Empowerment is variously defined as control over resources, decision-making, and eventually control over one's life. There are multiple contexts to women's economic empowerment in Pakistan. The existence of structural discrimination against women at the legal, cultural and economic policy levels tend to either push them back or they face increased structural violence in their lives. In the context of legal discrimination, inheritance laws circumscribe women’s rights. Further, women's unequal control over resources and ability to access these, is further strengthened by the infamous Hudood Laws that allow some individuals to commit violence against women with impunity should they demand their rights.
Economic policies impact peoples' lives in complex and different ways. The detrimental impacts of structural adjustment are now widely acknowledged throughout the world. Pakistani women, in both urban and rural contexts, have had to face the bulk of the detrimental effects in Pakistan. Poverty related subsidies have been reduced from Rs 5.2 billion in 1991 to Rs 284 million in 2001, and the public sector investment as a proportion of GNP has been halved between 1988 and 2002. These steps have negatively affected women in the context of food security, health and access to other services and utilities.
Organizing women: A critical aspect
Women in rural and urban contexts are disadvantaged due to their inability to organize themselves, especially in the public sphere. As their mobility is curtailed, organizing them presents a challenge — but a challenge well worth taking. This is especially so when the lifting of subsidies in tandem with the privatization of services and utilities put the poor under added pressure. These pressures exacerbate to the family level, making livelihoods and the care economy more precarious. A possible solution is establishment and formation of associations and cooperatives.
Presently, when trade unions and other forms of protective mechanisms have lost ground over the little coverage they had gained, it is important to form associations for workers as well as cooperatives for agricultural producers and consumers to access affordable health care, housing, finance and insurance. The ILO recommends cooperatives to governments as a policy measure because they promote “values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity; as well as ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others.” Further, they promote the principles of “voluntary and open membership; democratic member control; member economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community.”
Similarly, the formation and promotion of associations along skill lines would be an important intervention on behalf of women. Women shy away from forming any type of association because they believe it might put their access to remunerated work at risk. They are also culturally discouraged from forming organizations that might take on an active rights-based approach.
In Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad, through motivation by community-based organizations, women have formed small groups and associations to negotiate with middlemen in areas of work such as garments, paper and fresh flowers, packaging, dry fruit packaging, embroidery, leather work and looms operation.
Control over resources and access to knowledge systems
Land rights, the effective ownership and control of their land, ensure that women’s voices within household and community level decision-making carry weight. Women opt for food security rather than cash crop production (promoted by skewed market incentives). Government incentives should target cultivation of staples, and focus on ensuring that women possess the social capital to cultivate and farm their land. It includes the knowledge and expertise required for cultivation as well as the legitimacy to undertake this work. It means helping women acquire the requisite knowledge about sowing, reaping, and supervising other men, an aspect that often makes it possible for male family members to exercise control over land even when it belongs to women. The government machinery will have to be more sensitive to women’s needs. For example, training for breeding livestock is imparted to men by the government line departments rather than to women who traditionally look after livestock.
At present the ownership of land in Pakistan is skewed. In rural contexts, land reforms should provide ownership and control of land to women and men from all castes, classes and religions. The reform is essential to diffuse landed power that impacts livelihood opportunities, rule of law and electoral processes.
The ownership of resources in urban contexts also leads to a greater dependence of women on middleman or contractor. Women often lack requisite knowledge about credit facilities or laws that might protect them. But even if they have the knowledge, access to such facilities presents a problem. If the government wants to achieve social protection for women, targeted interventions should be executed at several levels, from the mohalla (street) upward.
An enabling legal environment and regulation
The government steps to ensure protection to workers, especially women workers, mean enforcing a minimum wage; ensuring equal pay for equal work; regulating the informal sector; regulating conditions of work, especially protection from hazardous work; home-based, piece-rate contract, and agricultural workers to be treated as workers with rights to social security, medical and old age benefits; and enacting laws against sexual harassment of women.
It is important not to equate the tools for economic empowerment with economic empowerment itself, as these do not automatically lead to empowerment. The assumption that accessing paid work will automatically lead to empowerment and that somehow structural adjustment policies have unwittingly and unintentionally set in motion forces that will emancipate women is untrue.
Safety nets that were promoted as a corollary to structural adjustment policies have failed women; zakat only reaches 2 million people out of the 50 million who live below the poverty line in Pakistan. Studies of the formal and informal sectors indicate that women are empowered only if the remuneration is fair, if the employment conditions are decent, and if the conditions and hours of work are regulated. Home-based work further burdens and oppresses women rather than empowering them, given the social, cultural, and productive and reproductive contexts of their existence. There is some evidence that educated women deal with the world with more confidence and command more respect, underscoring the enhanced importance of the social investment in educating girls.
Mechanisms like employment quotas, micro-credit and low-interest credit for women entrepreneurs, skill development and marketing tools are important aspects of achieving economic empowerment. But they present a mixed picture. Employment quotas, in the age of informalization of economy, amount to very little. The federal and provincial governments have failed to fulfil the five percent quotas announced ten years ago within government departments either due to lack of capacity, especially at the higher levels (due to structural aspects of lack of education and other professional opportunities for women), or due to sheer apathy.
The results from all over the world, in Northern and Southern contexts, indicate that the women who do well after accessing micro-credit have a supportive environment (family or region that is economically well-off). But the poorest of the poor or most marginalized are unlikely to benefit from micro-credit. In fact, their burden appears to increase because of accessing micro-credit. Many women pass the money they access to their husbands or sons. Many have reported increased burden of work sans support from the family.
Though these mechanisms should be further refined and targeted in context-specific ways, we will have to go beyond them to achieve meaningful empowerment for women.
Women’s access to state institutions at the local level should be improved. These range from schools, to the basic health units, law enforcing agencies as well as the district courts to the local government officials. The inclusion of women at the union council level did yield positive results. But the reversal in government policy, i.e. the reduction in the number of seats reserved for women, will be a setback for many women. Until women’s limited mobility, and therefore extremely limited access to the public sphere are addressed, such recommendations will fail to be realized.
The provincial or district governments should set up registration boards in which all labor, contractors and employees engaged in a particular activity are required to register. The activities can range from urban informal workers and piece rate or contract workers to agricultural workers. Apart from being a source of information on the size of sectors and occupations, the registration boards could also serve as clearing-houses of information on other sectors, including rates/remuneration.
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