The Draft National Policy for Women 2016 proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India is refreshing in many aspects and takes on board several concerns of the feminist movements in India, including the need for taking into account unpaid care-work of women, creating more gender disaggregated data and making skill and technology available to all, with a special focus on marginalized women. It makes a reference to the rights and social security of migrant workers and domestic workers, again important concerns for development and feminist activists. However, we would like to bring to the attention of the Government, certain important points.
Publication Category: Policy Papers
Claiming Spaces for Women In Public Transport
Studies on gender-inclusive transportation have largely focused on the safety of women as commuters and transport users, and there is not much information available about their roles as transport service providers. The ILO (2019) observed that women constituted less than 20% of the global transportation workforce in 2018, as they had limited options in transport-related occupations in all countries. There have been some sporadic, small-scale efforts in some countries, to engage women as public transport bus drivers, including by governments of Ghana, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and so on. However, these efforts have not been sufficiently documented so as to provide deeper insights into structural factors that impede women’s employment across different roles within this industry.
In order to fill the gap in evidence, about women’s exclusion from being providers of transport, Azad Foundation undertook a rapid qualitative study to analyze critical factors that affect women’s recruitment and retention in public transport as bus drivers. This report documents key findings and highlights critical recommendations to address gender based exclusion in this regard.
Read the Claiming Spaces for Women In Public Transport Advocacy Brief
Women on Wheels in New Delhi, India
The development sector’s engagement with poverty alleviation and gender equality has evolved considerably over the past 40 years. Significant efforts have been made to accommodate theoretical advancements in the broader field of gender and development. Programs designed to empower women – and men in some settings – have evolved from the welfare, efficiency and equity focused-approaches of the 1970s and 1980s to the more recent empowerment, human rights and capabilities-based approaches of the 1990s and the new millennium. Because of a broader structural understanding of the sources of women’s poverty and disempowerment, today many more actors in development engage, not just with employment and labour force participation as means to empower women, but also with more politically-sensitive issues (i.e. property rights, political participation and the gendered division of household labour, to name a few) that they had previously been hesitant or unwilling to take on.
These progressive shifts have sometimes paradoxically occurred alongside changes that construct poverty alleviation and gender equality less as complex structural issues and more as technical-rational topics that can be addressed through a bureaucratic approach to development management and practice. There has been a gradual shift away from a political understanding of the causes of poverty and gender inequality to an apolitical and ahistorical management of its symptoms (Ramalingam 2013). The widespread use within donor agencies, government organizations, charities and even NGOs of the language and logic of business management – through, for example, tools such as Results Based Management (RBM) and Logical Framework Analysis (LFA) – has had a profound impact not just upon how development is conceptualised and operationalised but also upon the operational cultures and management styles of organizations working on the ground to alleviate poverty and promote gender equality. Consequently, these actors increasingly understand development more as a managerial issue that can be planned, carried out and evaluated within short periods of time, rather than as a messy, unpredictable process of social change.
Of course, it is important to remember that the technical-rational approach and the political approach are not entirely antithetical. Actors that understand development as a political process can nonetheless support a careful thinking through of the logical “theories of change,” and recognise that in a context of scarce resources, a focus on efficient and effective use of resources is a serious responsibility for those supporting change. The two strategies do not have to be mutually exclusive.