Visit to the South #2 – Gender Awareness Training and a Lesson on Equity

This was the second in a series of three Gender Awareness Training workshops that we are doing to sensitize SACCO representatives on gender issues and mainstreaming gender into their programs and policies. There were about 34 participants, and many more women attended this time, which was great to see.

In Malawi, women don’t have equal access to financial services. There are many reasons for this – a lack of education, lack of decision making power within the household and high levels of poverty among women, just to name a few. The thing is, when it comes to micro-credit, women in general have far better repayment rates. They rarely default on their loans, and pay back the money easily and in good time. In general (and this is broadly speaking) men are much worse at paying back loans, and tend to use money for themselves, rather than for the family. If women are a better risk financially, why then, are most of the loans going to men? It is all an issue of access – access to education about financial services and access to the power and knowledge to go to the SACCO and get a loan. Men tend to be the ones who are in charge of bringing money into the household, and therefore it is more often than not the man in the family who has access to financial services and not the woman. Ironically, however, women do about 2/3 of the world's work, and produce about 75 - 90% of the food crops in the world. And this is just productive work - it doesn't even include the reproductive or community work that women bear the load of. FINCOOP, one of the SACCOs we are working with, is actually in the process of designing a loan specifically for women. This will encourage women to access credit and will be combined with the education they need to ensure that the money is used to its fullest extent. Increasing female membership of the SACCOs is not only working towards empowering women and increasing the quality of their lives, but it is just good business sense!

So, you might ask – if we are talking about gender equality, and there are loans specifically for women, isn’t that discrimination against men? There is a difference between gender EQUALITY and gender EQUITY. Equity is a stage in the process of attaining gender equality, and requires the fair and just distribution of resources to achieve the end goal of equality. It is all about leveling the playing field. Even if in theory men and women have equal access to credit at the SACCOs, practically, this might not be the case for the reason that described above. In this case, the SACCO services need to be made more easily available to women, so that they can have the same end result as the men.

It is like the story of the Fox and the Crane –

“The Fox invited the crane to dinner and prepared his special soup. He thoughtlessly served the soup in his favourite shallow bowl and the crane had difficulty eating because only the tip of her long beak could reach the soup. The next day, the Crane invited the fox to dinner and served soup in her tall, slender bowl from which the fox had great difficulty eating”.

Both had an equal chance to eat the soup, but in both cases, one was left out. In order to be fair an equitable, they need different chances – a shallow bowl and a tall, slender bowl – in order to achieve an equal result. Seems like Aesop had it right. What a smart guy.

All in all, the training went well and I think we have achieved our goal of sensitization. We just need to make people aware of the issues so they can start thinking about the importance of mainstreaming gender within their SACCOs.

I think that is enough of a lesson today. Thanks for humouring me...