Statement of Sarah Poole, Deputy Director, Regional Bureau for Arab States, UNDP On the occasion of “Rural Women in the Arab Region: Cases of Challenges and Resilience”

March 19, 2018

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Statement of Sarah Poole
Deputy Director,
Regional Bureau for Arab States
United Nations Development Programme
On the occasion of
Side-event to the 62nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women
United Nations Headquarters, New York
16 March, 2018

- Check against Delivery -

Good afternoon Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Colleagues,

At the outset, on behalf of UNDP I would like to express our thanks to the Arab Women’s Organisation and UNWOMEN for organising this event, as an important contribution to CSW focused specifically on challenges facing rural women in the Arab region. I would like to convey our special appreciation to Her Excellency Minister Mervat Tallaway for her leadership and partnership. We are especially delighted to be partners with AWO in the forthcoming AWO-UNDP Manual of Gender Responsive Implementation of the SDGs, from Strategy to Action. This joint effort is a reflection of our shared view on the centrality of women’s role in achieving the SDGs.Mourad Wahba, our Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States, conveys his regrets for not being here with you today: he is currently traveling to Algeria for an important international conference on women’s political participation – a critical factor in women’s inclusion and empowerment.

As we are all aware, the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs are grounded in the principle of leaving no one behind. Unfortunately, the reality today is that women in the Arab region remain underrepresented across all spheres of life. UNDP’s 2016 Arab Human Development Report highlights that women across the region continue to contend with a range of barriers and deficits curtailing their advancement, and depriving entire societies of achieving their potential.

Allow me to share a few points that illustrate the extent of the challenge:

  • As of 2015, only 22 percent of women aged 15 and older were employed outside the home in the Arab region, compared with 75 percent of men. This is the lowest female labor participation rate – and the largest gap between male and female labour participation rates – in the world.

  • Geography is a significant factor of inequality in the region, with disparities between urban and rural areas being more pronounced in the Arab States than in many other parts of the world.

  • Women’s political participation and representation in decision-making lags far behind that of men: overall, the representation of women in national Arab parliaments is still at 18%, and the average proportion of women in ministerial level positions in the Arab countries reaches just 10.5%.

  • Women and girls are bearing a disproportionate burden of the ongoing conflicts and crises across the region, which is home to about 47 percent of the world’s internally displaced persons, over 57 percent of the world’s refugees – and a growing number of female-headed households.

  • Gender inequality is reflected in numerous other ways throughout the region, often with a disproportionate impact in rural areas: low levels of income, entrepreneurship, access to credit, inheritance rights and land ownership.

  • We are also mindful of the tremendous gap facing women, particularly rural women, in the area of financial inclusion. Our Administrator participated earlier this week in the high-level event entitled Innovative Practices for the Financial Inclusion and Economic Empowerment of Women, Especially Rural Women co-organized by G77 and China, which highlighted that innovative ways to increase women’s access to finance is key.

  • I would also stress the moral and economic imperative to recognize the contribution of women’s unpaid work, which upholds economies and societies alike.

  • And finally, I come to the issue of data. A continued imperative to ensure that rural women in this region are not left behind is to strengthen the availability, quality and disaggregation of data.

As UNDP, we are fully committed to supporting local and national partners to address these challenges – advancing the role of women in the Arab States region, supporting resilience especially for people affected by crisis, and increasing women’s participation in the political, social, and economic spheres.

We have several projects supporting rural women’s empowerment in Sudan, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and Morocco. We are working throughout the region with displaced women and local communities to include women, including rural women, in livelihoods programming – although much more needs to be done to improve access to credit, to create markets and to look at the structural barriers that are preventing women from entering the market.

Agenda 2030 and the SDGs offer an opportunity to promote gender equality across all development goals. The ambitions of the SDGs – and its principle of leaving no one behind -- can only be achieved if the barriers that hold back women are properly addressed.

In this light, I am pleased to share with you that we are committing to a new initiative, for the Arab States region, focused on tackling some of the challenges facing women’s economic inclusion, in the labor force, and the financial sphere.

Through this, we stand ready to support countries in the Arab region to develop pro-poor national development strategies which address the barriers women face in accessing and controlling assets, resources and services. We look forward to engaging in future discussions and thinking together with our partners.

As our Administrator said on International Women’s Day, “The time is now to build a world free of discrimination and exclusion, and make it possible for all women and men to live lives of dignity and opportunity.” We remain committed to strengthen and scale-up our partnerships and support to women’s empowerment and inclusion in the Arab States – as a key factor in the achievement of the SDGs.