Week 4
Dates: 13th to 19th June
Moderator: Mamoeketsi Ntho (More about Mamoeketsi)
Theme: Gendered Time Poverty: The role of transportation in women’s economic empowerment
Click here to view the introduction to the theme
Click here to view the discussion archive
Summary:
Issues behind women’s time poverty
Mobility and Access. A lack of mobility and access restrict women
on their choices and hence ‘face more trade-offs than men’.
Mobility and access therefore need to be seen as human rights issues
Assumptions about women’s time. According
to culture it is only natural for women to do what they are doing i.e.
carrying out multiple roles simultaneously (not necessarily sequentially),
it is part of being women. The time burden they suffer is regarded as
normal hence time poverty is ‘seldom factored into the analysis
of transport processes’.
Implications. Due to this misconception, women’s right
to prioritise their time is not considered in transport planning, in practice
this translates into exclusion from the mainstream development. Transport
planning “is done for vehicles not for people”, this leads
to transport initiatives that lack a human face hence fail to empower
women to make productive choices for the use of their time. The engineering
orientation of transport planning creates unfriendly, insensitive and
unsafe transport infrastructure.
How has gender time poverty been addressed?
In Uganda the following have been done;
- Promotion of technologies that reduce time poverty
- Strengthening the natural asset base of the poor and women
- Rural electrification
- Promotion of agro/rural/community forestry and energy saving stoves
What next to do?
- Employ measures that save travel time and the transport burden
- Adoption of integrated rural accessibility planning
- Promotion of affordable intermediate means of transport
- Bring services nearer to people
Challenges
Revisiting the role of culture in defining gender roles.
Research that informs practice; employing multidisciplinary research tools!
