GreaterGood South Africa

Women power
Monday, November 2nd 2009

At the end of the last millennium, world leaders distilled key Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be achieved between 1990 and 2015. One of the eight ambitious goals is to 'Promote gender equality and empower women'. South African Social Investment Exchange (SASIX) evaluator, Dylan Edwards, expands on how this goal underpins the Exchange’s development sectors.

Globally, millions of girls and women continue to live in poverty, disempowered and discriminated against. They are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS, less likely to attend school and more often subject to physical and sexual violence. During the 16 Days of Activism, facts like these are thrown around so much that we risk becoming numb to their meaning. It is worth reminding ourselves not only that inequality exists, but why we should all care about it.

A moral good

The first and most obvious point is that gender equality is something that is good for its own sake – a moral good. Nobody who believes in human equality can stand in opposition to equal rights across genders. Women’s rights, seen from this perspective, are simply an inseparable part of the human right to be treated equally.

The problem with this is that while moral goods are easy things to commit to on paper (and there are plenty of pieces of paper – treaties, proclamations, declarations, pronouncements, statements, conventions – where the leaders of the world have committed to gender equality), taking real action to realise a moral good is more difficult. For example, despite all the signatures on all the pieces of paper, there is not a single country in the world where women earn as much as men.

Double standards

Double standards in our morality are commonplace, and it is all-too-easy for us to be committed to a moral position in principle (drinking and driving is bad), though our actions might not always align with that position (but I’m sure it will be okay this time). Fortunately, there are many other good, practical reasons for promoting gender equality. Apart from being a moral good, gender equality is good for the economy, good for the state of education, and good for public health.

A greater good

Women, given the option, are more likely to send their children to school, and far more likely to send their daughters to school than men. Education has many beneficial knock-on effects for society as a whole: as levels of education increase, health improves, innovation increases and household income rises. This is supported by a recent World Bank survey which finds that when women and men have relative equality, economies tend to grow faster.

Gender equality will also drastically reduce the number of hungry children in the world. A recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute concludes that 15 million fewer children would be undernourished in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa if women were given an equal say in making household decisions in those regions. The same report finds that where women are the main family decision-makers, more resources are dedicated to child health, nutrition and education.

Sadly, however, in two-thirds of developing countries women have a less-than-equal say in household decisions.

A good investment

It is clear that sustainable development and gender equality cannot be separated, which is why the promotion of gender equality informs the evaluation of SASIX projects across all development sectors. Evidence shows that investments in women's and girls' education and health yield some of the highest returns of all social investments, including reduced rates of maternal mortality, better educated and healthier children and increased household incomes.

The commitment to gender equality is both morally right and practically necessary if we are to achieve our other developmental aims. By providing the platform to invest in projects that address gender imbalances, SASIX gives investors the opportunity to do both what is right, and what is necessary.

Find out more about gender equality and the SASIX development sectors on our SASIX research pages

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