Women's economic empowerment as smart economics

Session IV, Women’s Legal Status and Access to Economic Resources.

It is a known fact to this audience that if you exclude women from economic structures, you also exclude more than 50 per cent of the talent, the driving force, the organisational power and the entrepreneurship of humankind. Still, statistics show that women, who produce 90 per cent of the world’s food, own only 2 per cent of the world’s land. And, women are three times as likely as men to work in the informal economy. 

So, the empowerment of women has, in my view, first and foremost to do with formalisation and access to the rule of the law. 

How can equal legal status for women, including the right to own and inherit property, and to hold joint land titles, best be enforced? 

In addition to presenting Norway’s viewpoints on today’s agenda, I will also mention the work of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, which is supported by Norway and a number of other donor countries. The Commission was set up in 2005, and will deliver its report in January 2008. One important item on its agenda, stressed by the donors, is to look at gender sensitive factors in poor people’s access to property rights. 

This Commission has done, what so many speakers at this conference have mentioned as a prerequisite within the field; making an inventory on baselines, and formalisation programs, counting success stories, but also some “worst cases” experiences. The Commission will deliver its results in January 2008. Must important, the Commission will deliver a Tool Kit for governments; a menu, or buffet table, on how countries can go about in ensuring the access to the law for poor people; have to make easy and accessible programs and methods for property registration; and, to show how property rights belong to what we call “the bundle of rights”, seen in the context of access to legal mechanisms, arbitration, and security of jobs, amongst others. It is, in short, to minimize barriers, and link the informal-formal sector standards to secure protection of the poor. 

Empowerment has at least two important dimensions. It is a complex concept, and the term can be applied to:

1) The restoration of individuals’ sense of their own value and their ability to deal with life’s problems (the individual approach), and

2) Changes to power structures to develop a society that is inclusive, protective and ensures equitable distribution (the collective approach). 

Both dimensions are included in the Commission’s work. 

The important question is how can the individual approach spur the collective dimension of empowerment? How can governments be persuaded to adopt gender sensitive agendas that ensure access to formal structures and enforce women’s rights and protection?  

Formal structures and access to property rights not only secure income, but also give entitlement to other benefits. 

There is a need for a closer analysis of power relations. Mainstreaming a gender perspective into economics will not in itself open up markets for women. Systems of power, agents of change and impediments to change must be considered. Who are the strategic partners in the struggle for power in the economic sphere, and who are in a position to impede empowerment?  

What can donors do? 

Norway has been at the forefront of efforts to bring legal empowerment and the fight against poverty onto the global agenda. We have therefore actively supported the new Commission, and intend to promote the dissemination of its results and the mainstreaming of legal empowerment into both regional and national programmes. 

Pilot programmes on the legal empowerment of women and the securing of property rights could play a vital role in the follow-up efforts. It is extremely important that formalisation programmes take women’s access to property rights, including collective and users’ rights, into consideration. A solely individual-based approach to property rights could easily cement unfair structures that favour the rights of men. It could also create new obstacles that prevent women from maintaining tradition-based rights. 

Donors could cooperate on the provision of easy access to legal aid for women and cheap arbitration mechanisms for the poor at the local level. This might be of particular importance in post-conflict situations, mentioned here today. 

Job security in the wider sense has a different meaning for women than for men. We have seen that women who enter into the organised labour market in manufacturing industries in Asia experience greater personal insecurity: both in the work place itself and on their way to work. Donors should be sensitive to this fact in their investment incentives, and should encourage employers to safeguard the female work force to a far greater extent than today. 

Vocational training efforts that aim to raise women from the lowest level jobs to more skilled positions should be supported. When women move up the ladder in businesses, their pay levels, security and dignity improve dramatically. This is real empowerment. 

This seminar has been touching upon the importance of access to credit, that relates closely to property rights. We should not always stick to micro credit as a tool. In the banking systems, there is a wide gap between the micro credit level, and the multinational financing institutions. In between, there is a level that is as important as the other two. That is the banks for saving accounts (Sparebank), and Housing banks. I hope the Commission will deliver tools in that regard. And; ensuring access to cash is part of the collective approach to empowerment; it is the minimum requirement of distribution policies in favour of the poorest of the poor. 

With funding from Norad (the Norwegian Agency for Development cooperation), Care is supporting efforts to strengthen the economic empowerment of women in eight African countries, largely by establishing, and providing training for, self-run savings and credit groups that provide poor women with easy and immediate access to financial services, and to a certain extent insurance. These groups enable women to start businesses, ensure more continuity of current business activities, or even out seasonal fluctuations in their economies, which are often closely linked to the agricultural cycle. 

Norway has also through some years been supporting simple and easy access programs in titling. One such program was mentioned here yesterday, from Vietnam, where a titling mechanism was set up at local levels and where the title itself for the first time had a line to put the woman in the household’s name. Other titling programs have been effectuated in Indonesia, in Thailand, and in the new economies in Eastern Europe. These programs have mainly two parts; one is, to register through mapping, and the other, to set up registers with easy, cheap and fast access. 

So, as you see, donors can share success stories, but should always be sensitive to the fact that change is driven from within society; donors are merely facilitators. 

Finally, donors should be active partners in efforts by other multilateral organisations and international financial institutions to empower women. It may be that access to law is most easily ensured by training women in entrepreneurship and labour rights. In any case, we ourselves must make sure that the empowerment of women is in focus when we are drawing up our yearly programmes and managing our funds. We have only ourselves to blame if the issue is forgotten or overseen. 

The necessary political will at governmental level is vital to achieve all these ends. This is why the Commission for the Legal Empowerment of the Poor will present its results to governments in the form of a tool kit. This is intended to help governments both implement reform and take concrete action on poverty through ensuring the rule of law and easy and secure access to property rights in the wide sense. It is my hope that leaders from both donor countries and developing countries will include the empowerment of women in their overall strategies for development. 

The Commission I talked about will need to find a home for follow-up; a partner for both developing countries as well as donors where programs are defined to the ends mentioned above. It is my hope that both the World Bank, UNHabitat and the UNDP can be such partners after January 2008. Then the vision is that the cork of the Commission will have changed conceptual thinking, and developed the needed tools. Action within the field of legalisation and formalisation will signify a new and bottom-up way of development. 

I like the focus of this meeting; the link between legal empowerment and economic empowerment. In my mind, that is what it is all about. 

Thank you for your attention.