Chiarini, A. (2017). Enhancing Opportunities for Rural Women’s Employment and Poverty Reduction: Strategies for Eradicating Poverty to Achieve Sustainable Development for All, United Nations Headquarters, New York
In an effort to contribute to the policy discussion surrounding the “business case” for rural women’s economic empowerment as a key strategy to achieve Agenda 2030, the paper identifies important factors and strategies that have contributed to the outcome of women’s empowerment and their links with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first strategy is to strengthen sustainable livelihoods by encouraging an environment that recognises and values rural women’s productive activities and upholds and fulfils their rights to decent work. Some of the various techniques mentioned include enhancing local food security and nutrition, generating employment opportunities to support women’s livelihoods, responding to the social and economic needs that rural women have identified, adding value to current initiatives, and collaborating with rural women’s organisations to build their capacities.
It is argued that technological progress, globalisation, and rural transformation generate opportunities for economic growth, poverty reduction, employment, and food security. To this end, to support women’s economic and social empowerment, combining direct implementation and on-the-ground coordination with other community-level programming has been used as a strategy, specifically with a focus on women’s access to capacity development, productive assets and technologies, finance, information, and services, employment, and market opportunities, and interventions aimed at promoting women’s leadership within producer organisations and rural communities at large.
Strengthening women’s economic opportunities and ability to make decisions in groups or organisations is a major focus of many initiatives to support women’s empowerment. However, women frequently continue to lack power at the household level. They are powerless to influence the priorities and spending habits of the household or to take care of their own medical needs. In accordance with SDG 5, target 4, which calls to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through the promotion of shared responsibility within the household, the Household Methodologies (HHMs) are creative, participatory approaches stated in the paper to promote equitable intra-household relations, fair division of labour, and shared decision-making processes.
The paper concludes that the strategy is beginning to show promise in terms of opening up job opportunities, and it’s critical to emphasise that these interventions are not only ensuring better incomes for the targeted rural women but are also having a positive impact on their families’ social welfare, including family health insurance and children’s education.