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Thursday 27 December 2018

Deconstruction of #MeToo and the new-age feminist movement

By Sana Naqvi

Hashtag #MeToo
Source: Wikimedia Commons


The feminist movement has been an intrinsic part of progress in Pakistan’s narrative and has evolved over the years. The movement today has more tools at its disposal than the street-based activism of the previous generation of feminists; new platforms have emerged and transformed the way protest and dialogue on gender issues can take place. The #MeToo movement uses social media to amplify women’s voice by carving a space for them to share harrowing encounters of being sexually assaulted or incidents of other forms of sexual harassment. One of the criticisms leveled against the movement is that due process is not followed and has resulted in creating binaries between social media and legal recourse. It is important to look at both separately, but also together, and try to come up with a nuanced way forward.

Social media has transformed the activism landscape globally and has allowed women to speak about their injustices, reach out to others who might feel as immobile, and provide an avenue that has for the most part not been available to many. Facilitating women to find solace in comfortable spaces is perhaps social media’s greatest achievement.

Misunderstanding about the #MeToo movement has led to it being criticized as a ‘witch hunt’, leading to reservations against it. The movement is about a certain kind of accountability, which requires men to take responsibility for their actions and exercise caution about improper conduct. With women no longer remaining silent about their experiences, they are trying to transform the discourse by changing the norms around how men treat women and normalizing conversation on sexual harassment, which is scarce, if at all.

In situations where harassment is involved, it is difficult to conceptualize what ‘justice’ would look like, as a result it becomes increasingly complicated to have a universal set of rules. Critics are wary of using social media, and propagate the use of legal recourse. In a country like Pakistan, where legal systems have failed women multiple times, is this the best course of action?

The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, passed in 2010 requires each organization to have an inquiry committee set up to listen to complaints that employees might have, setting out ‘major’ and ‘minor’ penalties. Complaints can also be reported to the federal or provincial ombudsman specially appointed to handle harassment cases. To complicate this relatively well-drafted law which includes an all-encompassing definition of what harassment is, the Sindh ombudsmen is a male; however, few women would be comfortable speaking to a man about their experience. Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa do not even have ombudsmen, so who do women reach out to when the legislative mechanism (the ombudsman) is absent? In this context if women resort to social media, is it still fair to demonize them for it?

In our work in the Action for Empowerment and Accountability Programme, we have studied politics as an arena in which there is widespread harassment. Legislators have their personal character and physical safety vulnerable to attack; female politicians are frequently verbally harassed during rallies, in talk shows and even on the floor of the parliament, which is routinely covered by national media. Examples include Shireen Mazari being called a tractor trolley, Amir Liaqat’s inappropriate comments about Sherry Rehman and a religious cleric assassinating Punjab Minister for Social Welfare Zille Huma in 2007 for not wearing ‘Muslim clothing’. The National Assembly still has no committee specifically for parliamentarians to hear complaints of harassment. As incidents have become public, some women politicians with voice and agency occasionally take issue and raise objections on the floor of the house.

Strong action across the board is required to make the political arena safe for all women because when we achieve this, women in important positions will be able to ensure that protective laws against women are tabled, passed and implemented. Our research has shown that protection for women politicians is largely missing, and this issue is not class specific nor is it party specific - it’s gender-specific.

Women who speak up are labelled as doing it for attention, fame, vengeance and money, but the movement’s real aim is to create support systems for victims and also help move forward from the trauma. One way to achieve this is the concept of ‘restorative justice’ which ‘emphasizes accountability and making amends, seeks to avoid sentencing, instead focusing on bringing victims and offenders together to understand the magnitude of the harm done, the ways in which healing can be achieved’. Constructive paths like this can only be achieved when there is open discussion about how to deal with harassment; dialogue not punishment can help curtail future behaviors.

The #MeToo movement raises important questions, a pertinent one being why frameworks to deal with sexual harassment are so weak. Even though we have a sexual harassment law passed almost a decade ago, it has taken the #MeToo movement in 2018 to push for more widespread sexual harassment committees at workplaces and a review of the Ombudsmen’s effectiveness. It is important for those who are skeptical of the #MeToo movement to recognize that it has alerted the public of the lack of implementation of the existing laws, forcing women to take to social media. This movement is crucial to give agency to women, and the way forward is if legal recourse and social media stop being seen as antithetical to one another.

Thursday 20 December 2018

The chickens and eggs dilemma: can poultry transfers reduce poverty?


By Kabeer Dawani and Ayesha Mysorewala



Photo credit: Pixabay.com



Prime Minister Imran Khan’s recent announcement to give chickens to women in rural areas, as part of a poverty alleviation strategy, has received a lot of flak.

Khan identified two benefits of this asset transfer programme: nutritious food for eating and more chickens and eggs to sell.

Although the prime minister claimed the programme has been tested, we are not aware of publicly available results from any evaluation of such a pilot in Pakistan. Moreover, scale-ups of successful pilots often disappoint in their results.

There has been one major study in Pakistan on a graduation strategy for the ultra-poor to transition to a higher standard of living. Its results highlight two factors that are important to consider.

First, when given the choice of a productive asset, only 10 per cent of the sample opted for chickens, with the majority choosing goats. This implies that poultry is seen as a relatively low priority asset by the population.

Second, the intervention tested in this study had a gamut of additional components, including technical skills training, health and financial support and monitoring. All of these are absent from Khan's proposal and so any conclusions about the success of this study cannot be drawn for our context.

Writing for Dawn.com, Myrah Nerine Butt nicely pointed out the potential drawbacks for women from such a programme. In a similar spirit of thoughtful engagement and building on her article, we will argue using theory and evidence that the economic, gender and nutritional impacts of such a programme are limited at best and negative at worst.

The economics does not add up

It appears that the government has already initiated the programme, with rural women in Rawalpindi being the first to receive the chickens.

Each woman is being given one unit, which is made up of five chickens, with a total of 2.5 million units to be handed out across the Rawalpindi division at a cost of Rs 1,200 per unit. This has two implications.

First, if a similar proportion is applied to the rest of Pakistan, this has a budgetary implication of approximately Rs 78 billion for the nearly 65 million rural women across Pakistan.

This is no trivial amount, especially given the budget deficit. In fact, it is almost exactly the annual revenue collection from taxes on mobile prepaid cards alone that the Federal Board of Revenue stands to lose due to the previous government's tax reforms.

The second issue that is apparent from the distribution in Rawalpindi is that, all of a sudden, there will be a lot of households within close vicinity of each other in possession of the chickens.

This means that supply of chickens and eggs will increase significantly, making any commercial sales of surplus chickens and eggs difficult; basic economic theory suggests that prices will be driven down because of the drastically increased supply, making any profits minimal.

Rural areas are usually not well connected to markets in the first place and this lack of outlet will be a problem once localised markets become saturated. There may also be a negative spillover of this — existing suppliers of poultry could also see their profits slashed.

In addition, there are significant costs for households associated with handing them chickens. These include higher use of cooking fuel to cook desi chickens because they take longer to cook; land is needed for rearing poultry, which poor households do not necessarily possess; and finally, the opportunity cost of time for women, which is an issue we return to below.

These will of course remain hypotheses until tested, but nevertheless are based on observations from field work in rural areas.

All these issues identified above make it unlikely for an asset transfer programme comprising chickens to have any impact on income poverty.

Nutrition and health

At first glance, giving households greater access to protein-rich foods may appear to be good, especially with undernutrition being a major issue in Pakistan; the latest Demographic Health Survey shows that 41pc of rural children are stunted.

More chickens and eggs to consume, then, may be good, but it is important to point out a number of caveats to this.

Globally, there is a lack of consensus and consistent evidence on whether livestock and poultry transfers can decrease stunting. It is agreed, however, that the success of the interventions is conditional on certain factors such as where households keep the animals and how well connected they are to markets.

In some cases, there has in fact been a negative impact of livestock and poultry ownership on nutrition due to diarrhea and other diseases related to proximity to livestock.

Poultry fecal waste also leads to increased risks of environmental enteropathy, a serious condition which limits the absorption of nutrients among children.

On this, a recent World Bank report on Pakistan has argued that we need to focus on improving sanitation, especially in rural areas, to make progress on stunting.

There may be a strong argument for giving chickens and other small livestock to women, given that women’s control of assets and resources in the household is associated with better nutrition. Research from the LANSA project shows that care of small livestock and poultry is usually the domain of the woman. We also found that income from the sale of products and animals themselves is rarely controlled by the woman.

Given this, if transfers of more animals do not improve women’s access to resources and say over how their products are used, it may well increase their time burdens. This reduces time spent on rest and care of children, which is detrimental to their own health and that of their children.

Evidence from a previous study on a livestock and poultry intervention did, in fact, show no significant improvements in women’s say in household decisions in Pakistan.

In sum, there is no guarantee that giving chickens to households will improve health and nutritional outcomes.

In fact, there exists a possibility that without checks on sanitation and women’s time poverty, providing chickens may make things worse.

What about poverty alleviation?

Any poverty alleviation strategy must aspire to sustainable and broad based development.

Redistribution programmes, which transfer cash (such as the Benazir Income Support Programme) and assets (such as chickens), can serve the important purpose of protecting the poor from shocks and mitigating their risks.

These are valuable goals in and of themselves; however, what they do not do is provide a basis for structural reform to alleviate poverty significantly.

If the prime minister is serious about alleviating poverty, he must focus on halting and even reversing Pakistan’s premature de-industrialisation.

It is the manufacturing sector which has the capability of providing high-productivity and high-wage jobs, and which has globally led to poverty alleviation and inter-generational social mobility.

In the midst of a narrowing manufacturing base, however, hopes for broad-based development remain bleak.
*This blog was originally published in Dawn.com's blogs section.