Gender concerns in Employment Intensive Investment Programmes

Employment-intensive works can be a powerful means to promote women's interests and to break stereotype barriers for the employment of women on what is generally regarded as "men's work".

Particular attention is paid to the principle of equal pay for equal work, thereby guarding against the danger of unfair treatment of women. The training of women as technicians and gang leaders is emphasized, since practice has shown that where a higher percentage of women work at these levels, traditional cultural barriers are overcome and more favourable attitudes are developed for the recruitment of women workers for semi-skilled and unskilled work.

ILO supported programmes usually promote also other social policy objectives of concern to women, e.g. equal access to work opportunities, which means promoting non-discriminatory recruitment practices, and contribute to the establishment of women's associations or interest groups and their participation in decisions that affect them, e.g. on the selection of categories of infrastructure of direct concern to women, such as water supply or health facilities.

Achievements:

In Botswana, active encouragement of women's participation led to 37 % women employment as casual/temporary workers on a labour-base road improvement programme. The percentage of women participating training has been 60 % at gang-leader and team leader levels, and 20 % at the technical officer and technical assistant levels.

In Lesotho, the participation of women in a similar ILO-supported employment-intensive road project reached up to 60 per cent of the total work force.

In Madagascar, contractors have been encouraged to employ at least 25 % women among the labourer force of rural road rehabilitation projects. While this original target has globally been reached, contractors see this threshold as the upper limit. Nevertheless, traditional apprehensions have been broken, and the quality of the work done by female labourers, particularly on finishing tasks, is now acknowledged and appreciated.

In an urban rehabilitation and maintenance programme in Antananarivo, Madagascar, women account for 70 per cent of the total labour force.

In Sudan, a programme undertaken in the province of Kordofan in order to create work and incomes for a population ravaged by famine after the 1985/86 drought, promoted training and employment for women in sectors like construction, from which they had traditionally been excluded. Negotiation with village leaders resulted in giving women the right to decide for themselves what type of work they wanted to perform. Initially rejected by women from better-off households, this right was quickly seized by poorer women, first by working age girls and female heads of household, then by other women as well.