Promoting Gender Equality In Access To Resources And Earning Capacity
The fact that gender inequalities exact high human costs not only to women and girls but societies at large by constraining countries’ development prospects provides a compelling case for why public and price action needs to be taken to promote gender inequality. Thus it is evidently clear that the state has a critical role in dusting the equal well being of both women and med and by doing so, ultimately attaining the substantial social benefits associated with improving the status of women and girls.
States have a role in identifying the prevailing gender inequalities in rights, resources and voice and how these raging disparities affect women’s and men’s ability to particle in and contribute to and benefit from development. Given this, there is a critical role for active policies and programs that promote gender equality in access to productive resources and earning capacity, providing gender appropriate social protection and strengthen women’s political voice and participation. These and more active measures help promote efficiency as well as gender equality objectives. “Active measures are concrete, often targeted steps to redress specific forms of gender discrimination and exclusion in the home, community or workplace”.
The aim of active policy measures is to ensure that women and men have access to and command over productive resources that they can participate fully in productive employment and community affairs. These active measures do more that leveling the playing field between men and women; they also focus on correct persistent inequalities. While there are a lot of various active policy measures that could be taken to accelerate progress towards gender equality, focus will be put on three main categories of interventions that will address persistent patterns of gender inequality which are as follows; Promoting equal access to resources and earning capacity, providing gender appropriate social protection and strengthening women’s political participation. These three core areas are not only at the centre of public action in promoting gender equality in development but also in correcting places where there are disparities.
Access to productive resources and earning capacity are critical to women’s and men’s ability to participate in and contribute fully to development. In the education sector for example, the active measures that could be taken include:
- Modifying school facilities and teaching staff to address cultural concerns about sending girls to school,
- Providing targeted subsidies such as grants, stipends, fellowships, vouchers for tuition and other costs and Capitation grants, subsidizing girls’ schools or girls’ places in schools.
In regards to access to financial resources, financial institutions can facilitate saving and borrowing by women if they design their services in a way that accounts for gender difference in demand for savings and for differences in the constraints that women and men face in access financial services. For example, simplifying banking procedures and making savings and credit tor physically accessible where women have limited mobility or time to travel.
Just as with the poor, giving women a more convenient, safe and reliable meat to save can make an important and cost-effective contribution to raising women’s incomes and reducing their vulnerability and gender specific risk. Microfinance programs could also be introduced to have training activities that help female (and male) borrowers become more effective entrepreneurs thus creating a gender balance in the entrepreneurship and business sector. Micro-financing programs have proven to be very effective in strengthening women’s access to financial resources.
In the employment and labor market sector, affirmative action programs could be initiated in terms of recruitment and job screening for public sector employees and for private firms with government contracts ensuring that a certain percentage of women are employed at all levels and ranks to ensure an equal balance between the male to female ratio.
