Gendered poverty
* South Africa Nowhere outside South Africa do class, 'race' and gender interact so clearly in defining structural inequality. Tamara Braam examines the relationship between poverty and gender in the South African context, looks at the different ways of analysing and conceptualising genderised poverty, and sets out the guidelines against which the impact of poverty programmes can be measured.
South African society's most salient feature until the 1990's was the racialisation of the entire political, economic and social systems. The people of South Africa were racially classified (based on physical features such as skin colour, hair texture, shape of nose etc.) into 'white", Coloured' and Indian'. The atrocity of the apartheid system of legalised racism lies not only in having socialised South Africans into positions of relative inferiority and superiority but also that this has had direct material socio-economic implications. In short 'race' and class in the South African context have emerged as intrinsic to each other whereby black people (those classified African, coloured and Indian) were systematically oppressed and exploited, the result being large section of these groups being forced into positions of deprivation and abject poverty.
According to the 1995 United Nations Development Programme report, South Africa ranks 95th among the countries of the world in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI). However if black and white South Africans were considered separate "countries", the white would be ranked 34th, alongside Portugal, and the black would be ranked 128th, alongside Ghana. (UNDP, 1995: 22).
Black women in South Africa have historically suffered multi oppression and alongside children, disabled and old people have been rendered most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation. Bearing the brunt of apartheid's migrant laws by being forcefully separated from partners and husbands and left to fight for survival in rural areas with little/no prospect of sustainable livelihood, black women embody and personify structural inequality in
Many black women continue to migrate: leaving their children and families in rural areas, out of desperation, to work in the kitchens and houses of the 14 International Viewpoint #301 urban middle and upper classes. Black women's poverty coloured by their racial classification of the previous apartheid era is genderised in that their position and status as women, further compromises their chances of living a tolerable life. Key indicators of poverty
There is no uniformly agreed upon poverty line for South Africa. Estimates of the poor population range from 35% -55%. In a 1995 World Bank report on Key Indicators of Poverty in South Africa, used as a base for the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the poorest 40% of households were defined as poor, and the poorest 20% of households as 'ultra-poor.'
According to the report, South Africa has one of the worst records among comparable middle-income developing countries, in terms of social indicators (health, education, safe water, and fertility) and among the worst records in terms of
Nearly 95% of South Africa's poor are 'African', 5% are 'Coloured' and less than 1% are 'Indian' and white. Female-headed households have a 50% higher poverty rate than male headed households.
The vast majority of the poor and ultra poor have no access to electricity, running water in the household or modern sanitation. 1/3 of the poor live in shacks or traditional dwellings. About 95% live in rural areas. Almost halt have no education or only incomplete primary education. Less than 30% of poor working-age adults are actually working. Over 45% of the poor are children below 16 years. Three Perspectives on poverty
Poverty can be evaluated in different ways. With an "Income perspective," a person is poor if, and only it, her income level is below the defined poverty line. Many countries have adopted income poverty lines to monitor progress in reducing poverty incidence. Often the cutoff poverty line is defined in terms of having enough income for a specified amount of food.
The income-based approach, used by the World Bank is limiting but useful in that incomes are important as human development cannot be guaranteed if people do not have a means to secure a
In the modern capitalist world it is essential that people have access to a secure, steady reasonable income. However it is not the only factor impacting on
Incomes differ for whole populations so average incomes provide a distorted picture of a national economy, averaging out rich individual incomes with poor incomes.
On a social group /class level incomes differ within the same group e.g. within the working class one will find higher income and lower income depending on what occupations workers find themselves in. There are urban and rural divides and gender divisions on a group level, which are not taken into account.
Alternatively, with a "Basic Needs Perspective," poverty is defined as deprivation of material requirements for minimally acceptable fulfilment of human needs, including food. This concept of deprivation goes well beyond the lack of private income: it includes the need for basic health and education and essential services that have to be provided by the community to prevent people from falling into poverty. It also recognises the need for employment and participation.
The "Capability perspective" understands poverty as the absence of some basic capabilities to function - a person lacking the opportunity to achieve some minimally acceptable levels of these functionings. The functionings relevant to this analysis can vary from such physical ones as being well nourished, being adequately clothed and sheltered and avoiding preventable morbidity, to more complex social achievements such as partaking in the life of the community. The capability approach reconciles the notions of absolute and relative poverty, since relative deprivation in incomes and commodities can lead to an absolute deprivation in minimum capabilities.
Poverty in South Africa is usually measured using the October Household Survey. Poverty patterns are looked at using the household as the unit of measurement. This is problematic, because households generally consist of women and men. And so, patterns of inequality and poverty where women and girls do not have equitable access to cash, schooling or even food in relation to men and boys is not taken into account. Human Development Framework
This perspective draws on each of the three perspectives but particularly on the capability perspective. The focus lies not merely in the impoverished state in which the person actually lives but also on enlarging people's choices.
From a human development perspective poverty means the denial of choices and opportunities for a tolerable life (UNDP 1997,5). Given the different intersecting dimensions of poverty and the complexity of how they all impact on the quality of life
EXI
HEARD
A DISTURBING THING ON
THE
RADIO.
THE
DOCTOR WAS
TALKING
ABOUT concerned about public transport, or the construction and maintenance of basic roads, tracks and paths in rural areas. With emerge, most white or middle class women unthinkingly use vast amounts of electricity each day. Many African, or poorer women spend much time and money accessing much smaller, and often inadequate, amounts of energy". (The
WHAT'S WRONG? WHAT IS AIDS AIDS?-THAT'S JUST GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA!
THESE GUYS KNOW NOTHING AIDS
A SERIOUS NEW SICKNESS AIDS IS A WE DONT WHICH AFFECTS EVERYBODY.
DON'T STOP IT, AIDS COULD KILL MANY PEOPLE. that a group/individual enjoys, using the income index on its own is inadequate. The UNDP had defined human development as the process of enlarging people's choices. The most critical ones are to lead a long and healthy life, to be educated and to enjoy a decent standard of living Additional choices include political freedom, other guaranteed human rights and various ingredients of self-respect.
The human development process in South Africa is about an improved quality of life for the "poor" which means meeting the myriad of challenges of housing, literacy provision, adequate health care services, increased employment opportunities, clean running water, etc.
Human Poverty as a concept within the human development framework means the denial of choices of opportunities for a tolerable life (UNDP, 1997:5) This perspective argues that poverty manifests itself in the deprivation of people's lives and goes beyond material things. It can mean denial of opportunities and choices most
AND IT'S AN AMERICAN PLOT. (AG, IT'S ONLY A WHITE MAN'S DISEASE.
HOW DO YOU KNOW basic to human development - a long, healthy life, dignity, and freedom from violence, reproductive choice, self-esteem and enjoying a decent standard living. The UNDP (1997) argues that poverty must be addressed in all its dimensions. Gender oppression and racial discrimination are obvious factors impacting on individuals and groups' levels of poverty.
Gender issues are not 'women's issues' - they are issues impacting on the lives and development of whole communities. Women are not a homogenous group and the way's in which they will experience gender oppression and hence the ways in which they can respond to it will differ according to their respective background.
"With health, most white or middle class women have access to some sort of medical aid. African, or poorer women are much more reliant on the public health system. With transport, vehicle license charges and other issues relating to private cars will affect most white or middle class women. African, or poorer women will be
Second Women's Budget 1997, 44). "Time poverty"
One of the most critical pillars and manifestations of gender oppression is the blindness of the unpaid labour which women do in the home.
Child bearing, child rearing, taking care of the needs of the extended family are all roles played by women, much more than men. This work is unrecognised, unpaid and taken for granted yet society could not function effectively without it. Unpaid labour is time consuming, often laborious and repetitive and places demands on women all hours of the day. Poverty can also be measured in terms of time and this is a critical factor in looking at gendered poverty for women are disproportionately time poor.
Conventional economics experiences difficulty in conceptualising time poverty as it does not have a specific monetary value. But the concept of "time poverty" Is particularly useful to feminists, because it is the sexual division of labour which allocates women the bulk of unpaid labour while men engage in work that is more highly valued in the productive sphere that is a foundation of gender oppression.
"Time budgets use the 24 hours in a day as the measure and the amount of time required to complete all the tasks required of one to fulfil their paid and unpaid obligations and to rest and otherwise care for themselves sufficiently to continue. A deficit implies that the person has a 'choice' to spend less time in caring for themselves so that s/he becomes ill and/or less able to do other things. Or, it may imply that the person is spending less time working, which reduces income (when the work is paid) or reduces benefits to society (when it is unpaid (Elson, 1996 a: 23)
Different approach have been developed in attempting to address gender oppression Women in Development (WID)
This approach assumes that integrating women into the mainstream through various policy measures is the best way to redress women's situation in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and South America.
The underlying philosophy is integration - adding on to existing development interventions. Classic examples of 'integrating women' are income generation projects designed to provide supplementary income and based on the assumption that women have a lot of spare time on their hands.
Within WID, different policy frameworks have emerged, articulated by Moser
15
* South Africa (1993) as equity, anti poverty, efficiency and empowerment frameworks.
The problem with WID is that it considers women as a homogenous group and does not take racial, economic and other factors into account. It projects the myth that women's development can be achieved by addressing economic issues alone. It does not question the kind of development being imposed on developing countries. It has no scope for change and transformation, as it does not challenge existing power relationships in society. Gender and Development (GAD)
Ideas from the third world movements among others have resulted in the emergence of this alternative approach. GAD does not consider women as a uniform group. Women's situation must be seen in context of the socio-economic, racial and other factors. Society is considered a major factor in the making of female and male identities. And it is important to focus not only on women but on the relationship between women and men and how society influences they're respective roles.
The problem with GAD is that it is easy to disguise the issues that really affect women by focusing on gender in a broad analytical way, concealing personal issues which have a profound impact on women's development.
The GAD approach introduces vocabulary, which focuses on gender identity, gender roles, division labour, reproductive roles, productive roles, community management roles and community politics roles.
In particular, it introduces the concepts of Practical Gender Needs (PGN), which arise out of the particular role which women play - like the need for child care -and Strategic Gender Needs (SGN), which usually challenge the existing power relationships between men and women. This approach provides 'technical tools for doing gender planning and analysis in a framework geared towards transformation.
Unfortunately, Development Approach" has become the
'buzz word' in the development sector. Its adoption does not necessarily represent a shift and a commitment to challenging gender power relationships.
Also, the technical emphasis of the GAD approach tends to shift the focus away from developing an understanding of the wider socio-political-economic context and how this in turn impacts on people's lives.
As a further critique of GAD, Nair (1996) asserts that the linking of gender to development means that gender debates become shaped by development debates which in turn are shaped by the interests of international institutions like the IMF. Characteristics of gendered poverty
Many Marxists and Feminists in Africa and elsewhere have used a Human Development Framework to conceptualise and discuss poverty. This lends itself to integrating an understanding and analysis of gender relations as a critical component of 'enlarging people's choices as well as 16 International Viewpoint #301 raising the level of well being achieved'. (UNDP, 1997).
The most critical indicators are: to lead a long, and healthy life, to be educated and to enjoy a decent standard of living. Additional choices include political freedom, other guaranteed human rights and various ingredients of self respect.
Well known British health theorist Lesley Doyal (1994) had this to say at the 1994 Women's Health Conference in
"In the end, it is not doctors that (make) women sick or better. It is the reality of their lives... it is how society (and men) treat them that is the central issue. Instead of starting with diseases and looking for their causes, we need to start with women's daily activities and assess their potential for providing or destroying women's health." (quoted in Goosen, Klugman, 1996)
Women bear the major responsibility for child bearing and child rearing and at the same time often work to supplement the household income. Women put food on the table, care for the elderly and sick and contribute to the community functioning by raising funds for the church or working together to get a water or housing project off the ground. With all the demands placed on women there is little time to take care of their own health and development. Women experience low social status, political oppression and exploitation by bosses and family which results in poor physical and mental health, which in turn feeds back into powerlessness and poor self esteem.
One of the most critical factors to radically improve a nation's health and quality of life is to make sure that everyone has access to safe, clean water and toilets and dispose of waste hygienically. Millions of people in South Africa do not have access to safe water supplies, toilets and refuse removal.
In many areas, only polluted water from rivers, streams and dams is available, forcing women to spend what little money they have on expensive fuel to boil water. The effort that women have to make to obtain water, a basic necessity of life, is a criminal waste of women's time, energy
One of the ways in which water gets polluted is through contact with human faces, which contain many dangerous bacteria, spreading illnesses such as typhoid, diarrhoea and cholera. Life is partıcularly harsh for women living in informal settlements as without modern sanitation and clean water, even if women themselves are not ill, the burden of caring for children or elderly/frail people is their responsibility.
Not having access to adequate, quality reproductive health care has devastating results on the lives of women as they cannot space the birthing of their children and are unable to make informed decisions about their lives, reproductive system and bodies. Women finding themselves pregnant repeatedly and struggling to cope with the children they presently have, have resorted to back street abortions with disastrous consequences for their future health, fertility and lives. Unsafe abortion is one of the five primary causes of maternal mortality and leads to an estimate 20,000 deaths every year (World Health Organisation, 1991); 99% of these deaths occur in the developing world. Safety and security
"According to the Interpol International Crime Statistics Report (ICPO) of 1994 South Africa has the highest reported rape ratio in the world while in terms of theft of motor cars and property related crime South Africa is found in twenty seventh and thirteenth positions respectively".
The extent of the epidemic level of the problem of violence against women is captured in the following statistics:
* Rape Crisis claims that 80% of rapes are perpetrated by acquaintances of people known to the survivor.
• The most prominent non-governmental organisations working in the field estimate that one in six women are abused by their partners (Human Rights
Watch, 1995:45)
• In the first study on femicides
(women killed by intimates) in South
Africa, 41% of women in the magisterial district of Johannesburg who were murdered during 1994 were killed by their partners (Vetten, 1995).
• Rates of rape were highest in Kwazulu Natal and appear to reflect overall levels of violence in an area
• The Human Rights Watch Report quotes police estimates that only 2.8% of all rapes committed are reported.
• Just less than one third of reported rapes actually reach the court and have those cases prosecuted only half result
(Source: Second Women's Budget)
Despite the fact that violence against women should clearly be a top priority issue for the police force the SAP has not identified it as such. Women value their own safety and bodily integrity more than they do motor cars, hand bags and any other cash/assets that they may own but decisions at a policy level has certainly not taken this into account. The brutal face of violence against women, historically, has not been exposed but like the invisible labour of women in the home has been concealed by the demise of the private/ domestic sphere.
The low attendance of the public men's march to protest against violence against women on 22 November 1997 which had received much media attention and had been the build up of weeks of planning and campaigning is indeed a reflection that South Africans have a long way to go in prioritising the issues as a national priority. Yet daily, hourly, women's lives are being shattered and destroyed with no possible chance of overcoming the barriers which stand between them and dignity, freedom and optimal human development.
In South Africa, as in other countries the vast majority of persons using the public transport system are women. Yet the way in which the public transport system is set up is not taking the multiple roles which women fulfil into account.
Many poor women find themselves in the informal sector and need to use public transport to move their goods from one point to the next. Often women travel with babies and young children, which makes using, congested, smoke-filled trains particularly difficult. Many women work extra long hours, having to leave in the early hours of the morning to return in late evening: this confronts them with the problem of irregular transport and the anger of sexual harassment. people were placed outside of the cities has meant that distances between home and work for black working women are long, eating into their time. "For example, in her study of economically active single mothers in Pretoria, Fairhurst found that the average distance travelled to work was 23.7km for African women, 12.4 for coloured and 10.8km for white women. (Fairhurst, 1982: 142)
Rural women have to walk great distances to collect wood for cooking and to fetch water. The combined effects of increased distances travelled and heavier loads places extra stress on the well being of rural women. There are very long distances to travel to reach basic health care amenities. In some instances when a child/family member is ill a rural woman is obliged to take her other children along with her as she will be away for more than a day and does not have access to reliable transport. In many cases she has to pay a relatively large amount of money to a person who owns a car to transport her in such an emergency. "To be educated"
Pre-primary education and the Educare Programme receives less than 1% of the overall education budget. This lack of provision of services severely hampers the income earning ability of mothers and care givers who cannot afford to pay for privately run educare centres. Whose wealth, whose health?
Health services' spending*. 198) atest dat Country 37 COUT per 100,000 ive birth г 1,00 100 1 South Ainc Botswana Malaysia
High rates of teenage pregnancy are a major reason for girls dropping out of school. The official teenage pregnancy rate in South Africa, excluding the former 'Homelands, is 330 for every 1000 women younger than 19.
In 1994 of the 25.6 million adults aged 15 years and older 7.4 million could be described as illiterate, and over half, 4m were women. There were about 10.3 million adults with education levels of Standard 5-8 needing vocational training More than half were women.
There is a direct link between the level of education and the degree of poverty. More than 2/3 of households where the household head has either no education or less than standard one, are living in poverty. This impacts more particularly on women.
Although the teaching profession is dominated by women (60 and 80% of employees), men hold 58% of principal posts, 69% of deputy principal posts and 50% of head of department posts.
Women's low level of education limits their access to skilled and thus higher paid jobs. In 1991 women represented 54.5% of people older than 18 years with no education. This in turn limits women's opportunities to enjoy a decent standard of living
Makgetla (1995) defines three distinct segments to the labour market. In the primary labour market, women are concentrated in service professions such as nursing and teaching and the clothing industry. Women occupy a disproportionately high number of jobs in the secondary labour market, mainly in agriculture, domestic work and the informal sector. And women are the exclusively occupiers of the non-market labour segment -agriculture and domestic work.
The jobs which women perform are mainly in the service sectors: catering, retail, domestic, secretarial and clerical, whereas the job men perform are located in manufacturing occupations. Women are concentrated in low paid jobs. Women are 59% of those with annual earnings of R1,000-2,999 (US$200-590), but a mere 6.4% of the R100,000-299,999 income bracket. (Nyman and Caga, 1995).
Reasons for women's low income include their concentration in jobs that are flexible and low-paid. Flexible work includes casual work, part-time work, subcontracted work, seasonal work and home-
Women are also located in jobs where there is a low level of unionism, which could serve as a further explanation for women's low income. While low level of formal education and training qualifications contribute towards limiting employment opportunities for women, this is not the only factor. Women's (unpaid responsibilities in the home are often used to justify employers' discrimination in the workplace.
Women represent a major percentage of the unemployed. According to one World Bank/SALDRU survey, 71.2% of African women of the age group aged 16-
Measuring poverty
Women's lives in the new global economy
• £4/$5/35FF. Cheque payable to P. Rousset, IIRE, Postbus 53290, 1007 Amsterdam, Netherlands.
* South Africa 24 are unemployed. Trade liberalisation policies have had a particular ellect on the textile and clothing industries whose work force is 80% female. When South Africa opened up trade with the rest of the world, many of it factories were unable to supply goods as cheaply as their competitors or at the right quality. The result has been that close to 40 000 jobs have been lost in the clothing and textile industry.
Large numbers of women are engaged in the informal sector of the economy. A key feature of this is that as within the formal economy, women occupy a disadvantaged position. Horn (1994) argues that often when activities undertaken by women become more profitable that they are gradually taken over by men. She scribes this to the inferior legal status of women, men's greater access to resources such as credit and women's role in social reproduction. Concluding remarks
It should be clear from all of the above that just as poverty in South Africa has been racialised, it also has a particular gendered characteristics that can be woven into a discussion an any aspect of socioeconomic life in our country.
The gendered nature of poverty needs to be a critical part of an analysis and strategy to tackle poverty in a fundamental way.
It will fail if it is added on as an important issue, as articulated in some WID approaches. It will fail if it loses perspective of the power relationships between women and men by focusing on gender in an overtly technical way. It will fail if it is only focused on outcome and not simultaneously on process.
Monitoring the various indicators cannot substitute for building the capacity of black people, poor people and poor, black women who are the embodiment of the most abject poverty in our country to participate in, understand and determine processes, political agendas and strategies which will deal with gendered poverty in a fundamental way. *
Electronic
Viewpoint
Some articles for the next issue of International Viewpoint are already viewable at our web site. We are slowly adding a downloadable archive of articles published in previous issues www.internationalen.se/sp/ivp.html The International Viewpoint list server enables you to receive all our articles, as soon as they are translated. Several weeks earlier than
There is no easy way to measure genderised poverty. Tamara Braam looks at the various indexes that have been used within a Human Development Perspective, and suggests a few guidlines for measuring progress in adressing genderised poverty. Human Development Indicator...
The Human Development Index (HDI) measure the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development - longevity, knowledge and a decent standard of living. A chon hin ran điy ane altd comond composite index, the HDI contains thee variables: life expectancy, educational attainment (adult literacy and combined
The Human Poverty Index (HPI) measures deprivation in basic human development in the same dimensions as the HDI. The variables used are the percentage of people expected to die betore age 40, the percentage of adults who are illiterate, and overall economic provisioning in terms of the percentage of people without access to health services and safe water and the percentage of under weight children under 5 years old
The Gender-related Development Index (GDI) measures the achievements in the same dimensions and variables as the HDI does, but takes account of inequality between women and men. The greater the gender disparity in basic human development, the lower a country's GDI compared with its HDI. The GDI is, in effect, the HDI adjusted downwards for gender inequality.
Whereas the GDI is an indicator of gender inequality in basic capabilities, the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) indicates whether women are able to actively participate in economic and political life. It focuses on participation, measuring gender inequality in key areas of economic and political participation and decision-making.
The 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) starts from the basic premise is that all human beings are bon free and equal and must be treated with dignity and respect, respective of sex. Although many international agreements recognise that women and men are equal extensive discrimination against women exists.
Where there are poverty women suffer the most, as they are the last to receive food, health care, education and training opportunities for work. In order to stop this discrimination against
• Create a new economic order based on equity and justice
• Remove all forms of racism and racial discrimination, colonialism and all forms of international aggression
• Strengthen international peace, security and cooperation so as to promote social progress and
• Recognise the great contribution women make to the welfare of the family and development of society.
• Make sure that the role of women as mothers is not used as a basis for discrimination against them.
• Work to change traditional roles of women and men in society and the family so that the upbringing of children will require a sharing of responsibility between women, men and society as a whole.
Clear guidelines are stipulated in 16 articles covering discrimination, policy measures, guarantee of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, affirmative action, sex role attitudes and prejudice, prostitution, equality in politics and government, participation in international affairs, citizenship, education, employment, health care and family planning, special help for rural women, law and marriage and family life. ...and the political dimension
The CEDAW obligations should be the broad framework within other more specific indicators is developed.
It is clear that human poverty, gender relations and gendered poverty include many dimensions that cannot be measured - or are not being measured Indicator systems fall into three areas: traditional indicators such as censuses, composite indicator systems such as the Human Development Index and alternative indicators such as qualitative indicators. Use of all methodologies for measurement, including indicator systems, has overt or covert political intentions. The measurement generally also involves a moral attitude towards those being measured, which determines to a large extent which methodology will be
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATiON they are available in paper form!
We also have lists in French and Spanish.
Subscription is free.
To add your name, send a message to:
<100666.1443@compuserve.com>.
18 International Viewpoint #301
Penny Duggan & Heather Dashner (editors)
chosen. Traditional and composite indicator systems have largely operated in a gender blind fashion until recently. Towards developing indicators to measure gendered poverty
The excellent work done by Debbie Budlender and the team of feminist researchers involved in compiling The Women's Budget and The Second Women's Budget is an excellent basis from which to develop suitable measurements for defining gender indicators within the South African context.
A thorough overview of developments in respective sectors and the impact this has had on the lives of specifically poor women paints the context within which indicators should be developed. It is not merely a technical exercise but a profoundly political one. Using CEDAW as the broad parameters, building onto that by developing the questions raised in the two volumes of The Women's Budget, appropriate mechanisms to deal with the complexity of genderised poverty can be developed. The subjective factor
Qualitative indicators involve peoples' perceptions, judgements and values. Such indicators can play an important part in the attempt to measure results of development projects, and in the attempt to include women through the project cycle. They should be used in combination with quantitative indicators and qualitative analysis such as gender analysis.
After all, indicators largely point to important trends and questions but do not provide answers to these questions. (Beck, 1997). Qualitative indicators can reflect women's and men's experiences, recounted from their own perspectives, and can be used to elicit women and men's views about participation, their role and their influence. Their use is one way of safeguarding the measurement of genderised poverty from a purely technical angle. They make possible an approach which:
• Contextualises gendered poverty in the framework stipulated by CEDAW.
• Builds onto the work done by the
Women's Budget Initiative in understanding and defining what government departments' indicators are.
• Uses the broad human development framework of understanding poverty, going beyond a solely income based approach.
• Sees the measurement of gendered poverty as a technical task, which is implicitly political.
• Locates change within a broad gender and development framework.
By building on to the GDI and GEM by incorporating qualitative aspects through which critical qualitative elements such as whether women's strategic gender needs are being met, true levels of autonomy within the home can be measured. *
The other Asia
Philippine Communist
Party splits - again
Reihana Mohideen
A number of key leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines have been expelled after opposing directives to abandon the party's legal front organisations in order to advance the armed struggle in the countryside.
According to one leader of the opposition, Nicolas Magdangal, "There's a strong propensity to treat all debate as counter-revolutionary"
Dissident leaders of the legal peasant organisation aligned with the CPP - the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) said, in an open letter published in March, that the "wrong line" in the current debate comes from those lie the CPP leadership faction around Wilma Tiamzon] who are "guilty of an ultra-left error that [leads to] political isolation [and to] denigrate the importance of legal peasant organising and open mass struggles... they deny the importance of various forms of struggle... they say that the anti-APEC campaign and the anti-imperialist World Peasant Summit in 1996 were wrong... so was the antiGATT/WTO campaign in 1995, the ChurchPeasant Conference, the campaign calling for the dismantling of the rice cartel, and all other major political battles we initiated in the past to defend the peasantry and the Filipino people's interests.
"They assert that it is not necessary to build open legal organisations and pursue peasant struggles in the framework of a strong open peasant mass movement... they pushed for the dissolution of KMP chapters in the villages and towns... projects had to be stopped... armed units of the underground movement were mobilised to raid the local office of one of the KMP's support NGOs in order to force its closure."
The struggle seems to have been sharpest in central Luzon (where the CPP base was strong), where at least 500 party members have been purged.
The Tiamzon leadership, which represents the CPP's Netherlands-based chairperson 'Joma' Sisson, has labelled the dissidents it expelled as "wrongliners" and "reformists". A number of CPP organisations in central Luzon were ordered to fold up because they were "wasting time on politics and legalism". Also ordered to fold up were chapters of the May First Movement (KU) in central and northern Luzon, Mindoro, central Visayas, and Mindanao.
The impact of the split on the KMU and other CPP legal organisations is still unclear. However, there were reports of two May Day rallies in Bataan, central Luzon - a 2000-strong rally organised by the labour alliance Amba-bala, which was previously the KMU chapter in the area, and a much smaller KMU rally of around 100 people. * Source: Green Left Weekly#318, May 20 New police unit will "shadow" HK radicals
Hong Kong Police are forming "tailing squads" for shadowing and phone tapping "pro-democracy organisations with overseas connections, radical pressure groups, pro-Taiwan groups and individuals with Taiwanese background." Their targets include Leung Kwok-hung of April 5th Action Group and Lau San-ching, one of the board members of Hong Kong Voice of Democracy.
These "tailing squads" are modelled on the former political section of the force, disbanded in 1995. The squads will be composed of more than 100 policemen, supplied with advanced equipment.
Leung Kwok-hung has been harassed by the police since Britain returned control of Hong Kong to China. In an interview with Oriental Daily, he said that he has been closely monitored by the police since last July and they seemed to know the exact time and date of his planned demonstrations. * Source: Oriental Daily, May 18, reported by Hong Kong Voice of Democracy, 3/F, 57, Peking Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, China. Email: editor@democracy.org.hk. www.treeway.org.nk/~democracy/ Crackdown on Korean student unions
The Korean CIA has ordered the arrest of all elected representatives of Hanchongryeon (Korean Alliance of Student Unions), and arrested 5 people, including the vice-president of Youngnam University student council and the president of Dukseong Woman's University student council.
In April, police blockaded the 6th Hanchongryeon conference, and announced that any participants would be arrested. The association (of 150 university student councils, with direct elections), rejects the accusation of being a "proenemy group."
On April 13 police arrested Hanyang University student Ha Youngjoon on a charge of violating the National Security Law by "possession of pro-enemy documents". Presented as evidence was the British journal Race And Class, one of Ha's textbooks, and academic papers like Marxist Theory Of Depression, which have already been translated and published openly in Korea. * Source: PICIS Newsletter
19
WE WELCOME N-TESTS
* India The following articles and press clippings reflect the reactions of several sections of the Indian left to the recent nuclear tests, and the threat of Western sanctions. According to anti-nuclear campaigner Achin Vanaik, "after what has happened, there are still two vital paths to pursue. The first is to call a halt to the line where it now is and to adamantly oppose further movement by India towards open development and deployment of nuclear weapons or indeed any further tests. According to Vanaik, those who have supported the tests but are rightly hostile or worried by the