In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Female entrepreneurs in Bangladesh represent a miniscule percentage of business owners (0.05 percent), according to The Asia Foundation’s 2010 firm-level survey results. Issues of concern to women business owners, such as difficulties in accessing information on regulations or obtaining loans for their businesses, are concomitantly raised in a relatively diminished voice. Yet by joining together to form a Women’s Business Forum and working with local public authorities, a group of women entrepreneurs successfully negotiated over the course of several months to improve the terms for accessing credit from a local commercial bank.

Female entrepreneurs in Bangladesh represent a small percentage of business owners. However, recent Business Forums have provide them with a voice for expressing their challenges and concerns about the business environment. Photo by Geoffrey Hiller.

Although this was a success, in many of Asia’s developing economies, this type of collaboration is difficult due to an absence of a strong, organized private sector and active civil society (whether local business associations, consumer or citizen groups, or farmers’ collectives). As a result, mutual collaboration between the private and public sector is often weak, or in some cases nonexistent. Even when the private sector’s demands for reform are expressed, they may not always be clearly articulated, due to lack of capacity, or acted upon effectively by the government.

Public-Private Dialogues (PPDs), such as the one illustrated above between the Bangladeshi women entrepreneurs and their local bank, help facilitate constructive interaction for reforms  by providing a forum for participants to identify constraints and issues that need to be improved. Issues vary widely, ranging from the quotidian (garbage collection, the need for more street lights, or better parking facilities), to the complex (onerous business licensing regulations, informal fees, improved food safety regulations, or gender-based discrimination).

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Earlier this year, Sumaiya Akhter, a 12-year-old resident of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, hanged herself from her ceiling fan with a scarf. She had been verbally harassed by Selim, an older neighborhood boy, on the way to and from school every day. Sumaiya told her parents, but just prior to her death, her mother scolded her for what was happening, and she likely had nowhere else to turn.

In an effort to reduce long tensions between police and communities, the Bangladesh Police created a nationwide network of Community Policing Forums. Above, police and community members participate in a recent forum.

Regrettably, Sumaiya’s case is not an isolated incident. Crime in Bangladesh is on the rise overall, and this kind of gender-based violence is also becoming more common. According to the Bangladesh Police, between 2001 and 2010 there was a 42 percent increase in reported crimes, including narcotic-related offences (a 394% increase), child abuse (306%), and cruelty to women (25%). Many observers cite the strained relationship between the police and community members as a large factor contributing to this surge. Tensions and misunderstandings are exacerbated by a long history of distrust resulting from the application of a legal code that dates back to 1861 when the British were in power. At that time, the objective of the police was to defend British colonial rule rather than to serve and protect citizens. Unfortunately, some of these same ideas about policing continue to be applied today.

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A global campaign is underway right now to bring attention to a pressing human rights issue which affects up to 60 percent women across the world. The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign – which falls between International Day Against Violence Against Women (November 25) and International Human Rights Day (December 10) – brings attention to the global issue of gender-based violence. While living a life free of violence is a basic human right, millions of women around the globe are victims of violent acts including domestic violence, forced prostitution, rape in wartime, marital rape, and other forms of physical and psychological abuse.

Despite the serious consequences of gender-based violence, the WHO notes that it continues to have an "unjustifiably low priority on the international development agenda." Photo by Karl Grobl.

Gender-based violence is deeply rooted in societal norms that set and reinforce the unequal power relations between men and women which perpetuate the problem. Within the Asia-Pacific region, there are a number of entrenched cultural practices that contribute to gender-based violence and pose a significant barrier to women’s equal rights. Forced early marriage, domestic violence, dowry-related violence, rape, acid throwing, female genital mutilation, forced prostitution, and the trafficking of women are major threats to health and well being of millions of women in Asia. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), many types of gender-based violence have increased in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years. Because these root causes are so deeply ingrained in patriarchal systems and cultural practices, implementing efforts to change them is complex and difficult.

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In Asia’s editor, Alma Freeman, interviewed 2011 Survey of the Afghan People co-author and former Asia Foundation program director for Law, Human Rights, and Women’s Empowerment in Kabul, Najla Ayubi, for her reaction to the findings of The Asia Foundation’s 2011 Survey and what they might mean for women’s rights, peace talks, and more. Ayubi is currently the Afghanistan country director for the Open Society Foundation.

As a survey author, what surprised you most about this year’s findings?

The high support for peace and reconciliation was a very surprising and important finding in this year’s survey. It’s surprising to see that 82 percent of the people support peace and reconciliation, which has interesting implications for the peace process. I also found it surprising that 74 percent of the respondents said they have confidence in religious leaders and 70 percent of respondents say that religious leaders should be consulted on problems facing an area. Also, 46 percent say that the country is going in the right direction, and only 35 percent say it is going in the wrong direction. That’s positive news, but since last year, the percentage of people who think the country is going in the wrong direction has increased by 8 percent. In 2009, that figure was 29 percent. To me, this reveals an unstable attitude of the people on whether their country is moving in the right direction.

Women respondents report lower levels of support than men for reconciliation with armed opposition groups. What do you make of this?

Women have been marginalized by the Taliban and other armed opposition groups for decades. That’s why woman don’t have much empathy for the armed opposition groups, and are not as supportive as men for the so called peace and reconciliation process which is going on with the government. In many cases, they feel they won’t get any benefit from this type of negotiation – specifically, they worry their rights will be compromised, and for me as an Afghan woman, I’m also afraid that my rights will be compromised during these peace talks. Two of the biggest issues that affect women’s lives here are the lack of freedom of movement to work outside of the home and access to education. In the current peace talks, how this will be factored in is totally up in the air. It’s very clear that women support peace, but not the kind of approach that risks compromising their rights.

Also, women are only symbolically part of the peace talks: some women have been put in high-level positions, like at the High Peace Council or at the local, provincial level in peace talk committees, but they aren’t able to actually represent women’s voices and interests there. For example, some of the women representatives in the High Peace Council have said that in many cases when there is a peace talk trip inside of the country, they are not allowed to be part of the delegation. The male representatives say that due to the security situation, women aren’t able to come. But this makes me ask, if the security is a problem for women, why is it not a problem for men? If the men can go and be protected by security forces, then why can’t the same be done for women? It’s more of a stereotype or patriarchal thinking that women are not eligible to be in peace talks rather than anything having to do with their ability.

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Among the assets of the annual Survey of the Afghan People is the fact that the data is collected from men and women, and disaggregated as such. In this way, not only does the survey allow for a nuanced look at attitudes across geographic regions, ethnic groups, and age ranges, but it opens a window into the differences between women and men’s perceptions. Though the commonly held, often unspoken assumption is that views and experiences will coincide at the same level, it is the occasional gaps that most warrant our attention.

Education

When asked to identify the biggest problem women face in their local area, 25 percent of all respondents, men and women, cited the lack of education and/or illiteracy as the most significant problem for women. Despite both men and women recognizing it as a problem, over the years fewer male respondents than female have been in favor of gender equality in education, as shown by this year’s results in which only 42 percent of men strongly agree that women and men should have equal opportunities in education, while 61 percent of women do.

Employment

Likewise, while the majority of respondents (62%) are in favor of women being allowed to work outside the home, the survey shows a significant difference between men and women’s attitudes regarding gender equality in employment. Indeed, 79 percent of female respondents say women should be allowed to work outside the home, but that opinion was only shared by 50 percent of men. It is also worth noting that this figure has been declining, for both men and women, over the past six years that the survey has been conducted.

Political Leadership and Participation

There was also divergence of opinions regarding equal representation among political leadership, with just 33 percent of male respondents and 61 percent of female respondents saying that men and women should have equal representation. There was little difference, however, between men and women’s objection to being represented by a woman in governance institutions from the local to the national level.

Regarding voting, and whether men should vote in place of women, 85 percent of respondents said that men should not vote in place of women. At the same time, there was a significant difference between men and women’s responses with over a third, or 34 percent, of male respondents saying that women should be advised by men before voting, as compared to less than a fifth, or 19 percent of women.

A few additional gaps covered in the survey include:

• More men are supportive of the peace, reconciliation/negotiation and reintegration efforts than women.
• Men are more likely than women to have contacted their MP for help in solving any of their personal or local problems.
• As in the formal justice system, more men than women say local shura/jirga are accessible to them.

Identifying where differences between the sexes, or even gradations, exist such as these evident in the survey results, allows us to begin to take critical steps toward achieving gender equality.

Barbara Rodriguez is a program officer for The Asia Foundation’s Women’s Empowerment Program, based in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at brodriguez@asiafound.org. The Women’s Empowerment Program develops women’s leadership, strengthens women’s organizations, increases women’s rights and ensures their personal security, and creates new political and economic opportunities for women across the Asia-Pacific region. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

As world population reached 7 billion last week, stories about the implications of population growth saturated the media. While total population counts offer broad “sound bite” appeal, the underlying structure of population has far greater socio-economic, political, and environmental implications.

The population of India is expected to eclipse that of China around the year 2025. Photo by Karl Grobl.

Population composition by sex, age, ethnicity, educational attainment, political orientation, or geography matters for everything from school planning to environmental management and even to political stability. It has been 25 years since the widespread adoption of sex-selective abortion, and pockets of developing countries around the world are now contending with a dearth of women which precludes a generation of young men from marrying and starting a family. The absence of this stabilizing social institution has already had a notable impact on crime rates, political organization, and migration patterns.

Variance in age structure has similar ramifications, and a comparison of India and China offers an illustrative example. As noted in last week’s blog piece, “7 Billion and Counting,” the population of India is expected to eclipse that of China around the year 2025. But the sheer size of the world’s two most populous countries masks stark underlying differences in population age structure. In the year 2000, China’s total fertility rate was just 1.6 births per woman, falling well below the “replacement rate” of about 2.1 needed to sustain a stationary population. So is China’s population shrinking? Not yet. This is partly because a total fertility rate of 2.1 will only maintain a constant population size under a stable mortality rate while China is making substantial gains in public health. Life expectancy at birth was already 71 in 2000 but is expected to reach 81 by 2050. In fact, China will still be growing when the population of India surpasses it. However, sometime around 2030, the population-shrinking influence of low fertility will overtake the population-growing effect of reduced mortality, and the population will begin to decline. This expectation is of course contingent on the assumption that fertility rates will not rebound and that longevity improvements fall along a similarly predictable trajectory.

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Francia came to Tala Leprosarium from her hometown of Camarines Sur in Bicol region as a leprosy patient when she was 17 years old. Before she contracted leprosy, she had worked as a domestic helper. When I met Francia at Jose Rodriguez Memorial Hospital, a former leprosarium and grantee of The Asia Foundation’s partner organization, Give2Asia, Francia was teary-eyed as she related how she was orphaned at such a young age. Surprisingly, she said she was “glad” to have been a leprosy patient, as this was how she found her way to the leprosarium which has become home to her for almost 30 years. She now lives with other former leprosy patients in a Gawad Kalinga home in Tala, Caloocan. (Gawad Kalinga, which means “to give care” in Filipino, is a Philippine-based poverty alleviation and nation-building movement whose mission is to build homes for the poor.) Unmarried at 47 years old, she looks to her life as a patient assistant as a vocation.

As patient assistants at Jose Rodriguez Memorial Hospital, both Francia and her friend Caesar receive an allowance of a little under $10 a month from the hospital, $16 a month from the local government for their care-giving services, and a cash/food ration of $1.5 a day from the hospital. They support doctors and nurses with fellow leper patients and provide care and moral support to patients who have been shunned by society. Despite having been fully cured, Francia still bears the psychological scars from her disease. As a person with a disability, she yearns for the time when former leprosy patients can mingle and live with family members and be accepted fully by society.

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Newsweek/The Daily Beast, in its September 18 issue, ranked the Philippines as the “best place in Asia for women.” The Philippines ranked 17th worldwide, among 165 countries, the only Asian country to make the top 20. Data across five categories – justice, health, education, economics, and politics – were analyzed to determine the overall ranking. It is, however, interesting to see that the data points did not consider the situation of women in conflict situations. If Newsweek had analyzed the situation of women in the conflict-affected Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), and women’s limited access to education and health services, vulnerability to violence and trafficking, and lack of livelihood opportunities there, then the Philippines would have certainly fallen far in its ranking.

As with most internal conflicts, women have been particularly affected by the conflict in Mindanao. Above, students outside of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) camp in southern Philippines. Photo by Karl Grobl.

The question of gender equality is particularly acute in the ARMM. It is well known that the provinces in the region rank lowest in the Philippines on the Human Development Index; what is less well known is that they also have the highest Gender Disparity Index. In the Philippines, it is only in the ARMM that women have significantly lower literacy and educational levels than men. Compounding the problem are the domestic roles proscribed by cultural norms, which often constrain Muslim women’s opportunities to be full participants and beneficiaries in social, political, and economic life.

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The phrase “gender equality as smart economics” has become the recent mantra of such powerful women leaders as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet. It is also the rallying cry of the World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report (WDR) on Gender Equality and Development.

Progress is some areas has been made in recent years toward gender equality - education is one. There are now more girls in school worldwide than ever, with girls outnumbering boys in secondary schools, and young women outnumbering men in universities. Photo by Geoffrey Hiller.

Indeed, as the Bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, pointed out in a September 19 op-ed on the day of the launch:  “Equality is not just the right thing to do. It’s smart economics. How can an economy achieve full potential if it ignores, sidelines, or fails to invest in half its population?”

The latest report – the first ever to focus on gender equality – is a welcome and persuasive effort to identify why gender equality is critical, and what policy makers can do to achieve it. As Isobel Coleman, from the Council on Foreign Relations wrote:

The Bank’s framing of gender equality not only as a development objective in its own right, but also as smart economics, is an important message for those countries that lag the most on gender equality. Just as investing in women and girls can create a positive development cycle, the opposite is also true: countries that fail to empower half their population will suffer from lower productivity, slower economic growth, and weaker development outcomes.

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At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum taking place in San Francisco this week, the powerful role women entrepreneurs play across the globe in driving economic growth and job creation is high on the agenda. Recognizing this growing role, particularly for micro, small, and medium enterprises  (MSMEs), I joined leading economists, experts, government officials, and women entrepreneurs from around the world today for a dedicated all-day discussion on specific constraints women face when starting or developing a business. The stakes are high as these businesses are a major driver of economic growth and jobs – topics on everyone’s mind.

District Women's Business Forums, supported by The Asia Foundation, bring women entrepreneurs together to negotiate for better access to loans. In many cases, these networks have forced banks to change their policies toward women. With a new loan, executive committee member Rowson Arefin recently opened a beauty parlor in Bangladesh's Rajshahi City. Photo by Geoffrey Hiller.

This high-profile international event has brought together participants from very different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds as diverse as Japan, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, to Peru, Chile, Australia, and the United States to share what they all have in common: the determination to reach their full potential as SME owners or managers and the feeling that this potential is still too often restricted by social, cultural, financial, legal, or administrative constraints across APEC economies.

In Asia, MSMEs are widely recognized as the engine of economic growth, generating employment and job opportunities in both rural and urban areas, and helping to alleviate poverty. In his paper on women entrepreneurship in Asia’s developing countries, Tulus Tambunan uses figures from the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to evaluate the proportion of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with regard to the overall population of enterprises in selected Asian developing countries. The percentages range between 90 percent in Pakistan and India, to more than 99 percent in the APEC economies of Indonesia (99.9%), Thailand (99.8%), China (99.7%), and Malaysia (99.2%). Vietnam is a bit “behind,” with 96.8 percent of its enterprises being considered as SMEs. Whether they are entrepreneurs forced to work in an SME due to lack of other options, or entrepreneurs by choice, driven by the desire to succeed and to develop their businesses, women represent a growing portion of these SME owners.

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