Indicators. Outputs. Outcomes. Success.
The proportion of women holding parliamentary seats in Bangladesh has nearly doubled and now stands at 20%. So has the ratio of girls to boys in tertiary education, formerly at 0.37, it is now at 0.66. Women’s employment in the private sector is on a significant rise. In the largest sector in Bangladesh, approximately 80% of the workforce is women, which indicates increased jobs and therefore women’s empowerment.
Yet for Rahima, (not her real name) these statistical leaps forward resonate only emptily.
Leaving her village and family and coming to Dhaka to work felt like the first spark of freedom for Rahima. Her family did not have the ability to sustain even one meal a day and the only respite seemed to be to marry Rahima off. However, once she started living with him, her husband lost all his money in gambling and had no source of income from cropping either.
Working in a factory, Rahima earned much more than she did before. Her husband would beat her if she did not give her salary to him. So working from the crack of the dawn till late evening in a cramped workplace with all forms of harassment was not the source of misery for this woman. Having no respite, she walked out with her children, only to find herself come back to the abusive husband.
So where are we with our outputs and indicators?
Logical frameworks are the basis of measuring success within the development arena today. This is now linked with Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which crystallised development goals into a number of key outcomes within a declared time-frame of 15 years. Significant levels of success in meeting these goals within the deadline have been seen in developing countries such as Bangladesh.
This has been true in case of women development in Bangladesh too. The third MDG goal is overarching gender equality, which encompasses parity in education, political participation, and economic empowerment.
A recent study indicated that Bangladesh has achieved most of the MDG targets. In fact, Bangladesh and Cambodia performed best among the 49 LDCs. This includes progress in six key areas: hunger and poverty, education, maternal and child mortality, gender parity, epidemics, environmental sustainability. Indeed, MDG has had significant impact in countries such as Bangladesh. One of the key strengths of MDG has been its departure from vague frameworks, and introduction of numerical targets and consensus.
The indicators within the third goal that seeks to achieve equality and empowerment for women, include the share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector and the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament.
Numerous large scale donor programs are now being implemented across Bangladesh in the areas of livelihood development (asset transfer, job creation, challenge funds), education (food for work program, reaching out of school children, education enrolment programs), adolescent and maternal health programs (sexual reproductive health rights, maternal health program), disaster management (livelihood development in chars, market creation and linkages for the poorest, disaster risk reduction action plans for women) among others.
But, the question remains – do numerical targets and indicators actually indicate success in women’s empowerment and equality?
If a woman is working in the informal or formal sector of this economy with x amount of income, (a) is she empowered in her work environment? (b) does she have any decision making ability in her household? (c) does she benefit from an equal and just community or society?
The answers are right before our eyes.
We know that this woman, who earns an income, has a high probability of facing numerous problems in the form of sexual harassment at the workplace, lower wage rates irrespective of skill levels and more. It is really time to look deeper into the design of these initiatives and the core functions of these very indicators.
When we do assign a success indicator with the portion of jobs women are entering into, are we looking into the levels within which these jobs are being filled up?
Experiences and cases in numerous projects and initiatives do not necessarily indicate the same success levels and impressive indicators. In the ground reality, if we look into these initiatives, we will see that giving assets to women, giving individual girls or women schooling, jobs, loans, access to political office, or other – may empower women individually, but do not necessarily translate into “empowerment” or “equality” for other women.
We all know that acting and battling is not the easiest route in the ground realities in countries such as Bangladesh, this transformation cannot be carried out by only top-down or only bottom-up approach. It needs to be both, carried out in tandem and designed with a strong understanding of how to tackle the culture, history, and the current society.
Gender equality has undoubtedly come a long way, but it is really time to rethink our strategic interventions. Our short-term, result oriented strategies that show faster results in the form of x percentage rise in jobs, and x percentage rise in income may show concrete numerical figures, but they do not indicate true essence of “empowerment” – equality.