Make Every Woman Count
2.3 Challenges and Gaps While the countries in the region have promoted women’s economic empowerment and entrepreneurship and GRB, and have committed to eradicating poverty through legal, policy and institutional reforms, challenges remain and gaps. East African women still face barriers that restrict their involvement in and benefits from new developments. The first gap observed relates to the legislation guaranteeing equality and prohibiting discrimination in the workplace. According to the sources consulted, nearly half of the countries in East Africa do not have legal provisions guaranteeing equal remuneration for work of equal value. This lack of legal protection allows the gender pay gaps to continue and prevents women from realising economic rights and full and equal participation in the workplace. Not all countries have legislation prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace. While national legislation guarantees equal treatment in employment, women continue to face discrimination and harassment in the workplace owing to weak implementation and enforcement. Moreover, in many East African countries, women have fewer employment opportunities. A second gap concerns women’s access to financial resources, such as credit. In most East African countries, except for Djibouti, Eritrea and Mauritius, no provisions were found in national legislation prohibiting discrimination in access to credit based on gender. This lack of legal protection prohibiting discrimination violates principles of equality, hampers female entrepreneurship, hinders women’s economic empowerment and presents obstacles to realising women’s economic rights. For some East African women, it is also not possible to open a bank account or register a business in the same way as men. In other counties, few women hold bank accounts or borrow money, in part because of a lack of steady income and limited access to financial institutions and information about their rights and opportunities. Concerning legislation on parental leave, some gaps are evident. About half of the countries in the East African region do not meet the ILO standard for maternity leave, and not all States pay paternal leave. In countries where legislation provides for paternal leave, the law does not include all fathers. Moreover, the laws concerning maternal and paternal leave are not applied equally in all sectors. For example, the Labour Act of 2017 of South Sudan provides for paternity leave but this entitlement does not apply to partners of unmarried pregnant women.604 The Act is also inconsistently executed. While applied in the private sector, it has yet to take effect in the public sector.605 While women in the formal sector are guaranteed maternal leave, female workers in the informal sector or self-employed women lack such protection. As a result, self-employed women and women in the informal sector lose income as a result of pregnancy and return to work almost immediately. The feminisation of poverty remains a concern in the East African region. In many countries, more women than men, in both urban and rural areas, live in poverty. The economic, social, cultural and institutional barriers women face to equal employment opportunities and entrepreneurship contribute to our understanding of the feminisation of poverty. In many countries, such as in Kenya and South Sudan, households headed by women tend to be poorer than their male counterparts. Women, in general, have fewer employment and business opportunities than men.606 Other contributing factors include high unemployment numbers among women in the formal sector and persistent gender pay gaps. Throughout the Decade, East African countries made advances in implementing GRB through legislative and policy reform; however, some challenges remain. A critical gap observed is that not all East African countries have a legislative framework in place to institutionalise GRB. Political instability and conflicts have hampered advances in GRB in some East African countries. While some countries allocate funds to promote gender and projects aimed at women’s economic empowerment, national budgets often do not include a gender-specific budget line. Some countries do not have mechanisms in place to monitor and track GRB. Lack of or insufficient training on gender-sensitive budgeting to better integrate gender in developing and implementing budgets, policies and programmes represents another gap. These challenges make it difficult to assess to what extent the allocation of national budgets addresses the needs of women and strengthens gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.
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