Daily Times

A little over a year back, the United Nations released a report on gender equality for its Sustainable Development Agenda 2030, highlighting Pakistan as one of the four countries that were focused upon. The report identified inequality among women in general and presented a gloomy picture for the country. It used key facts and figures from a UN Demographic and Health Survey’s 2012-2013 report which focused on variables such as location, wealth, and ethnicity.

The report publicised that 12% of women in Pakistan (4.9 million) aged 18 – 49 are concurrently deprived in four sustainable development goal-related dimensions that include: education, child marriages, healthcare, and employment.

Pakistan is thus losing out on opportunities to improve economic growth as a result of not being able to maintain gender equality and is failing to include the opinions and experiences of about half the population. Although in the last 15 years, women’s labour force participation has been documented to have increased by more than 50%, this fact still means that employment opportunities have been created for only one out of five women.

When it comes to women being an active part of the workforce, the situation may sound dreary for a developing country like Pakistan, given the total employment to population ratio (EPR) for women in Pakistan was estimated to be 23.18% in 2017. Quite often, women’s efforts are not documented as a contribution to the nation’s GDP, this usually relates to rural areas but fall into the urban spectrum as well. To be precise, the worth of contribution by female family workers is calculated to be almost 4% of the GDP while the gender wage gap is known to be at a striking 34% which is more than twice the global average. And 55% among the regularly paid female workers receive less than the acceptable minimum wage rate.

The data from the UN report also revealed that women’s well-being and empowerment stoop further down in marginalized ethnic groups such as Pashtun, Saraiki, and Sindhi.

The World Economic Forum has marked Pakistan as being among the worst performers as far as gender equality is concerned; ironically, Pakistan is the second-worst country being at the 148^th rank out of the 149 countries in the global gender gap index 2018 report released by the same. To emphasise upon the gravity of the situation, the report goes on to say that Pakistan is among the four Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt that are the poorest performers when it comes to the number of women holding marginalised positions.

According to an IMF study, it has been estimated that Pakistan’s GDP can be increased by about one third, had the female labour force participation rates matched that of male participation rates. All that needs to be done is a reduction in the gender gap in female participation.

The largest disparity for women is observed as far as education is concerned in Pakistan and this is where a dire need for development is needed at a national level. It is noted that 29.3% of women from the affluent urban background while 98.8% of women from the rural background lack access to education; this draws a miserable situation knowing that 74% of our women have less than 6% of education on average.

The Sustainable Development Goal 5 aims at achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls through the provision of equal rights and opportunities and enabling an environment for them that is free of violence and discrimination. This SDA is therefore integral to all other dimensions and is hence critical to the success of all 17 goals. Developing countries like Pakistan still have a long journey ahead of them knowing that attaining gender equality by 2030 would require an urgent action to fight off issues at their root cause.

Also, despite more women have entered the political arena in recent years, the global participation rate of women at national level parliamentary seats is merely held 24.1%. On the other hand, the private sector at the global level also needs more progress for female workers knowing that women occupy less than a third of senior and middle management positions. The World Economic Forum report has also indicated that it will take women 202 years to earn the same as men. Companies around the globe are thus devising strategies to empower women both at the urban and rural level in order to create avenues of livelihood. Perhaps apply a heavy multiplier here to come down to a realistic local figure.

Quite a number of multinational companies across the globe have started developing employment programmes with great emphasis being laid on women inclusivity. For example, Mondeléz International expanded the Cocoa Sustainability Programme called Cocoa Life which aims at empowering 100,000 women in over 1,000 communities in six countries. Originally launched in 2014 in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, it reached out to Indonesia and Dominican Republic in 2018. Accordingly, the focus is on promoting women empowerment across five focus areas comprising of farming, community, youth, livelihoods, and environment. Up till now, Cocoa Life has helped women acquire better access and control to both household and productive resources. As a result, 50,000 women have been annually facilitated in terms of better access to finances that have enabled education and entrepreneurship.

At a local level in Pakistan, quite a number of NGOs and the private sector through a public-private partnership or CSR campaigns are doing their part towards making women self-sufficient. Meanwhile remaining steadfast for such programmes’ sustainability is of utmost importance while ensuring transparency of funds allocated by NGOs for such a purpose to reach a unified goal. When it comes to micro-financing for instance, women are known to be more responsible, thus reaping better results; Grameen Bank by Dr Muhammad Yunus, we could have our own examples in the pipeline.

The writer is a communication professional and an artist.