Strategies for Stimulating Poverty-alleviating Growth in the Rural ...

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g. Women’s key role.
Rural nonfarm employment holds special importance for women. Women account
for about one-quarter of the total full time RNFE workforce in most parts of the developing
world, though only about 10 percent in the MENA region (Table 2). They also participate in
part-time RNFE activity, particularly in household-based manufacturing and service
activities. Women dominate many of the nonfarm activities that grow most rapidly during
structural transformation – activities such as food processing and preparation, trading and
many services. They likewise hold major interest in many of the declining rural nonfarm
occupations – basket making, mat making, ceramics and weaving. Consequently, women
will be key actors in the economic transition of the rural nonfarm economy. To facilitate their
contribution to an accelerated rural transformation will require assistance agencies and
governments to explicitly recognize the key role to be played by women entrepreneurs and
employees.
Evidence on women’s success in RNF activities is mixed. In some situations, as in
some poor zones of Chile, women prove more successful than men in RNF activities, earning
higher wages (Berdegué et al. 2001). In other cases, the opposite occurs. It appears that the
critical issue may not be gender per se but rather who lacks the assets and mobility to
undertake poverty-alleviating, non-refuge rural nonfarm activities.
h. A handmaiden or an engine of growth?
Many RNFE activities produce goods and services that are consumed almost entirely
within the region in which they are produced (e.g. many retailing and personal services,
highly perishable agricultural products, and the processing of local agricultural outputs).
Expansion of these activities is constrained by growth in local demand, which in turn