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Globally, many women bear the responsibility of being the primary caregiver for their families. As mothers, wives, daughters, and grandmothers, women care for family members through illness, gather water, produce food, and educate children. Women bear the brunt of economic policies required for new loans and debt relief.
Indeed, cuts to social services, privatization and other reforms push women further into poverty and increase their workloads, jeopardizing the health and well being of their families.
In April 2007, Gender Action, a Jubilee USA Network partner, released its "Gender Guide to World Bank and IMF Policy-Based Lending." The report breaks new ground in examining how standard policy decisions and practices not only deepen poverty, but lead to further disparities between men and women. In September 2006, Gender Action and CEE Bankwatch Network published the report "Boom-Time Blues: Big Oil’s Gender Impacts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Sakhalin." The report demonstrates detrimental gender and health implications linked to World Bank lending practices and extractive industries projects (Big Oil) in eastern Europe.
Structural Adjustment Programs & Women
Structural Adjustment programs (SAPs) — economic reforms imposed on impoverished countries as a condition of new loans and debt relief from the IMF and World Bank — require countries to make drastic changes in trade and social spending.
One major change required by these policies is opening agricultural markets to heavily subsidized goods, often from the United States. In sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, where women produce between 60 percent and 80 percent of food, small farmers cannot compete with cheap imports from rich nations.
Trade liberalization has also caused men to migrate at higher rates to urban centers or other countries in search of work. Women are left as sole providers for their families.
When faced with the inability to produce food for subsistence and income, women turn to work in factories in free trade zones. Women in these factories often face sexual harassment, intimidation, unsafe work conditions, meager pay and repetitive stress injuries.
In addition, when governments cut social spending to meet budget requirements set by the IMF, women often have to make up for the loss to social services. Cuts to education spending and the increasing cost of education to the studentís family often mean that girls lose out. In countries were there are fees for education two thirds of the children who donít attend school are girls.
Women are also disadvantaged by the privatization of health care services, and many mothers watch their children die of preventable diseases like diarrhea and malaria while their countries send money instead for debt service. Mothers in the global South also lose much needed prenatal care without access to health services. In Congo, where the government spends 16 times more for debt service than health care, 515 in 1,000 children die before they turn five. One mother, 36-year-old Nsimenya Kinyama, has lost six children; most to treatable diseases.
Standing in Solidarity with the Women of the World
The burden of debt rests disproportionately on the shoulders of women. By becoming part of the Jubilee movement, women and men in developed countries can help build a better world for women and their families everywhere.
Sources: United Nations Human Development Report 2004; Craig Timberg, "For Congoís Mothers, Unceasing Loss: War, Though Ended, Still Claiming Children," The Washington Post, Feb. 12, 2005.
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