Balancing the load

Gender and mobility

Women, particularly in poor rural areas, often spend more time and effort on transport, have less access to public services and less control over resources. Women also have fewer opportunities than men to use different types of transport such as wheelbarrows, animal traction or motorcycles.

Improving women's and girls' mobility and reducing their 'time poverty' would help achieve the third MDG: promoting gender equality and empowering women.

'Time poverty' means that women tend to work much longer hours than men and have to make more trade-offs between their activities. This restricts their economic choices and they cannot easily transfer their labour to the market economy. Women also have unequal access to agricultural support services and inputs, market information and credit (particularly credit based on peer collateral that relies on frequent meetings).

World Bank research found that in Morocco new roads make travel to school safer, encouraging parents to send their daughters to school and increasing female primary school enrolments to 68 percent from a pre-project rate of 28 percent. In rural Pakistan, communities with similar levels of school availability have different primary net enrolment rates for girls, which depend on the availability of all-weather roads.

Investing in water, sustainable energy and transport infrastructure that cuts the time women spend on household tasks can drastically reduce their time poverty and remove constraints on their empowerment. Appropriate interventions include:

• local paths and tracks that lead to water or wood sources
• transport services that meet women's special health needs
• affordable transport for women such as bicycles or providing them with credit services to access existing technologies
• transport services that support women's economic activities, such as increasing the load carrying space on public transport.

Gender issues, however, are rarely prioritised in transport investments. In China the national gender machinery, responsible for ensuring implementation of gender equality strategies, includes 24 ministries and 5 civil society organisations but not the Ministry of Transport. Since the World Bank first highlighted women's unequal transport burden ten years ago, its more recent research in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Tanzania and Zambia shows that a combination of poor gender relations and low purchasing power still restricts women's access to transport. Women's mobility is also restricted by their lack of 'power to choose' - including what transport mode to use or where they can go.

Addressing gender equity and women's empowerment does not just depend on investing in roads. It also depends on:

• the commitment of governments and transport agencies to mainstream gender into their planning processes
• how far government and transport agencies are able or willing to address women's time poverty, their lack of access to affordable transport technologies and ultimately the gender relations that reinforce these barriers to female mobility.

Priyanthi Fernando
Centre for Poverty Analysis, 29 Gregory's Road, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka priyanthif@cepa.lk

See also

Integrating Gender into World Bank Financed Transport Programs, IC NET, 2004
www.dgroups.org/groups/worldbank/gatnet/docs/TAG1_final.pdf

Balancing the Load: Women, Gender and Transport, Zed Books: London, edited by Priyanthi Fernando and Gina Porter, 2003

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