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Gender Equality – At the heart of development: Why the role of women is crucial to ending world poverty
2007
Department for International Development (DFID)
The world is unequal and it is most unequal for women and girls. Most of the poorest people in the world are women and part of what makes them poor is the discrimination they face purely because of their gender.
These are the girls whose brothers go off to school in the morning while they stay at home to fetch water or work around the house.
They are the women who do the same jobs as men but get paid less, or whose wages go direct to a husband or a father. Or the women who are not allowed to get a job at all.
They are the women who are beaten, raped and infected with HIV and AIDS, the mothers who die in childbirth, the girls who are trafficked to be sold as a sexual commodity.
And they are also the activists who long to change the laws and traditions that deny them their rights, but are forbidden from taking part in any decision-making.
The dice are loaded against half the human race.
In rural Africa it is women – not trucks, not trains, not planes – who carry two-thirds of all goods that are transported.
In Southeast Asia, women provide up to 90% of labour for rice cultivation.
In India, Nepal and Thailand, fewer than 10% of women farmers own land.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women produce up to 80% of basic foodstuffs. But a survey of credit schemes in five African countries found women received less than 10% of the credit given to
male smallholders.
This is the reality of a world that is too often stacked against women.
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