2009 Global Hunger Index - International Food Policy Research ...

Odinaeva Khosiyat
Ayni district, Tajikistan
“The salary of my husband has increased, but the
prices of products have risen twofold. As a result, we
have begun to borrow money. The quantity of cattle
has decreased as we have started to sell it to
purchase flour and oil.”
“The meal for the women in the family has decreased.
It became difficult to study in high school for my
daughter. I therefore decided to transfer my daughter
from internal to correspondence courses.”
“Reduction of labour migration has reduced the
income of families. Many labour migrants have
returned from Russia without any salaries or money.”
In South Asia, especially, where the link between the low status of
women and high rates of child malnutrition is strongest, interventions
must aim to improve women’s status and to build support for women’s
empowerment among communities. In areas where women’s status is
known to be low and efforts to increase it are met with resistance,
such as an increased incidence of domestic violence, strategies to
promote children’s nutritional status can include actions to increase
support from husbands, and from the community in general, for women’s
roles in ensuring child nutrition.
REDUCE GENDER GAPS IN ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION AND OPPORTUNITY.
It is important to reduce barriers to market access for women and increase
their control of productive assets. In most of the developing
world, women have fewer resources and face higher barriers to participation
in economically productive spheres than men. General policies
to improve income-earning abilities and opportunities for women include
reforming property rights systems to be more equitable toward
women; eliminating barriers to women’s labor market participation; removing
constraints to participation in credit and other markets; and
developing technologies that increase the returns to female labor,
whether through increased demand or increased labor productivity
(Quisumbing 2008; Smith et al. 2003). In countries where gender
gaps are long entrenched, policies to reduce gender gaps will entail
not only policy reform to eliminate gender discrimination but also interventions
that enable women to catch up to men.
Examples of reforms that have strengthened women’s property
rights range from land registration and changes in inheritance law
to giving landless women control over small plots of land. Ethiopia’s
low-cost, rapid, and transparent land registration scheme required
land administration committees at the lowest level to have at least one
female member. Land certifications, issued after public registration
for transparency, included maps and pictures of husband and wife, important
in a society with low levels of literacy (Deininger et al. 2007).
In Ghana, the inheritance law was reformed to enable a man’s wife and
children to inherit if he died without leaving a will (Quisumbing et al.
2001). In India, where women traditionally have little access to land,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have begun experimenting
with giving landless farmers and women’s groups small plots to
cultivate, together with technical assistance in agricultural practices
(RDI n.d.).
28 Gender Inequality and Hunger | Chapter 04 | 2009 Global Hunger Index