About 58 percent of businesses in South Africa are owned by women, yet 75 percent of these women do not add value to the products they deal with, according to Ruth Kagia, World Bank country director for South Africa.
Of the women-owned businesses, only 6 percent employ more that five people and only 17 percent of their firms are registered, which becomes an issue when applying for finance, she said.
In 2009, for every 100 men in the construction industry, there were about 13 women.
Kagia was speaking in Johannesburg on Monday at the launch of the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development by the World Bank.
The report says misallocating women’s skills comes at a high and rising economic cost. Gender equality can have large impacts on productivity.
It says women now represent more than 40 percent of the global labour force, 43 percent of the agricultural workforce, and more than half of the world’s university students.
“For an economy to be functioning at its potential, women’s skills and talents should be engaged in activities that make the best use of those abilities,” it says.
But, as the stories of many women illustrate, this is not always the case.
The World Bank says: “When women’s labour is underused or misallocated – because they face discrimination in markets or societal institutions that prevent them from completing their education, entering certain occupations, and earning the same income as men – economic losses are the result.”
The report says when women farmers lack security of land tenure, as they do in many countries, especially in Africa, the result is lower access to credit and inputs and to inefficient land use, reducing yields.
It says: “Discrimination in credit markets and other gender inequalities in access to productive inputs also make it more difficult for female-headed firms to be as productive as male-headed ones. And when women are excluded from management positions, managers are less skilled on average, reducing the pace of innovation and technology adoption.”
The research says greater control over household resources by women leads to more investment in children’s human capital.
It says evidence from a range of countries such as South Africa, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ivory Coast and the UK shows that increasing the share of household income controlled by women, either through their own earnings or cash transfers, changes spending in ways that benefit children.
For women and girls in developing countries, says the World Bank, much has changed for the better in the past quarter century.
Women’s labour force participation has grown in the past 30 years as expanding economic opportunities have drawn many female workers into the market. Between 1980 and 2008, the gender gap in participation narrowed from 32 percentage points to 26 percentage points, it says. – Wiseman Khuzwayo
Source: Pretoria News website (October 2011)
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