BEIRUT: Women in Lebanon and other Western Asian countries still face unequal access to politics, employment and education, the UN’s latest report on fighting poverty has said. The Millennium Development Goals Report 2009, launched last week by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, found that the global financial crisis is exacerbating negative social, economic and political trends in the Western Asian region, where a disproportionally low number of girls attend school and prospects of paid work for women are meager.
Western Asia, as defined by the UN, encompasses the Levant, the Gulf countries, Iraq, Turkey, Israel and Cyprus.
“Women have struggled to advance in political representation, holding only 9 percent of parliamentary seats” in the Western Asia region, stated the 56-page report, suggesting the implementation of temporary quotas to boost women’s participation. Only four out of 12 women candidates secured seats in Lebanon’s Parliament in the country’s elections this June.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) were endorsed by 189 countries in 2000. Women’s empowerment is one of eight targets set out by the UN with the intention of improving health, quality of life, gender equality and wealth in poor and developing countries by 2015.
The other goals include achieving universal primary education, reducing child and maternal mortality rates by two thirds, reversing the incidences of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and halving the proportion of people who earn than $1 a day.
Although the number of people living in extreme poverty – defined by the UN as less than $1.25 a day – decreased from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion between 1990 and 2005, the number of those living in poverty in Western Asia nearly quadrupled from three million to 12 million during the same fifteen year period.”
The poverty gap fell between 1990 and 2005 in all regions except Western Asia,” found the report. It estimated 17 percent of the world’s 6.8 billion people will be considered as extremely poor by the year end, a 6 percent increase from today’s figures.
The number of poor people in Western Asia who have jobs but are unable to support their family rose by 15 percent to 25 percent from 2007-08, the report added. Employment opportunities for women in the region “remain extremely low,” said the report, putting the female employment-to-population ratio at 45 percentage points below those of men. Only 21 percent of working-age women in the region are employed.
The MDG report also expressed concern that Western Asia’s goal of meeting its target to reduce hunger could be threatened by the current global food and economic crisis. No progress on curbing the amount of hungry people in the region, which rose between 2004 and 2006, was accomplished between 2006 and 2008.
“The numbers of people going hungry and living in extreme poverty are much larger than they would have been had progress continued uninterrupted,” said Ban in the report’s introduction, drawing attention to the recent fall in foreign aid to developing countries. He was nevertheless optimistic the MDGs could still be achieved “if the global community responds constructively to the downturn.”
Especially disturbing was Western Asia’s progress on the UN goals to empower women and achieve gender equality, according to the report. Lebanon and its Western Asian counterparts continue to have among the lowest gender parity indexes in the world for primary and secondary education.
According to one leading women’s rights activist in Lebanon, the UN’s dismal results on Western Asia come as little surprise. “The issue here is what we’re going to do about it,” said Lina Abou-Habib, director of the non-governmental rights organization Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action. “How is it that we’re going backwards after decades of social development?” she asked.
Rather than pump millions of dollars into “quick-fix” solutions, countries in Western Asia should rather “question the way in which social institutions operate on the basis of patriarchy,” Abou-Habib said.
“The problems are now so entrenched” in Western Asia that it is only with a radical shake-up of social and political norms, coupled with genuine political reform that countries in the region will achieve greater gender equality, she said.