Saarc region than their male colleagues. Pakistan, a developing country of the region, is not among the 48 least developed countries in the world. Yet, Pakistan’s performance in terms of the Gender Inequality Index (GII) is one of the worst. Pakistan has a GII value of 0.563, slipping down to 126th out of 149 countries in the 2013 index. According to an Oxfam study titled ‘Multiple Inequalities and Policies to Mitigate Inequality Traps in Pakistan (March 2015)’, Pakistan ranks last in women participation in the workforce among the Saarc countries. They comprise 42 per cent of the total family labour but are mostly unacknowledged.
While travelling through Pakistan by road, more women can be seen working in fields than men. However, 80 per cent of these women are given no more status but being regarded as unpaid family workers. They work in the fields all their lives, yet own less than three per cent of the land. If the world provides female farmers with the same access to productive resources as male farmers and closes the gender gap in agriculture, it could increase agricultural yields by 20-30 per cent, raise economic output by 2.5-4 per cent, and reduce the number of people who go hungry by 12-17 per cent globally. The world, by recognising the contribution of women and providing them the same opportunities in the agricultural field, could reduce the number of people living in chronic hunger by 100-150 million the world over, says research by ONE, an international campaigning and advocacy organisation, spearheading the “Poverty is Sexist” campaign. The burden of poverty is heavy enough on entire families. Yet women, wrongly called the weaker sex, end up carrying a bigger burden of poverty than the men. The burden must be shared to provide holistic relief to communities globally.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th,  2015