This page is concerned solely with promoting gender equality on road work sites. It only touches on one facet of the many impacts that roads can have the lives of women in rural areas, on mobility, gender equality, and on family well-being. For example, poor access to health facilities, whether due to poor roads or lack of health centres, is a major cause of high infant and maternal mortality.
Donor agencies and national governments are integrating measures to promote gender equality within traditionally male-dominated areas such as transport and infrastructure. Experiences across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia show that measures promoting greater gender equality through use of labour-based road maintenance and construction provide greater social benefits to rural households and communities then do conventional works.
Increasing women’s participation in roadworks ensures a wider distribution of benefits than when only men are involved and increasing their involvement in small-scale contracting also adds to their income-generating options. However, there are constraints. These include negative perceptions by men, both within the household and the community as well as contracting procedures that may inadvertently exclude women. Male prejudice must be reduced and provisions that ensure that contractors comply with measures to ensure gender equality must be enforced..
Drawing from the increasing numbers of examples of good practice available, there are a number of proven measures to promote gender equality in labour-based roadworks. These include:
1) Focus on community participation of both men and women early in the planning stage to promote understanding of the unequal gender impact of poor infrastructure and of the social benefits of improving it.
2) Require mandatory recruitment procedures in minor works contracts, preceded by conscience-raising activities targeting both men ( to encourage them to allow female family members to participate) and women (to inform them of employment opportunities).
3) Require contractors to recruit a new workforce at regular intervals (such as every 5km) to spread work opportunities and ensure that women are not discouraged by excessive travel distances. Work programmes should also be adapted to allow for women’s considerable domestic workload.
4) Ensure equal pay for equal work and require contractors to submit weekly time sheets, broken out by gender.
5) Stimulate the development of women-owned construction enterprises by defining more flexible criteria for selection of small local enterprises to be trained as small and medium rehabilitation contractors, thus removing the present bias towards firms led by technically qualified men.
Promoting women’s participation in contracting will nevertheless be difficult. Contractors are, reasonably enough, more interested in profits than gender equity. Incentives to encourage contractors to employ women must be designed and applied.
In conclusion, it is clear that there is plenty of scope for donor agencies and national governments to integrate gender equality within transport sector policies, programmes and projects. Labour-based road rehabilitation and maintenance projects, in particular, yield immediate benefits at the local level by providing jobs accessible to men and women.
This page was contributed by Jeff Turner, Programme Manager of AFCAP
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