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THE FEMINISATION
OF URBAN POVERTY
source: www.unchs.org/mediacentre/
documents/whd/GRHSPR7.doc
www.careinternational.org.uk/
resource_centre/urban/urbanisation
_of_poverty.doc
www.doublestandards.org/
davis2.html
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In the developing world, women come to the cities from the countryside for many reasons, but always, they come expecting a better life. They come because they can no longer earn a living in their village, or they have lost their homes, or worse, their families… - yet what these women often find is a life of drudgery and dire poverty, increased vulnerability to violent crime, and limited employment opportunities – a life devoid of hope for improvement. According to the 2003 UN-HABITAT report, most of these migrant women end up living in urban slums, the victims of a phenomenon now known as the ‘feminisation of urban poverty’; (1)
- in a rapidly urbanising world- where housing is sub-standard, such as in slums and informal urban settlements - it is women who suffer most from environmental degradation and lack of essential services;
- in Africa, for example, women headed households are among the poorest in both rural and urban areas. In these last ones however, women headed households are increasingly high especially in slums (about 30%). In some African cities, slums are a refuge for women who are fleeing difficult situations created by domestic violence, divorce or marriage and property inheritance disputes;
- these women must take care of their children and run their households, making them generally less mobile than men. They are also usually less educated than men, and these realities combine to limit their income-earning opportunities. Women receive only a small share of developmental opportunities and are often excluded from education, better jobs and political systems. As a result, women-headed households generally suffer more from poverty, malnutrition and disease. And this happens worldwide;
- in Asia, lack of access and control over land has many negative impacts for women. Eviction of residents of informal settlements is the most dramatic manifestation of the fight for land and the position of the poor. In the case of evictions women suffer in particular as they bare responsibility for finding new shelter both for themselves and for their children and extended families. At the same time, the majority of Asian women have no access to housing or credit facilities;
- the 2003 UN-Habitat report cites a study of urban populations in Bengal, India, where healthcare is provided according to an individual’s status in a household. This means that, due to the lower status of women and girls, less money is spent on them for medical treatment. This disturbing fact was clearly illustrated in the case of a cholera epidemic that occurred in Bangladesh, in which female fatalities were 3 times higher than male fatalities – not because women were more vulnerable to the disease, of course, but rather because women generally were not taken to hospital until the disease was far more advanced; (1)
- in major Latin American cities, the increased emphasis on market forces has also led to growing land speculation and to increasing land prices. These land prices and subsequently rents have tended to increase while the real incomes of the middle and low-income groups fall. The urban poor, women in particular, cannot afford even the most modest plots. The only alternative for them is the unauthorised occupation of land without services and self-construction of makeshift housing;
- the poor are currently the largest producers of shelter and builders of cities in the world – and in many cases, women are taking the lead in devising survival strategies that are becoming, in effect, the governance structures of urban slums in developing countries. This is especially true in the all too commonly encountered situation where formal governance structures have failed them;
- throughout the Third World, in fact, the economic shocks of the 1980s and 1990s forced individuals to regroup around the pooled resources of households and, especially, the survival skills and desperate ingenuity of women.
- In China and the industrialising cities of Southeast Asia, millions of young women indentured themselves to assembly lines and factory squalor.
- In Africa and most of Latin America (Mexico’s northern border cities excepted), this option did not exist. Instead, deindustrialisation and the decimation of male formal-sector jobs compelled women to improvise new livelihoods as piece workers, liquor sellers, street vendors, cleaners, washers, ragpickers, nannies and prostitutes;
- in Latin America, where urban women’s labour-force participation had always been lower than in other continents, the surge of women into tertiary informal activities during the 1980s was especially dramatic; (2)
- urban poverty was also massively feminised in the ex-Comecon countries after capitalist ‘liberation’ in 1989. In the early 1990s extreme poverty in the former ‘transitional countries’ (as the UN calls them) soared from 14 million to 168 million: a mass pauperization almost without precedent in history; (3)
- if, on a global balance-sheet, this economic catastrophe was partially offset by the much-praised success of China in raising incomes in its coastal cities, China’s market ‘miracle’ was purchased by ‘an enormous increase in wage inequality among urban workers during the period 1988 to 1999.’ Women and minorities were especially disadvantaged.
(1) UN-HABITAT, “The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlement”, Earthscan, London 2003.
(2) Orlandina de Oliveira and Bryan Roberts, “The Many Roles of the Informal Sector in Development”, in Cathy Rakowski, ed., Contrapunto: the Informal Sector Debate in Latin America, Albany 1994, pp. 64–8; as mentioned in Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, March-April 2004, www.doublestandards.org/davis2.html
(3) Slums, p. 2.
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