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Tuesday, 31 October 2006 16:38 |
By JIM GENARO
For the United Nations to meet its five Millennium Development Goals, it will need the support of national and regional governments, as well as investment from the private sector, Dr. Roger Coate told an audience of about 40 people at UNC Ashevilleës Reuter Center last Wednesday night.
Coate, who is a professor of international relations and director of the undergraduate program in international studies and political science at the University of South Carolina, presented his talk, titled "Women in Development: The Continuing Crisis" to the Western North Carolina Chapter of the United Nations Association of the U.S.A.
"Whatës
a crime is whatës happening ÇƒÓ or not happening ÇƒÓ in developing
countries in terms of education of the poor," Coate said. This is
crucial, he added, because education is the foundation for making
improvement on all of the U.N.ës Millennium Development Goals.
The MDGës, he
explained, are five priorities established by U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan in 1999, with the intention of combating the major
challenges facing the worldës poor before 2015.
The professor
focused on the impact on women worldwide of three of the U.N. goals:
achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and
empowering women; and improving maternal health.
"The world, as a whole, is way off-course," Coate told the audience.
Maternal health,
particularly, has seen only minimal progress in recent years, he noted.
In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, the chances of a woman dying in
childbirth is one in 16, he said. By contrast, in the U.S., the rate at
which women die during labor is only one for every 3,800 pregnancies.
Furthermore,
childbirth is the leading cause of death among women in the world,
Coate said, even though the vast majority of these could be prevented
with even a moderate degree of prenatal care.
The problem is worse in societies that encourage young people to marry early, he said.
"Adolescent
girls, whose bodies are not yet fully mature, are particularly
susceptible," Coate noted. Girls who give birth between the ages of 10
and 14 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women ages
20 to 24, he added.
In many places,
cultural biases against contraception have contributed to these
problems, Coate said. In Africa, for instance, only 20 percent of women
use modern forms of birth control.
In terms of
gender equality, the degree of progress that has been made depends on
which criteria is used. The U.N., Coate noted, uses four major
standards for determining a member stateës degree of gender equality.
These include the enrollment of girls in primary and secondary
education, literacy parity, the share of women in non-agricultural wage
employment and representation in government.
Coate said that
while developing countries often have a greater percentage of
representation by women than the developed world, on the rest of these
standards, the developing world is greatly lagging.
Particularly in
terms of education, a great disparity exists between men and women in
developing countries, he noted. While religious biases contribute to
the problem ÇƒÓ particularly in Muslim countries ÇƒÓ other institutional
challenges often prevent women from attending school as well, Coate
said.
For instance,
the requirement of most primary and secondary schools in Africa that
students purchase school uniforms is a serious detriment to the ability
of many young people ÇƒÓ particularly girls ÇƒÓ to go to school.
"If the income of the family is less than $200 a year, how can you afford uniforms?" Coate asked, rhetorically.
Many families in the third world choose to keep their daughters at home to work, rather than pay for them to go school.
He added that
this phenomenon is not as bad in the impoverished former Soviet Union,
where state socialism held a more egalitarian ethos.
After outlining the problems facing women in developing countries, Coate posed the question, "What needs to be done?"
The answer, he said, relies on the support and participation of the governments of the countries that are most in need.
In many of these
states, cultural biases make it difficult for western aid workers to
make inroads, Coate noted. For instance, in Muslim countries, many
people object to efforts by non-Muslims to promote gender equality.
"My Muslim
counterparts say that womenës equality contradicts their culture," he
told the audience. "I have a hard time arguing with that."
He added that this represented "not a clash of civilizations, but a clash of cultures" that is difficult to overcome.
Other challenges
to progress in developing countries comes from the outside, he said.
One of the biggest problems is the effect of structural readjustment
policies imposed by the World Bank on developing nations that owe large
debts to it. Many countries entered such agreements during the 1980s
and 1990s, Coate noted. These plans typically "urged cutting social
services to pay debt," he said. Education, which is invaluable in the
long-term, but in the short-term shows little financial payoff, was
often the first thing cut, Coate added.
On the other
had, the U.N. has been successful at combating poverty in the
developing world through an innovative program known as
"microfinancing," Coate told the audience.
This program
focuses on providing economic assistance to individuals through small
loans that allow them to invest in their own livelihoods.
Through the
program, a lender might offer a farmer a loan of "a couple hundred
dollars so they can get a cow, get a couple of chickens," Coate
explained.
This program has
been widely successful at combating poverty, he said, and is popular
among fiscal conservatives because it encourages capitalism and
self-empowerment.
Furthermore, recipients of the loans typically have a high likelihood of repaying their debts, Coate noted.
In terms of
combating maternal mortality, the picture is bleaker, he said. Though
the problem could be easily fought, Coate said, the money to do so has
simply not been allocated.
The U.N.
estimates that to provide adequate prenatal care for the majority of
mothers in the developing world would cost between $12 billion and $18
billion, he said.
"Eighteen
billion dollars ÇƒÓ how much do we spend a day in Iraq? One billion
dollars a day," Coate told the audience. "And yet one mother dies every
minute."
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