ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad Chamber of Small Traders and Small Industries (ICSTSI) on Sunday demanded that the government take concrete steps to empower rural women, a central factor in ensuring food security and ending poverty.
ICSTSI Patron Shahid Rasheed Butt noted that female farmers controlled less land and had limited access to inputs, seeds, credits, technology and finance. He added that rural women were more vulnerable and marginalised, with their voices having being muted.
He pointed out that empowering rural women was a pre-requisite to ending poverty and hunger, achieving food security and ensuring uniform development, for which bold steps were required.
Butt said that around 60 per cent of working women in the South Asian region were linked to agriculture. He also noted that they were intentionally kept poor and unprotected and that they could only be lifted out of poverty if this sector was supported.
The patron also said that all countries stress on the importance of female education however proper steps were never taken in this direction, the main factor keeping women’s share in economy very small.
He added that the majority of women working in agriculture were not paid while they were kept away from critical decisions in the subcontinent, a situation which required government intervention.
The nexus of limited access to resources, inadequate health care and education, systematic discrimination and barriers to their participation in economic activities exacerbated poverty among rural women, he noted.
Improvement in the lives of farming communities would boost agriculture’s share in the Gross Domestic Product while expanding the reach of microfinance banks would help them, he said, adding that proper insurance facilities can could also assist the farming communities in a big way.
