[rts] Mainstreaming gender

[Priyanthi Fernando]

Dear colleagues

I would like to raise an issue about rural transport that did not emerge at
the workshop, nor in the preceding email discussion, but which I think
deserves some attention by the participants on this list – namely the issue
of mainstreaming gender into the paper’s analysis.

The paper devotes a whole section under user perspectives to women’s unequal
access to transport technologies, to the invisibility of women to transport
planners and to the inappropriateness of some transport technologies for
women’s needs. These are important issues, but the studies conducted by the
Balancing the Load: gender and rural transport  programme researchers in
Asia and Africa, show that the problem is quite a lot more complicated.
Gender relations play a significant role in determining gender differences
in mobility.  In Bangladesh for example, women in wealthier families have
less mobility  than their poorer counterparts merely because the poor simply
cannot afford to maintain restrictive cultural traditions.  In much of the
Indian subcontinent (and maybe elsewhere) overcrowding of transport services
is one reason why women do not make use of them.  In some parts of Pakistan,
girls argued that male members of their families use overcrowded transport
services as an excuse to keep them from going to school. Safety on transport
services also has a gender dimension that goes beyond wearing seatbelts or
crash helmets to issues of sexual harassment. A study in the 1980s on
low-income women in shanty areas in Lima, Peru showed that women commonly
experienced sexual and violent harassment in crowded buses and at bus stops
and that traveling with bags of merchandise and small children they were
powerless to defend themselves. Gender relationships in some Ghanaian
villages preclude women from staying away from home overnight, and so many
cannot make use of the transport services to reach markets further away
because of the irregularity of these services and the risk of not being able
to return the same day.    The more positive stories, such as the much
celebrated case of the cycling campaign for women in Tamil Nadu (India) have
shown that innovative transport programmes do effect changes in gender
relations and can lead to women’s empowerment (though  in this case not to a
reduction in women’s transport tasks!)  It is interesting to note also that
once these women had learned to cycle, the lack of women’s bicycles in the
community was not a deterrent.

The study of self-employed women in Ahmedebad (India) showed that the higher
density of transport in urban and periurban areas does not always translate
into greater use of transport by women. These poor women self-employed in
the informal sector mainly walk either because bus drivers will not let them
board the buses with their wares or because they would rather save on the
bus fare.

“On the move
” also describes the potential of the introduction to transport
technologies to disadvantage women and cites an example of how men’s
increased use of animal carts and motor vehicles in areas of Mali had a
negative impact on women’s capacity to market produce in their donkey carts.
Similar cases can be drawn from Ghana, where the increasing (male) use of
hand trucks in Accra’s markets is eroding women’s capacity to earn an income
through head loading porterage. In parts of Nigeria the development of
roadside markets had a negative impact on women traders  in off-road
communities who relied on local markets for marketing their produce.   And
among the Santhal tribal communities in India, the increasing use of
bicycles by men have resulted in their taking over the marketing function
from the women, reducing women’s transport ‘burden’ but also decreasing
their access to and control over important cash income.

Issues relating to transport service routes, timing and fares are not gender
neutral, and the paper does not consider the gender implications of these
aspects of transport service provision. Route planning often does not take
into account the multiple trips that women need to make in the course of
attending to their dual responsibilities as carers and income earners.  The
study of bicycle taxis and motorcycle taxis in Uganda showed that these
services had little impact on meeting women’s transport needs because a
majority of women’s transport tasks did not require travel along that
particular route.  Even in higher density urban environments, poor women
employed in child care, domestic and informal sectors have a wide variety of
destination points that are not necessarily on  a public transport route.
For low income groups the comparatively low cost of transport services such
as railways, buses, minivans, jeepneys etc are still prohibitively expensive
and transport can cost  up to about a third of their monthly incomes.  For
this reason, women informal sector workers commuting from outlying rural
areas into Calcutta metropolis (India) using the State run bus or train
services evade paying fares thus contributing to the inefficiency of the
transport system.

In a more general sense, the linking of transport service provision to
economic activity, and not fully addressing what the paper considers
“arguably the more social rather than economic” transport needs of women
could also marginalize the contribution that women make to the economic life
of poor rural and urban families and communities and could reduce the
potential impact of transport interventions on poverty.  Where rural women
spend a great deal of time in accessing basic needs, traveling to and from
fields, and headloading goods, little time  and labour is left for
agricultural production.  Where labour is a major determinant of
agricultural productivity and where women are farmers, this would lead to
low levels of agricultural production.

These are some of my thoughts.  I have some other thoughts (not directly
related to gender) that I will also share with you in a later posting.  But
for now I would be very interested in what other colleagues have to say
about the gender issue, particularly since I know that there are many of you
who have addressed these concerns in your work.

Best wishes to all

Priyanthi Fernando
IFRTD Secretariat