Poverty’s disproportionate trap on Covid:19-impacted women
Soon after the breaking of the news of Covid-19 around the world, it became apparent that the world was facing a health crisis of pandemic proportions, which translated more to a global challenge than just a health risk.
Figures of confirmed cases continue to grow exponentially, totalling 97 464 094 confirmed cases of Covid-19, including 2 112 689 deaths, reported to the World Health Organisation to date.
While more men are anticipated to die from the virus, women are said to be disproportionately experiencing the social and economic effects of the pandemic.
This is attributable to fragile systems and safety nets cracking almost instantly in most African countries such as Zimbabwe.
Working women disproportionately leave their workplaces due to family and household responsibilities.
Unlike the great recession of 2008, during which eight in 10 job losses affected men, female workers have borne the brunt of layoffs this time around. Furthermore, the pressures of juggling jobs, family and household responsibilities have worsened their economic circumstances, disportionately entrapping these women into poverty.
Earnings have been eroded as productivity has been reduced mostly in sectors dominated by women.
Family economies are being pinched, leaving women to figure out how to make up the gap. And as schools shut down, many parents but mostly women have had to leave the workplace altogether to care for children stuck at home. This has resulted in more and more women falling deeper into the poverty trap developing countries such as Zimbabwe.
In some of the dire circumstances of the pandemic, women in labor were turned away from hospitals full of Covid19 patients in Zimbabwe, where the country's health care system was already in chaos at the advent of the pandemic, as doctors had just come from a strike. The plight of women was also exacerbated by the increased incidences of domestic violence which often rise in times of crisis.
It is anticipated that the Covid-19 pandemic will put a heavy toll on women and affect them disproportionately. According to estimates from the UN, the poverty rate for women will go up by 9,1% due to the pandemic. It was expected to dip by 2,7% from 2019 to 2021.
The UN agencies have pointed out that the pandemic will push a total of 96 million into extreme poverty, relegating women to the deep end of the poverty trap.
This is a mechanism that makes it very difficult for people to escape poverty and is created when an economic system requires a significant amount of capital in order to earn enough to escape poverty.
Usually this cycle of poverty is as a result of self-reinforcing mechanisms that cause poverty, once it exists, and will persist unless there is outside intervention. It can persist across generations, translating into a development trap for developing countries.
It is created due to a mix of factors, such as lack of access to education and healthcare, working together keeping an individual or family in poverty. It mostly affects countries at early stages of development.
As such these countries cannot save because they are poor, and, hence cannot invest, thereby they remain poor. Furthermore, the persistence of high levels of informality in various developing countries is a one major reason, workers and employers do not find sufficient incentives to reach formal work agreements, and hence remain informal.
Developed countries have not been spared either as women between the ages of 25 and 54 accounted for more than two-thirds of the job losses to date, resulting in economic crisis, as women are hit disproportionately since most of them rely on food banks, shelters and other support services that include provide unpaid care, or work in retail businesses that have largely shut down.
Notably, survival-type jobs have been the first to go, especially in the service industries, while “low-income, lowliteracy, and new immigrant women are vulnerable and isolated in the first place, because of language and cultural norms.
The disproportionate impact of the pandemic is therefore affecting women, especially those of reproductive age thereby demonstrating the deep flaws in the ways we have constructed our societies and economies.
Women are more likely to lose their jobs and income owing to the pandemic and thereby impacting their chances of coming out of poverty. They are also less likely to be covered by any form of social protection. Structurally, a higher proportion of women are heads of households, paying the major share of household costs while carrying out major household tasks.
Moreso, a smaller proportion of women have husbands in the formal sector, hence most of the women are forced into the informal sector to fend for the family. Zimbabwe has over 70% of street vendors being women, struggling to support their families in the face of continuous police raids against unlicensed trade and now more affected by the Covid-19 emergency measures, which include the shutdown of all informal businesses. This has an effect of eroding all their meagre savings, pushing communities deeper into the poverty trap.
The International Labour Organisation, posits that it must be realised that vending is not a first choice, it’s a livelihood issue which policy makers should be ceased with in order to uplift women from the pangs of the poverty trap in the face of ravaging Covid-19.
A generation is being lost as the majority of women vendors in Zimbabwe are in their late 30s or older, although we have started to see young women between 22 and 35 years old joining the informal sector.
There are many dimensions of chronic poverty ranging from human suffering to vulnerability, resulting in a basic needs failure, in abrogation of human rights, thereby degraded citizenship through widespread chronic poverty occurs.
Tackling chronic poverty is therefore a global priority for our generation and is vital if our world is to achieve an acceptable level of justice and fairness, while ensuring preventing a reversal of progress made towards diversity and inclusion of women in mainstream economics.
The poverty trap can be broken by planned investments in the economy and providing people the means to earn and be employed.
A series of poverty alleviation programmes can be enforced to raise individuals out of poverty by providing monetary aid for a period of time.
Recommendations on alleviating this poverty trap on women include:
l Implementing a comprehensive health agenda for adolescent girls and women;
l Eliminating marriage for girls younger than 18 years;
l Place adolescent girls at the centre of and national action and investment on maternal health;
l Improving access to basic sanitary products;
l Focus on HIV prevention on adolescent girls;
l Make health-system strengthening and monitoring work for girls;
l Make secondary-school completion a priority for adolescent girls; and
l Create an innovation fund for girls’ health while increasing donor support for adolescent girls’ health.
When people live in poverty, their ability to exercise all their human rights is eroded.
Poverty in Zimbabwe “wears a woman’s face”, with the high unemployment rate forcing women into the roles of both raising their children and supporting their families.
Those who have little option but to become unlicensed street vendors face not just police harassment and arrest, but sexual exploitation.
Therefore, governments are encouraged to end abuses that contribute to poverty. However, most African states, including Zimbabwe, have been found wanting. In April 2001, heads of state of African Union countries met and pledged to set a target of allocating at least 15% of their annual budget to improve the health sector.
Sadly , a decade later, only Tanzania, had achieved the Abuja Declaration target of at least 15% and by 2016, joined by Rwanda and South Africa. Meanwhile, 11 countries reduced their relative contributions of government expenditures to health during the period.
The coronavirus has now laid bare the appalling state of the continent’s public health sector, which has been characterised by acute shortage of critical and lifesaving equipment, such as ventilators and intensive care beds.
According to the World Health Organisation in mid-April 2020, there were just 2 000 ventilators across 41 African countries and 5 000 intensive care beds across 43. Ten countries did not have any ventilators at all. And, to make matters worse, Africa has a paltry number of medical personnel trained to operate them.
With the numbers of Covid-19 cases spiking, there is reason to be worried that the virus will overwhelm Africa’s health systems, resulting in the continent becoming the global epicentre of the pandemic.
Therefore, the Covid-19 pandemic must jolt all African governments to adequately invest in their healthcare systems which are inevitably intertwined with their fragile economies.
They must honour their own constitutions and the international human rights treaties they have ratified and guarantee the right to health, which includes ensuring availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of health care goods, facilities and services. This also includes protecting the dignity of women through equality and empowerment in line with the Sustainable Development Goal number 5.
Mandeya is a Zimbabwean economist currently based in Canada. These weekly New Horizon articles are coordinated by Lovemore Kadenge, an independent consultant, past president of the Zimbabwe Economics Society and past president of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators in Zimbabwe. Email: kadenge.zes@gmail.com/ Cell: +263 772 382 852