Rural
Women form, by far,
the biggest group that have
been left
behind by those who
have been funding and
implementing the Millennium
Development
Agenda,
since 2000: According to UN
Women globally, and
with only a few exceptions, rural women have
fared
worse than rural men and urban women and men for every Millennium
Development
Goal
(MDG) indicator for which
data are available. Read
the UN Women
Fact Sheet: Rural Women and the Millennium Goals
Despite
their important role as food producers and
guardians
of the environment, rural
women are unlikely to be paid for their work or
have land rights,
while being
highly vulnerable
to gender-based violence, including female genital mutilation. Such
women are more vulnerable
to HIV/AIDS and
other sexually transmitted infections, than
rural men and
more likely to die during
child-birth, than
their urban counterparts, due
to poor diet,
early marriage and
lack of antenatal care.
Girls in rural areas are often forced to drop out of school due to
sexual abuse and unplanned
pregnancies
and less likely to attend
secondary school, than their urban sisters.
This means that rural women are the least literate and thus
the most
vulnerable
to exploitation.
Over
the past 15 years, some
of the big donors, including DFID and USAID, have
sought to reach all
eight
MDGs by focusing on the
needs of the urban,
rather than the
rural poor, see my previous post...
This
has had
the advantage of not only reducing
development
costs, but
also of
creating
thousands of low-paid workers in
over-crowded cities -
potential consumers of
western goods and services. Prioritising
urban development has also supported their
policy to
increase urbanisation, throughout
the developing world,
which is seen as vital for the
expansion of a
globalised, free market economy.
The
Post 2015 agenda has 17 Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs). These new
development goals again
depend on increased
urbanization and
have already been
criticised
for embedding the private
sector along with neoliberalism, as the 'normal' financial
model (see paper by Khan, et al.)
The
'sustained,
inclusive and sustainable economic growth'
that is to
be promoted in accordance with SDG
8 and
the 'sustainable industrialisation' described by SDG
9 will
depend on the
availability of urbanised,
cheap
labour;
while
SDG 11 calls for 'inclusive and sustainable urbanization'
Crucially,
there is no mention of the obvious
need to
develop 'sustainable,
strong rural economies'
in any of the new development
goals.
Sustainable,
strong rural economies that ensure fair access to
markets and lead to
improved livelihoods are
essential for the empowerment of
rural women and men.
Strong rural economies
are the key to reducing
inequality and will depend
on the devolution of economic and political power to rural
institutions, such as
producer groups and savings clubs that are headed
by rural
women.
This
means that the following targets should be included in the Post 2015
Agenda:
- Strong, sustainable rural economies that empower rural women and reduce the need for mass urbanization/forced migration.
- Economically and politically powerful rural institutions, headed by rural women.
Unless
these
two targets can be fully integrated into the
new SDGs, it is highly
likely that in
future, rural women will
either
be forced to migrate to the
closest urban slum or
risk being
left even further behind by the Post 2015 Agenda.
