Women are poorer.

Women are poorer

Poor rural women are the most deprived people in the world. They are sicker and more illiterate than men and lack the opportunities males have to better themselves.

That is the stark conclusion of two major studies on world poverty carried out in 1990: the Human Development Report 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank's World Development Report 1990.

Both international development agencies, bringing 85 years of combined experience in the implementation of development programmes to their analysis of poverty, reached the same conclusion that women suffer the effects of poverty far more than men do.

Little progress in 30 years

"For more than half a billion poor, rural women, there has been little progress over the past 30 years", the UNDP analysis concludes. Many poor women are still illiterate. Their real incomes have either decreased or not increased. They face a high risk of death during chilbirth and their children have almost no access to health care.

UNDP also finds:

* Female children in developing countries get less food, health care and education.

* Adult women get less education, professional training and compensation for even longer hours worked than men.

* The risk of death for an expectant mother in some developing countries is 50 times that in industrialized countries.

* The female literacy rate for the developing world is now three quarters that of the male.

* Much of the work that women do remains "invisible", not revealed in national accounting and censuses. Women work 25 per cent longer hours than men and much their work--household activities and growing subsistence crops--is unpaid.

Poorer than men

The World Bank Report concludes that available figures on health, nutrition, education and labour force participation "show that women are often severely disadvantaged".

Data for 1980 indicated that women encounter cultural, social, legal and economic obstacles that even poor men do not. They work longer than men and, if they are paid, they receive lower wages.

Half a million die

in childbirth

About half a million women, 99 per cent of them in the developing world, die in childbirth each year, the Report states. Geographically there were:

* 140,000 in sub-Saharan africa;

* 308,000 in Asia;

* 34,000 in Latin America and the Caribbean; and

* 6,000 in developed countries.

To remedy that critical situation, the World Bank urges the imrpovement of family-planning information and services to enable women to time and space pregnancies. "In many countries, 25 to 40 per cent of maternal deaths could be averted by avoiding unwanted pregnancies", the report says.

Stronger community-based health-care programmes for women, better hospitals and health-care centres with beds to take care of complicated and emergency deliveries, and a transport system to transfer women with high-risk pregnancies to better facilities are also needed, the World Bank concludes.