Gender Equity and Economic Efficiency in Adjustment Programmes

Abstract

Most writing on gender and adjustment points out the disproportionate negative impact on women of the new policies. There are good reasons why UNICEF sounded the alarm bells on the welfare of women and children in its ‘Adjustment with a Human Face’. Evidence was gathered about precipitous falls in maternal and child health and the parlous state of social services alongside sharp declines in real income. The economic cost of all this was depicted in terms of disinvestment in human resources. In addition there were chapters in the two volumes of the UNICEF study which described how women’s economic capabilities were especially debilitated by adjustment measures. Even before this publication there was a warning about the uncertain net outcome for women of new incentives and extra burdens in Development, Crisis and Alternative Visions: Third World Women s Perspectives (Sen, 1985) written for the United Nations Conference in Nairobi. More recently the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Engendering Adjustment for the 1990s (1989) has put the issues, raised elsewhere, in the logical order of describing women’s roles, the impact adjustment has had on them and what attempts have been made to help women. The bulk of the report tends to focus on the non-economic roles of women and on their welfare and well-being.