Gender inequality is costing sub-Saharan Africa on average 95 billion USD a year, peaking at 105 billion USD in 2014, Africa Human Development Report 2016 disclosed.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Administrator Helen Clark said achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is the right thing to do and it is a development imperative.
“If gender gaps can be closed in labor markets, education, health, and other areas, then poverty and hunger eradication can be accelerated”, she said at the launching of TICAD- VI in Nairobi yesterday.
The UNDP report analyses that the political, economic and social drivers that hamper African women’s advancement and proposes policies and concrete actions to close the gender gap.
These include addressing the contradiction between legal provisions and practice in gender laws, breaking down harmful social norms and transforming discriminatory institutional settings, and securing women’s economic, social and political participation.
Deeply-rooted structural obstacles such as unequal distribution of resources, power and wealth, combined with social institutions and norms that sustain inequality are holding African women, and the rest of the continent, back, the report estimates, adding that a 1 percent increase in gender inequality reduces a country’s human development index by 0.75 percent.
While the continent is rapidly closing the gender gap in primary education enrolment, African women achieve only 87 percent of the human development outcomes of men, driven mainly by lower levels of female secondary attainment, lower female labor force participation and high maternal mortality, it indicated.
The report also states that even if 61 percent of African women are working they still face economic exclusion as their jobs are underpaid and undervalued, and are mostly in the informal sector.
Accordingly , African women hold 66 percent of the all jobs in the non-agricultural informal sector and only make 70 cents for each dollar made by men while only between 7 and 30 percent of all private firms have a female manager.
In a key finding, the report estimates that total annual economic losses due to gender inequality in the labor market have averaged 95 billion USD per year since 2010 in sub-Saharan Africa and could be as high as 105 billion USD (6 percent of the region’s GDP) in 2014.
Social norms are a clear obstacle to African women’s progress, limiting the time women can spend in education and paid work, and access to economic and financial assets, it was indicated, adding that for instance, African women still carry out 71 percent of water collecting translating to 40 billion hours a year, and are less likely to have bank accounts and to access credit.
African women’s health is also severely affected by harmful practices such as under-age marriage and sexual and physical violence, and high maternal mortality, the most at-risk women being those of childbearing age, the report said, adding a 1 percentage point rise in adolescent birth rate increases the overall adult female mortality rate by about 1.1 percentage points.
“With existing gender disparities, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and Africa’s Agenda 2063 would remain an aspiration, and not a reality”, UNDP Africa Director Abdoulaye Mar Dieye said. “Closing the gender gap would not only set Africa on a double-digit economic growth track, but would also significantly contribute to meeting its development goals.”
Addressing gender inequality requires an all-of-government and all-of-society approach, taking into account established linkages between women’s social wellbeing and economic opportunities for more productive lives.
The report proposes four strategic pathways to greater gender equality and women’s empowerment, including adopting legal reforms, building national capacity to accelerate women’s involvement in decision-making, adopting multi-sectoral approaches in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, and accelerating women’s ownership of assets and management of resources.
The report noted that countries which invest more in gender equality and women’s empowerment are doing better on human development.