January 20

Stemming Girls’ Chronic Poverty (Revised)

Gender Studies Poverty Trackbacks (0)

Stemming girls’ chronic poverty (revised) : Catalysing development change by building just social institutions by

Nicola Jones
Caroline Harper
Carol Watson
- with -
Jessica Espey
Dhana Wadugodapitiya
Ella Page
Maria Stavropoulou
Elizabeth Presler-Marshall
Ben Clench
2010

Abstract

Childhood, adolescence and early adulthood remain for many girls and young women a period of deprivation, danger and vulnerability, resulting in lack of agency and critical development deficits. What happens at this crucial time in girls’ and young women’s lives can also reinforce their poverty status and that of their offspring, as well as influencing their movement into or out of poverty. In many cases, overlapping experiences of deprivation, foregone human development opportunities and abuse or exploitation perpetuate and intensify poverty for girls and young women over the life-course.

 Recently – in part because of the child focus of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the 2007 World Development Report – there has been growing attention on the need to include girls (and boys) more prominently in development agendas. How to do this effectively, however, remains under-researched, especially in debates around chronic poverty, which have in general paid relatively limited attention to gender dynamics.

This report addresses this gap by placing girls and young women centre stage, highlighting ways in which five context-specific social institutions inform and determine their life opportunities and agency. Based on the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), these are: discriminatory family codes, son bias, limited resource rights and entitlements, physical insecurity and restricted civil liberties. We discuss the characteristics of each social institution, its gendered dimensions, its linkages to poverty dynamics and its impacts on girls and young women.

We balance this with a review of promising policies and programmes aimed at tackling the discriminatory dimensions of these institutions. Social institutions are constantly undergoing change. The process may be slow, uneven and even suffer from reversals in some contexts, but the evidence that we present underscores that positive change for girls and young women is possible, even in the most challenging socio-cultural, political and economic contexts.

READ THE ONLINE FULL REPORT HERE (revised)

The Report Summary booklet and the individual chapters below are available to download below. 

 

Chronic Poverty Reports. Chronic Poverty Research Centre.

Downloads

1 Summary booklet PDF 3380.0 KB
2 Preliminaries PDF 1909.8 KB
3 Introduction PDF 2081.2 KB
4 Chapter 1: Discriminatory family codes PDF 3021.9 KB
5 Chapter 2: Son bias PDF 4434.5 KB
6 Chapter 3: Limited resource rights and entitlements PDF 2514.0 KB
7 Chapter 4: Physical insecurity PDF 2424.0 KB
8 Chapter 5: Restricted civil liberties PDF 3075.4 KB
9 Conclusions and policy recommendations PDF 1272.7 KB
10 References, Index, Annexes PDF 1131.8 KB
September 13

Gender Equality, Poverty And Economic Growth

Empowerment, including Enfranchisement Equality Poverty Trackbacks (0)

Gender equality, poverty and economic growth

This paper reviews empirical findings from economic analyses of the role of gender equality and women’s empowerment in reducing poverty and stimulating growth. Going beyond the large literature documenting the impact of female education on a range of development outcomes, the paper presents evidence on the impact of women’s access to markets (labor, land, and credit) and women’s decision-making power within households on poverty reduction and productivity at the individual and household level. The paper also summarizes evidence from studies examining the relationship between gender equality and poverty reduction and growth at the macro level. Although micro level effects of gender equality on individual productivity and human development outcomes have been well documented and have important ramifications for aggregate economic performance, establishing an empirical relationship between gender equality and poverty reduction and growth at the macro level has proven to be more challenging. The paper concludes by identifying priority areas for future research

Source: World Bank

Docuticker