Donor agencies and national governments are increasingly required to integrate measures to promote gender equality. These cover not only the traditional areas of social policy concern, such as health and education, but also policy areas such as transport and infrastructure. Recent research in gender equality within the road sector has highlighted labour-based road construction and maintenance as an area with significant potential for innovative gender mainstreaming practices. Drawing on experiences across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it is clear that greater gender equality in labour-based road maintenance and construction can provide substantial social benefits to households and communities that are involved in such programmes.
The greater involvement of women can ensure that the benefits are felt by a wider range of people and parts of communities than would traditionally be the case when men are mainly involved. Increasing their involvement in small-scale contracting could also to widen their income generating options. However, there are a number of constraints on their involvement in labour-based works. These include negative male perceptions of women's involvement, both at the level of households and the community and contracting procedures that may inadvertently preclude women from greater involvement. There is also a need to monitor and enforce contract provisions that ensure that contractors comply with measures to ensure gender equality.
Drawing from the increasing numbers of examples of good practice available, there are a number of proven measures to promote gender equality in the development of labour-based rural road approaches. These include:
1) Focus on gender-balanced community participation at the planning stage, to promote more understanding of the differential gender impact of poor infrastructure and of the social benefits of improving it.
2) Require mandatory recruitment procedures in minor works contracts, to be preceded by sensitisation activities targeting both men ( to encourage them to allow female family members to participate) and women.(to inform them of employment opportunities)
3) Require contractors to recruit a new workforce at regular intervals (such as every 5km) to spread work opportunities and ensure that women are not discouraged by excessive travel distances. The design of local programmes should also take into account women's existing time burdens
4) Require equal pay for equal work for both men and women; and require contractors to submit weekly time sheets, disaggregated by gender
5) stimulate the development of female-owned construction enterprises by providing for more flexible criteria for selection of enterprises to be trained as small and medium rehabilitation contractors, thus removing the present bias towards firms led by technically qualified male degree holders.
Promoting women's participation in contracting will nevertheless be difficult given that contractors are, reasonably enough, primarily interested in profit maximisation rather than equity. The design and use of incentives to motivate contractors to employ women must be further explored.
It is clear that there is plenty of scope for donor agencies and national governments to integrate gender equality within transport sector policies, programmes and projects. Labour-based road rehabilitation and maintenance projects, in particular, provide a vehicle yielding immediate benefits at the local level.
This page is concerned solely with promoting gender equality on road work sites. It only touches on one facet of the many relationships between mobility, gender, and family wellbeing in general. For example, poor access to health facilities is a cause of high maternal and infant mortality. The reader interested in more detail on relationships between gender and rural transport and its impact on social development in general should clickon the logo below.
This page was contributed by Jeff Turner, Programme Manager of AFCAP
