POVERTY FOR WOMEN IN AFRICA STILL A MAJOR ISSUE

Poverty has a female face and the global economic downturn has had its greatest impact on women.  More women lost jobs and have been forced to manage shrinking incomes to feed and their children and manage shrunken household incomes.

The portrait of the typical poor African youth is a young woman about 18.5 years old. She lives in a rural area and has dropped out of school. She is single, but is about to be married or be given in marriage to a man approximately twice her age. She will be the mother of six or seven kids in about 20 years.

The global economic crisis has hit African women on two fronts. First, it arrested capital accumulation by women, and second, it has drastically reduced the   individual incomes of women,  as well as the budgets they manage on behalf of households.

Unlike rich countries where more men tend to lose jobs compared to women, the crisis in Africa is leaving women with ever fewer job choices. In many export-oriented industries – for example, the cut-flower industry in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, and the textile industry in Kenya and Lesotho, it is women, not men, who are bleeding jobs because of the crisis.

Declining subsidies and a tightening of micro-finance lending further restricts the funds available to women in Africa to run their households and provide for their children.