WUNRN
WOMEN & POVERTY
UN-INSTRAW: Women & Poverty: New
Challenges
More than 1 billion people live in
poverty around the world, and a great majority of them are women. Women’s
poverty is a violation of their human rights to health and well-being, food,
adequate housing, a safe and healthy living environment, social security,
employment and development. Poverty can also be the result of human rights
violations when women are denied equal access to employment opportunities, are
paid less than men for equal work, are prevented by law or custom from owning
or inheriting land, or when women become the victims of physical and sexual
abuse. When women are denied equal access to education, when they do not have
the right to decide on the number of spacing of their children, or when they
face an unequal share of the responsibility for raising children, their ability
to earn an income and to be protected from poverty is greatly compromised.
UNIFEM - Reducing Women's Poverty
& Exclusion
Since
poverty traps women in multiple layers of discrimination and hinders their
ability to claim their rights, ending feminized poverty has always been a core
UNIFEM priority. Not only do women bear a disproportionate burden of the
world's poverty, but in some cases, globalization has widened the gap, with
women losing more than their share of jobs, benefits and labour rights.
>From tax systems to trade regimes, however, economic policies and
institutions still mostly fail to take gender disparities into account. With
too few seats at the tables where economic decisions are made, women themselves
have little chance of rectifying the deepening of existing inequalities.
____________________________________________________________
UN News Centre
World Bank
13
February 2009 – The spreading global economic crisis is set to trap up to 53
million more people in poverty in developing countries this year on top of the
130-155 million driven into poverty in 2008 by soaring food and fuel prices,
bringing the total of those living on less than $2 a day to over 1.5 billion,
according to the World Bank.
The new forecast highlights the serious threat to achieving the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aim to slash poverty, hunger, infant and maternal mortality, and lack of access to health care and education, all by 2015. Preliminary estimates for 2009 to 2015 forecast that an average 200,000 to 400,000 more children a year may die if the crisis persists, making a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million over the period.
“The global
economic crisis threatens to become a human crisis in many developing countries
unless they can take targeted measures to protect vulnerable people in their
communities,” World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick said on the eve of the
Group of Seven (G7) finance ministers’ meeting of leading industrial countries
in Rome on Saturday, which he will attend.
“While much
of the world is focused on bank rescues and stimulus packages, we should not
forget that poor people in developing countries are far more exposed if their
economies falter. This is a global crisis requiring a global solution. The
needs of poor people in developing countries must be on the table.”
New
estimates for 2009 suggest that lower economic growth rates will trap 46
million more people on less than $1.25 a day than was expected prior to the
crisis, for a total of an extra 53 million trapped on less than $2 a day, on
top of the 1.37 billion before the current crises.
A World Bank
policy note issued in the run up to the G7 meeting reports that almost 40 per
cent of 107 developing countries were highly exposed to the effects of the
crisis and the remainder were moderately exposed, with less than 10 percent
facing little risk.
It is
critical for exposed countries to finance job creation, delivery of essential
services and infrastructure, and safety net programmes for the vulnerable,
according to the note, entitled The Global Economic Crisis: Assessing
Vulnerability with a Poverty Lens.
Yet three
quarters of these countries cannot raise funds domestically or internationally
to finance programmes to curb the effects of the downturn. One quarter of them
also lack the institutional capacity to expand spending to protect vulnerable
groups. The note urges financial support in the form of grants and low or zero
interest loans for these countries.
Mr. Zoellick
recently called for the establishment of a Vulnerability Fund in which each
developed country would devote 0.7 per cent of its stimulus package to aid
poorer countries set up safety net programmes, invest in infrastructure, and
support small and medium-sized enterprises and microfinance institutions.
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