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Cost of gender disparities in access to socio-economic services in Malawi
Research Report # 0302
Prepared by Naomi Ngwira and Esnat Mkandawire
Institute for Policy Research and Analysis for Dialogue.
POB 2090, 83 Link Road, Namiwawa, Blantyre
Phone: 265-1-621871; 265-9-510596; 265-1-510362
Email: IPRAD@malawi.net
June 2003
Posted with permission of the authors
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Abstract
Cost benefit analyses of increasing men's and women's literacy and access to agriculture services as planned in the
Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper show that there are substantial net economic benefits in implementing the plans.
But the analyses also show that there are significant incremental net economic benefits of doing
this while closing the gender disparities in access to these services. It is also shown to be economically
worthwhile to implement activities of the National Strategic Plan to end Gender Based Violence. With these benefits,
GDP can grow at a rate that is at least twice the average annual growth rate of the past five years.
Introduction
This is a report of the findings of Cost Benefit Analyses (CBA) of the gender disparities in literacy and access to agriculture services in Malawi, and the interventions to redress it and also of activities to reduce Gender Based Violence (GBV). The purpose of the study is to provide information to assist in advocating for and planning programs that are gender responsive, and thereby contribute to overall national economic growth and poverty reduction. The objective of the study is to estimate the incremental financial benefits of addressing the gender disparities. A review of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (MPRSP) process showed that there was no gender rationalization of the allocation of resources and the setting of targets (Gender Studies and Outreach Unit, 2001). This study aims to show the economic gains of gender targeting of expenditures and reducing gender inequalities.
Gender inequalities persist in participation in or access to benefits of development all over the world (Tinker 1990; UNIFEM 2000). In Malawi women are disadvantaged in terms of access to health, education, and agriculture services (Semu et al 2003; Ngwira et al 2000; Bernbaum, 1999; Castro-Leal 1996; Ngalande Banda 1995). The debate on the importance of the gender variable in economic and social policy analysis revolves around two issues. The first one is whether women and girls or female-headed households should be the special targets of programs like credit, education etc, that do not provide for biologically determined roles (Buvinic and Gupta 1995; Kabber 1997). The second issue is whether gender inequalities impede economic growth, which is considered a condition for poverty reduction.
The implementation of gender sensitive programs usually requires that there be gender targeting in service delivery, and specifically that women should be given priority or quotas in access to the benefits or resources of development programs. This is a contentious issue. Although much of the recent literature does indicate that women are disadvantaged in terms of access to social and economic services, it is not always easy to show that women or female headed households deserve to be a special target of programs. The evidence is at best mixed (Lampietti and Stalker 2000). For example, Appleton (1995b:5) reports, and to appearances as if contradicting himself:
In Uganda, woman headed households as a whole do not appear to be poorer when assessed by consumption and income. Although women do work longer hours, there is no evidence that woman headed households' parity in incomes and consumption is brought at the expense of a further burden on women's time. Women headed households have less land, but ownership of this asset is not associated with higher welfare. They also have fewer other assets but this is to some degree offset by higher food consumption. All this suggests that women should not be designated as a targeted group on which poverty alleviation economic intervention should be focused. In Uganda gender of head of households provides no information on the economic status of the household. However the same is not true of a number of social indicators: compared to man-headed households, in woman-headed households girls are less likely to be enrolled in school, the sick are less likely to be sent for treatment, and mortality rates are higher.
Chant (1997) reporting on research in Mexico, Costa Rica and the Philippines, summarized her findings in the following way:
'the poorest of the poor' is a misleading stereotype for female headed households…. A central tenet of the argument is that aggregate household incomes tell us relatively little about poverty and that the examination of intrahousehold characteristics is vital for understanding economic vulnerability. Moreover, while stress on poverty of female headed households highlights the fact that women are disadvantaged by gender inequality, undue emphasis on material privation negates other elements (for example ideological, psychological, and legal- institutional factors) which are important in the formation and survival of women headed households, and which may mean more in terms of personal perceptions and experience of hardship than economic factors per se (p27).
Some of these conclusions depend on the research design. For example, unlike Appleton 1995 cited above, Tabaijuka (1994) found that:
In Tanzania, reducing the time burdens of women could increase the household cash incomes for smallholder coffee and banana growers by 10%, labor productivity by 15%, and capital productivity by 44%.
However, for Malawi, the results of the Integrated Household Survey conducted by the National Statistical office show that the sex of head of household is a statistically significant explanatory variable for poverty, even when poverty is measured using consumption expenditure.
Other studies and literature still indicate the benefits of giving special attention to female headed households and women. This is mostly in the new areas of public expenditure management and gender budgeting (Budlender and Ngwira 1999; Tanzania Gender Networking Program 1999). It is argued and demonstrated that gender targeting of public expenditures increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the expenditures.
Gender relations tend to result in distortions leading to created by biased and absent markets.
Cut backs in public expenditures that are characteristic features of the policy prescriptions of the
IMF and World Bank often worsen these distortions and crowd out women's contribution to economic growth.
New approaches to macroeconomics that stress the complementarities of public and private investment (e.g. Bacha 1994)
and production activities open the way for examining taxation and public expenditure through a gender lens to reveal
how spreading the burden of the reproductive tax1 can promote the development of well functioning labour markets and
contribute to equitable and sustainable growth (Palmer 1995:1981).
Redistributing the reproductive tax can take the form of public spending to reduce the workload of women. For example public expenditures can be used to reduce the cost to households of sending girls to school through for example child day care programs to take up a chore done by girls, or through reducing the distance travelled to fetch water and firewood. Sometimes the actual financial cost of sending girls to school can be subsidised directly (Rose and Al-Samarrai 1997). These kinds of public expenditures can accelerate the attainment of universal enrolment. The result is higher productivity of the women and girls later in their life, with consequent gains in economic growth.
The World Bank used available survey data on enrolment rates by gender and income quintiles, price elasticities of demand for girls' and boys' primary schooling, and published data on the share of private expenditures in total education expenditures in developing countries, to estimate the cost increment of gender targeting the expenditures. The findings were that a cut in cost recovery that got every school age child to school, and was gender targeted would cost 20.35% more in public resources and 33.33% if no gender targeting was followed. Cutting cost of primary education for both poor boys and girls, and increasing enrolment without necessarily targeting girls would need 16.16% more resources, and if gender targeting is followed, the increase in public resources required would be 7.93% (World Bank 2000:33).
The debate thus continues on whether to target women headed households. What is clear is that where as woman headed households may not have significantly lower average incomes, they fare badly in terms of indicators of human capabilities like health, education and employment (labor allocation) that are the important determinants of productivity and economic growth.
This leads to the second issue of whether gender inequalities impact the growth rate of an economy, and the speed of poverty reduction. Studies show evidence of a relationship between gender inequality and growth (Tinker 1989; Forestrythe et al 2000; World Bank 2000). Klasen (1999) estimated that if Sub-Saharan Africa had the growth in the gendered ratio of educational attainments of East Asia, economic growth would have been 0.5% points higher, and that the differential in education and employment opportunities between men and women served to reduce annual per capita growth by 0.8 % points. This is significant given that average annual growth in SSA stood at only 0.7% between 1960 and 1992.The magnitudes of effects give credence to the argument that one important element in Africa's slow growth may be its high gender inequality in education and employment (Blackden and Bhanu 1999).
There are similar findings relating to poverty reduction. Using simulations based on a semi-log function for consumption expenditures, the data from the IHS lead to the conclusion that 'the most effective and sustainable way of reducing poverty is higher levels of educational attainment, especially for girls and women'. The report suggests that increasing by one the number of women with high school education in households with women without high school, would lead to a 10% point drop in the head count of the poor (Poverty Monitoring System Policy Brief No.5). One channel through which this works is that educated women want less children so that per capita consumption of their families goes up. The other channel is that women are able to move into jobs in the service sector and get higher incomes.
At the sectoral level, studies in Malawi and Zambia (Due and Gladwin 1991) show that efficiency is lost when women have less access to productive resources. Women's labor tends to be under-utilized in formal production processes, and over-utilized in informal activities. As women's and men's labor has the same productivity, the equimarginal principles of optimization are violated, and the result is allocative inefficiency (Quisumbing 1996). This justifies raising the level of resources given to women.
In Burkina Faso, Udry et al 1995 found that if existing resources are shifted between men's and women's plots within the same household, output could be increased by 10-20%.
Chant (1997) cautions that although the intention of pointing to the deprivation in female headed households and the economic consequences of gender inequalities is welcome so as to legitimate reallocation of resources to them, it has the unintended effect of feeding
into negative images of, and attitudes towards, women headed households. This can act to depress the social and civil legitimacy of female headed households and, arguably to reinforce the idea that women's proper place is in the home of a husband, father or other male custodian (p27).
The results of these studies, stimulating and to appearances contradictory, indicate the information gaps existing on gender and development, and provide the justification for exploring the quantitative benefits and costs of reducing gender disparities in Malawi. There are no studies known that have been done on Malawi of this nature.
This report next outlines the CBA methodology that is used, it then sets out the absolute financial benefits, costs, and the net financial benefits of two scenarios: the MPRSP scenario of increasing literacy while maintaining gender disparity, and the alternative scenario of increasing literacy while closing gender disparities in literacy. It then shows the net incremental benefits of reducing the gender disparity in literacy over the MRPSP Scenario. The conclusions drawn from the study and the policy implications form the final part of the report.
Footnote:
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The time and resources extorted from (mostly) women as they try to fill in the gap left by the withdrawal of the government from the social sectors, due to expenditure cuts of the SAPs.
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