The difficult life of women in developing countries

Ruta writing…At work, we emphasize “gender equalitiy” issues. There is a growing conviction among international development work that a key to dramatic improvements in a developing country’s progress is to educate and empower women. It certainly makes sense to me. Women are key to a family’s culture and values. If the mother is uneducated and repressed, often the children are as well. On the other hand, when a mother values education, she teaches those values of learning, confidence, and ambition to her kids.

In Ethiopia there are many issues carrying over from “tradition”. The extreme are termed “harmful traditional practices” which include kidnapping (e.g. if a girl balks at an arranged marriage, she’s kidnapped into it), female genital mutilation (a particularly horrendous, awful, demeaning tradition that affects 60-90% women here) and child marriage. Child marriage has tremendous implications and receives too little attention. Girls as young as 7 years old are married to men on average 7-10 years older. They have sexual relations before their bodies are prepared for it. They bear children too young. If the labor is difficult (because their bodies are not sufficiently mature and there is little medical attention at births) their tissues during childbirth are compressed and permanently damaged. They can develop fistula, which can tragically lead to life long problems and ultimately rejection. These young brides stop their education, have no skills to work, and remain dependent on their husbands for life.

Additionally these young women are the fasting growing population of HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia. Women who are married have a HIV/AIDS rate 2 times higher than unmarried women here. Divorced women have a rate 8 times higher (often women are divorced when their disease is discovered) While the US via Pres Bush’s Emergency Aid for HIV/AIDS huge $48B program has done a lot of good, especially in its availability of drugs, behaviorally it ONLY fights HIV/AIDS through “Abstinence and Be Faithful” campaigns. I cannot suppress my exasperation. HIV/AIDS is not just a disease of promiscuous, errant behavior here. These women ARE abstinent until marriage, but they get HIV/AIDS from their husbands who are not. Only very few feel that they can ask their husbands to use protection. There is one study (Population Council 2008) that 20% of the adolescent girls in Addis Ababa had migrated to the city to escape early marriage. Unfortunately these girls experience harsh lives of abuse, hard work, extremely low pay, exploitation, few friends and little support.

Here are some statistics:
- 80% of women and 50% men stated that “there are at least some reasons in which a man is justified in hitting a women.”
- Nationally of women ages 45 and up, 93% had no education.(Central Statistics Agency, Ethiopia 2005) - Rurally women ages 30 - 45, 42% had no education. Of women who attended school, attendance was for 3.7 years. The main reason for not attending was that parents did not see the benefit or early marriage
- Rurally the median age of marriage for the 3000 women surveyed is 17 for ages 10-19; 14 among women aged 20-29; 13 among women aged 30 and older.
- 71% of rural women surveyed felt that if a woman dies during childbirth it is an unpreventable act of God.
- 21% feel that childbirth in a medical clinic can lead to fistula
- less than 2% of the rural women surveyed had any savings at all.
- 86% of women 10-19 needed permission to leave the house, 55% of women of women ages 40 and up needed to seek permission.
(Most stats taken from findings of Population Council, funded by UNICEF and UNFPA).

Again, a dramatic increase in positive outcomes are documented with increased education and increased support. In Ethiopia great progress has been made in sending girls to primary school. Young generations show lots of progress in attitudes, but it takes lots of effort to change whole communities of thought, action, and attitudes. Lots of NGOs are making very impressive progress and lots of great programs offer support and enablement. Of course, I think prayers for the world’s vulnerable always help too.

Thanks for your attention!

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