women
Women in Pakistan who make up 51 per cent of the population presently hold just 25 per cent of roles in the country’s labour force, compared with 82 per cent for men. To remedy this, governments across the region are beginning to focus on initiatives revolving around the Sustainable Development Goal #5. SDG5 calls for empowering women and girls, and promoting gender equality on global agendas.
Fortunately, with these efforts, we are starting to witness the socio-economic empowerment of women. There are several commitments made by the Government of Pakistan to support this endeavour. One of these is the Vision 2025 Five-Year Plan. This plan commits to provide women with a supportive environment to enable their social development and equally reap the benefits of economic growth and prosperity.
In 2002, the Government introduced the Pakistan National Policy for Development and Empowerment which certifies equal access to social services and development benefits and essentially creates a standardised framework for this. Given these extensive commitments, we wonder how far have they been implemented. A number of programmes and bodies now exist to support this including Gender Reform Action Programmes, Benazir Income Support Programme, First Women Development Bank and National Commission on the Status of Women. Each of these focuses their work on gender mainstreaming by developing need-based projects and integrating gender into all social and economic areas. Women’s development departments at provincial levels have also been established which initiates hostels and day-care centres for working women among other steps.
The Government has taken some praiseworthy efforts with the support of external bodies, such as USAID. Through this, since 2012, they have awarded over 6,600 scholarships for higher education to young women in Pakistan. They have also been able to train and finance over 50,000 female entrepreneurs as well as training close to 16,000 female political party representatives. These trainings help many women as it creates awareness and knowledge of commercial skills and trade policies to further their participation in both politics and economy.
One of the greatest opportunities for women’s economic empowerment lies in promoting their entrepreneurship capacity. According to 2016 UN Women’s Status Report, in the informal economy, women earn 65 per cent of the revenue generated by home-based workers. With the entirety of home-based workers in Pakistan earning PKR 400 billion (USD 2.8 billion), 65 per cent of this revenue being contributed by women is hugely significant. The caveat here is that, being informal workers, most are granted unfairly low wages and granted little social security or legal protection.
There is also a massive opportunity and to tap into that potential is through the private sector and banking policies which support lending to female Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and provide affordable loans to businesswomen. Gender-based loans could serve a very effective solution for the financial inclusion of female entrepreneurs by incorporating them into the formal sector, which would benefit both the women and Pakistan’s GDP. Serving an excellent example of this in practise is fintech organisation, Karandaaz which has implemented a two-tier solution service. These include firstly, technological solutions to enable women’s usage of formal financial services like banking, and secondly, creating female-centred financial products and channels (credit, savings, investments etc.). Their adoption strategy recognises the essential need for the female participation and enabling specifically their participation in access and reach. Commercial marketplaces, digital social platforms, as well as banks and fintech companies can apply for Karandaaz’s solution for financial inclusion, and have their model adopted into their own organisational structures.
There is a similar game-changing initiative to build more inclusive gender-sensitised workplaces, the Male Champions of Change Coalition (MCC.) This is a globally recognised initiative developed in Australia by the country’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, and growing into 155 countries, which since 2018 has also included Pakistan. It uses a strategic methodology to increase female participation in workplaces and then build supportive conditions and cultures for them to thrive. Private organisations can join the Coalition and adopt their methodology formally into their own structures. Among the 20 local corporations of this initiative include Telenor, PepsiCo, Serena Hotels and Inspire Group.
Overall, MCC Pakistan is now partnered with representatives from a wide range of sectors from hospitality to telecommunications, IT and software, microfinance, and sports. Member companies not only work on empowering women and increasing diversity in their own organisations but also in the wider society. MCC therefore creates a comprehensive structure setting targets for female inclusion and strategies for its improvement for member companies to implement, and then generates annual progress reports for continuous accountability.
Incubation centres are another growing facet of the Pakistani entrepreneurial sector since 2015, with around 10 private and public universities in the country now operating their own. If incubation centres also adopted gender-focused policies to support female enterprise, the prospects could be remarkable.
Opportunities and hope are vast and growing for women in our economy. By increasing support and focusing towards similar initiatives could achieve some extraordinary results in improving women’s financial emancipation across the country.
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Fiza Farhan
