Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Dr. Meena Acharya, Nepal

The Nepalese economy has undergone important structural changes since 1984/1985. The role of agriculture is declining. Commercialization of production is increasing and the unit of production in the manufacturing sector is shifting from being home based to factory based. The population is shifting from agriculture to non-agricultural occupations, but this shift has been less notable for women than for men.

Non-agricultural employment opportunities for women have expanded in absolute terms in the last decade. Relative to men. however, they are getting more concentrated in agriculture. They now form 65 per cent of the agricultural labour force, compared to 37 per cent in 1981. Their share in the non-agricultural labour force was 32 percent in 1995/1996 compared to about 15 percent a in 1981. Living in urban areas, particularly urban hills (which includes large valleys like Kathmandu and Pokhara), is more conducive to women's non-farm employment.

Village craftsmen/women are out of job on a massive scale. The proportion of production workers has declined substantially in rural areas between the two surveys (1984/85 and 1995 /96). This decline has been much sharp for women. With very few alternative employment opportunities, women are falling back to agriculture or forced to earn their living through unwanted activities such as commercial sex work.

The trends in wage employment opportunities are not clear. As per the 1981-1991 census, the relative importance of wage employment, vis-à-vis self-employment, is increasing. But the MPHBS and NESS information indicates an opposite trend. Relatively, more women are concentrated in self-employment in comparison to men. Such opportunities might have declined in mid-nineties due to slackness in investment. Moreover, women wageworkers are therefore concentrated more in agriculture than in non-agricultural jobs. In contrast, men wage earners are spread more evenly hem cell the two t\ PCs of jobs.

Women wage salary workers devote slightly less hours per day than men to non-agricultural-income earning activities but work almost similar hours with men in agriculture. Annually they work more days than men, both in and outside agriculture. Overall- women earn about 4 / of what men earn in agriculture but 88 percent outside agriculture as wages. In the organized manufacturing, sector, women are concentrated at lower echelons of the industrial hierarchy due to lack of education and training opportunities, employer biases and limited mobility on account of social responsibilities.

However, opportunities for family operated enterprises seem to be expanding as indicated by the statistics on working proprietors. This increase in opportunity seems to be concentrated more in urban areas which is indicated by the declining proportion of economically active women engaged in production activities and only a slight increase in those engaged in trading in rural areas. Female-headed households operate about Six per cent of family enterprises. Mostly, family enterprises have to do with trade/restaurants/ hotels or manufacturing, irrespective of the sex of the household head. But female operated enterprises are concentrated more in these sectors than those operated by males.

Overall, female headed household enterprises earn less return per enterprise than those that are male headed. In individual sectors- they may earn more. Female operated enterprises have much less access to institutional credit when compared to the male operated ones.

When compared to men, women proprietors in the manufacturing sector have less access to capital. Institutional credit, marketing network, marketing information and appropriate business training and education. Other constraints include limited access to modern management methods and technology and cost of production leading to uncompetitive pricing They also lack self-confidence and risk taking and staying capacity as they have access to very little capital and may face numerous family problems in their enterprises.

The thesis that women from the Tibeto-Burman groups tend to be more outgoing and enterprising compared to women from the Indo-Aryan group is supported only partially by current findings which indicate almost equal proportion of Gurung/Rai men and women in the professional and technical occupations and predominance of women in the service and trade sectors in this community. Otherwise high caste Brahmin/ Chetri, Gurung , Rai and Newar women seem to be equally enterprising. High caste and Newar women predominate the group of professional, technical and managerial workers and also the group of working proprietors. They also predominate in all other sectors of non-agricultural activities. Also ethnicity seems to play only a marginal role in the proportion of enterprises run by male or female-headed households. The overwhelming- factor in promoting Brahmin/Chetri and Newar women in non-agricultural activities and entrepreneurship seems to be the opportunity available. Opportunities and power relations provided by the macro-framework may be playing a much stronger role. Women from Tibeto-Burman groups face a less favorable socio-economic structure and power relations-and, so, probably a less opportunities for individual entrepreneurship as well.

Women wage earners in all caste/ethnicity devote similar hours to non­agricultural work per day and more days annually than men with a few exceptions. The female/male ratio is also nearer to one in most ethnic groups. Only Tharu women seem to work double the annual days worked by men of their own ethnicity.

Women do not migrate much in search of employment and form less than 6 percent among the short-term Job-seekers outside their own VDC. Even among those who move in search of employment, women spend much less time than men in those jobs. As for long-term migration, within each migrant ethnicity/caste group Gurung/Rai, Brahmin/Chetri and low caste women constitute larger proportion. Women mostly go to other places in Nepal in search of employment; the flow is more towards rural areas than urban areas. Ethnicity and caste seems to make not much difference to this general pattern. The main avenue of employment is agriculture, more so for women than men.

Both men and women received almost equal number of remittances per person. But women generally received less per person than men. Gurung/Rai and Newar women received largest amount per remittance.

Women have much less access to institutional credit, both at individual and enterprise levels. This is true for all ecological regions, urban/rural areas and ethnic groups. However, Brahmin/Chetri and Tamang/Magar/Limbu women heads of household seem to have greater access to credit compared to women in other castes/ethnicity. The pattern of use of credit is similar for both the sexes, across all ethnicity and areas. The largest amount of credit is used for consumption purposes.

Women's cash contribution to the family income is positively related to expenditure share on education and food in the total household income. This implies that the more cash income women earn tile larger the share of spending, on education and food.

Policy Conclusions

On examining the findings in the macro-micro framework outlined one cannot be very optimistic about women's future prospects. Macro-policies are still directed to deepening, and broadening the market and further integrating Nepal into the global economy .Whether Nepal can emerge from the '"Periphery of the Periphery" status to establish a more direct linkage with the world economy needs to be investigated in all its dimensions and depth. The rate of growth may be accelerated with the policies being pursued but whether this will create productive employment to the poor in the country depends very much on the policy package adopted to develop the Nepalese labour market. Investment in the rural infrastructure may create more-jobs for individuals and provide more work for the households by increasing the labor absorptive capacity of agriculture, but whether the terms of trade will be favorable enough for agriculture to enable these households to retain some of the productivity gains and rise above the subsistence level is yet to be seen.

As far as policies are concerned, the expansion of economic opportunities for women has been one of the major interventions considered basic to women's advancement. Accordingly, starting from the Sixth Five Year Plan (1981-1985), the government had emphasized women's involvement in all programs and projects, recognized the legal impediments to their economic empowerment and enunciated special programs for meeting their needs, The Seventh and the Eighth Year Plans, expanded on those themes. All three plans, with slight variations in emphasis. focused on small scale income generation and also education and training. The later plans. Particularly the Ninth Five Year plan, talked about involving women in all sectoral programs. The required legal reforms were to be implemented to facilitate women's participation in development.

The Ninth Plan Approach Paper sets the triple objectives of mainstreaming, eliminating gender inequality and empowering women, along the lines proposed by the Beijing , Platform for Action. Mainstreaming emphasizes tile formulation of clearly defined policies, targets and programs at national and regional levels, improvement in information to reflect women's contributions to the GDP- further institutional development and creation of a monitoring and evaluation mechanism. Elimination of Gender Inequality includes reform of discriminatory laws, affirmative action in favor of women- specific measures to eliminate Violence against women and an information campaign for gender equality. Empowerment includes provisions for mandatory representation of women in policy formulation, ensuring their access to credit and land, meeting their health needs as women, education- training and technology etc. So far, the effectiveness of government policies and programs in terms of providing equal economic opportunities has been very limited. This failure has often been attributed to institutional and social constraints. The macro-economic policy frameworks have hardly been analyzed for their effect on women.

The tragedy, however, is the fact that we are not able to recommend any grand alternative to the globalising capitalism short of globalising the movement against its avarice. The auto-centric capitalist accumulation, as recommended by some of the critics of global capitalism (e.g. Anlin.1997), seems to have already run its course by now which is amply illustrated by the fall of the Soviet-Union and the rightward movement of socialist countries, including the peoples Republic of China. In this respect there is severe limitation for a small country like Nepal already appendaged to the Indian economy.

At the national and local levels, new experiments are going on the world over, what Escobar (1995) calls "particularistic hybrids". From these experiments. certain elements of tile programs have tended to strengthen the voices and opportunities for the poor and women. These catalytic elements include social mobilization for change with strong participatory elements and strengthening of the local and community command over the resources. Broadening the opportunities for human development are also important for meeting women's practical needs. Following, recommendations are made for women's development in Nepal with full awareness of the limitations set by the unequal distribution of power and resources at tile national and international levels. Further, it should also be recalled that, historically, social and political struggles have tended to leave the relations of patriarchy within the household intact. These micro-macro measures will strengthen women's bargaining power for the present and in future struggles for structural change.

Text courtesy: A Book by the author in cooperation with the FES , Nepal-Thanks the author and the FES-ed