Cash is Queen…or should be…for women in the developing world
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The New York Times last week highlighted a recent and relatively successful pilot effort underway in Maharashtra, India, where a payment program is convincing couples to delay childbearing. The underlying impetus is that nagging fear of a booming population while the overlying reality is that where people are poor, money talks.
Being a feminist I’m not sure I agree with this particular use of cash bonuses, as it’s essentially no different than China’s one child policy, which offers non-punishment as a bribe for controlling family size. But I do support the release of more cold hard cash in development efforts.
India, a country with a vast population and an even more vast rate of poverty, has adopted cash bonus programs before. In fact, just last month a piece ran on the JSY program, a national initiative which pays women to give birth in hospitals instead of at home. It’s having some success, though studies have found that while the cash is reaching middle- and lower-income women, it has yet to reach the poorest.
I thought about another recent study I had read, which paid school girls in Malawi and found that they had safer sex – fewer HIV and Herpes infections – as a result. One group was paid conditionally upon going to school; while another was paid regardless. Both had lower infection rates than women who hadn’t been paid at all. And it wasn’t because with the money they went out and bought condoms and then used them, but it was the j’ne sais quoi of having money. The girls were choosier with their partners and more discerning with their risks.
This made me wonder about why we’re not more often paying women, as well as helping them to earn and save much more, in our development efforts. Studies have shown that when women control the money it’s generally better spent. And reality has shown that when people have money at all, they generally feel more empowered. This obviously leads to terrible things at times. But if we take an optimistic view, it can lead to really wonderful things.
Paying someone to do something is not a new concept; in fact, it’s about as rock-bottom simple as you can get, whether you look at it as bribery or feeding on the capitalist souls inside of us. Money is an essential commodity that allows us, almost universally, to interact in society with agency and choice. Money doesn’t replace the necessity we have to exercise our rights as humans, but it is a pretty damn good antidote to many ills. Especially for women.
As a colleague of mine who’s worked on HIV in Malawi said, we should know by now that women don’t need inspirational posters and educational songs….where poverty is rife women need money. Duh. And for more reasons than just that money will help buy X, Y, and Z that she needs. It’s about the power that having money invests in an individual. This is also why so often women don’t control money in their relationships and societies, a clear symbol of their status writ large.
Money, in and of itself, is powerful enough to enact real change at the public health and behavior-level…and it empowers those who have it to make those decisions freely. Even in developed societies, the concept of women having control of money and making money is relatively new, and for many of us squeam-inducing. Hell, the only monies I can think of with women on them in the US, the Sacajawea and the Susan B. Anthony coins, are about as rare as a US$2 bill (pretty novel).
That should be a major part of what’s being changed through global development efforts, should they be effective. Women need to be earning money, controlling money, lending it, saving it, and investing it. Then let’s see how much better off we all are.
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9:04 am
I am sort of uncomfortable with this as well, and it might be because of India’s history with forced sterilization and the high desire for male children due to high dowry’s (especially in rural/poor areas).
While the program is working, I don’t know if it is really addressing the overall problem of poverty and education.
The New York Times reported on this and had some great comments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/world/asia/22india.html?_r=2&hp
“India averages about 2.6 children per family, far below what it was a half century ago, yet still above the rate of 2.1 that would stabilize the population. Many states with higher income and education levels are already near or below an average of two children per family. Yet the poorest and most populous states, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, average almost four children per family and have some of the lowest levels of female literacy.
“An educated girl is your best contraception,” said Dr. Amarjit Singh, executive director of the National Population Stabilization Fund, a quasi-governmental advisory agency. He said that roughly half of India’s future excess population growth was expected to come from its six poorest states.”
1:23 pm
“An educated girl is your best contraception”
A-fucking-men. Why, why do we know this to be true – and yet we can’t even get it right in our own country. We need more money for welfare? Cut the school budget. More money for foster care? For prisons? For war? Cut the school budget. And people seem to be surprised that the less we spend on education the more we seem to need to spend on law enforcement and social services. Blarg.
People need to stop having babies. Like yesterday. It’s the number one problem facing the world – and exponential population growth will not be good for anyone. It’s sad that you have to bribe people to do the morally right thing, but if cash is what it takes, so be it. We’ve learned that most people, left to their own devices, do not make decisions in the best interest of the human race, the planet or even themselves.
There’s a school of thought, with a lot of scientific and economic analysis to back it up, that shows how foreign aid, especially monetary, has actually greatly hindered the developing world, effectively making the West a helicopter parent of the developing world, still paying their rent when their 25 instead of allowing them to struggle and grow and become self-sustaining. We don’t educate – we throw money and cheap grains and bleeding heart recent liberal arts college grads at the problem. This is especially true in Africa, where the West has essentially made large swaths of that continent dependents which is actually exacerbating the political and social turmoil there. There are no clear answers, in any case. Except that people need to stop having babies. That at least is clear.
Of course it’s always true, and the only systemic solution, but I’d rather see women educated about the consequences of having children to themselves and to the world than paid off. And that, with education, they can do so much more with their lives than simply reproduce. Paying them to (what, exactly? not have sex? use condoms?) essentially undermines their moral conscious and their capacity for social participation. Though at this late point in the game, the efficacy of the dollar in staying population growth is probably necessary, for better or for worse.