Guest Voices: Moroccan equal rights from AidData

During the week we were contacted by researchers at Aid Data. The organization attempts to build a database that tracks all development finance project-by-project. The goal of AidData is to accurately measure aid effectiveness using all of the data.

Anne Bernier, a research assistant from the College of William and Mary helped to write this blog post on new laws in Morocco. A new Moroccan Family Code hopes to give women greater rights. We encourage you to hit the link to the full article as it contains some graphs that help to explain the data.

While in Morocco this summer, Anne heard a lot about the government’s recent work to improve the status of women. In early 2004, the Moroccan Parliament overhauled the Moudawana, or Moroccan Family Code, giving women greater rights. The new family code removed provisions requiring women to obey their husbands and restricted polygamy. The reforms changed inheritance laws, allowed women freer access to employment and education, permitted Moroccan nationality to pass to children through either men or women, and empowered women to initiate divorce.

As Research Assistants forAidData, we wondered how Morocco’s donors would react to the domestic changes. As Nick Kristof has written, aid to women can have dramatic development effects.Did gender-related aid increase after 2004, perhaps to complement the reforms or as a “reward”? Or, did progress in the domestic legal code cause donors to shift aid away from women’s projects into other areas? For a quick comparison we keyword searched Morocco’s aid for the terms “gender,” “women,” “female,” and “girls” to flag projects with a significant women’s component in addition to those with women as the priority purpose. While the method isn’t perfect, as a first cut, we established a replicable and reliable sample of projects that would allow us to establish variation in allocation over time.

From the data we learned that despite a net increase in total aid to Morocco from 1999-2008, gender- related projects received around 1% of total aid both before and after the 2004 reforms. So, while gender- related aid did increase from $10,698,525 in 1999 to $16,307,016 in 2008 (and the number of projects went from 12 to 71 per year), we don’t see a dramatic change in allocation priorities by Morocco’s donors in either direction. This surprised us—donors had been clamoring for these reforms for years; but when they were passed we observe no obvious response on the part of these donors. This outcome is dissimilar to that noted by Chris Marcoux in the environmental issue area where change in aid is related to change in the domestic institutions of the recipient country.

But while there has been no major shift toward gender-related aid relative to other sectors in Morocco’s aid portfolio, perhaps donors became more targeted in the gender aid they were giving by focusing more directly on women’s rights, rather than traditional development activities thought to benefit women disproportionately. Thus, in our continuing quest to find a donor “response” to the reforms, we instead looked at the composition of projects within gender-related aid:

Here we see some big changes. First, education and employment and, to a lesser extent, business/industry/agriculture decreased dramatically from a combined 67% to only 15%. Government policy and capacity (all sectors) as well as social projects stayed about the same, though we were interested to find a few projects responding directly to the reforms, such as this American project and this Spanish project. The real story lies in aid to women’s empowerment groups, civil society organizations, and gender-related rural development. From 2005-2008, projects in these sectors accounted for $70,873,272 of the total $108,723,601 in gender related aid, with Spain and the International Fund for Agricultural Development as the largest donors.

This shift from education and business to civil society projects is similar to the United Nations Development Fund for Women’s strategy. UNIFEM proposes to politically empower women by increasing political representation and mobilization and improving domestic legislation and its implementation. Domestic and international efforts in Morocco could also be viewed within the larger movement to raise women’s status as a critical component of economic development, as noted by Isobel Coleman in Foreign Affairs.

But these descriptive statistics say little about the actual results for women in Morocco. Other countries and women’s rights groups lauded Morocco for its reforms, but despite instances of progress, change has been slow. In particular, many women’s NGOs despair spotty implementation by conservative judges and the national government. To track the reforms’ results, we used Womanstats to look up the UNDP’s Gender-related Development Index (GDI), which uses literacy, school enrollment, life expectancy, and income levels to calculate the social and economic disparity between men and women. A high GDI shows a higher level of achievement for both men and women and higher gender equality.

Since 2003, Morocco’s GDI has risen steadily, although its rank has bounced around from 100, to 95, to 111. So while the achievement levels of Moroccan women have increased since the Moudawana reforms, Morocco has stayed roughly in the same place relative to the rest of the countries in the world. Although we found that donors reacted to the reforms in 2004, it was in a more nuanced way than we expected, given their sweeping changes. Whether that was appropriate will have to be debated elsewhere.

Ending poverty by investing in girls

Women are more likely than men to spend their money on their families. A new study from Australia puts some facts behind this statement.

The report says investing in girls is the best way to lift families out of poverty. The study from Plan International is urging Australian companies with interests overseas to make sure they have equal hiring practices for women.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, we read more about the study of selfless women. you can download an mp3 of the radio story from here.

The report by Plan International Australia shows young women are the first to lose their jobs or have their education stopped so they can be placed in domestic work during an economic crisis.

Plan has been studying 140 girls since birth. The girls come from nine countries across the developing world.

Plan chief executive Ian Wishart says the report, called Because I am a Girl, shows many countries still have the attitude that girls are not as important as boys.

"The situation for girls starts pretty bleak. At least 100 million girls are missing from the world population statistics because of female foeticide," he said.

"In other words, gender-biased abortions are taking place when people learn that it's a girl. Then when a girl is born, many girls already get stripped of what we call economic assets. They won't inherit anything from their family just simply because they're a girl."

Mr Wishart says recent research by the World Bank shows economic growth is boosted by the number of girls who complete their secondary education and go on to earn higher wages.

"The stats show that the extra year of study of school results in 10 to 20 per cent higher income," he said.

"If you start multiplying that through five or six years of high school, it has a dramatic effect.

"And the other thing that happens is a young women who gets a fair job with a decent wage will invest 90 per cent of that in her family and children, compared to just 30 or 40 per cent for men, I'm afraid.

"What that results in is her children will almost certainly be well educated and live outside of poverty."

But Mr Wishart says it is hard for girls and women in developing countries to get an education and then employment.

"The difficulty is the pathway for girls through life is littered with what I call trapdoors to fall down; entry to primary school denied; pulled out of high school for an early marriage and perhaps an early pregnancy; the dangers of HIV/AIDS," he said.

"And even if you got through all of that maze, discrimination in actually the awarding of jobs. A lot of this needs to be changed for the potential of young women to be released and realised by national economies.

"Unfortunately there's still 20 per cent of girls who are not entering primary school. So it's not about discriminating against boys or neglecting boys, it's about bringing girls up to the same level, giving them an equal chance to participate in the national and global economy."

Women make up 70% of the poverty population

A microcredit firm called Okiocredit has completed a study that looks at the percentages of women who are in poverty from country to country. The study finds that women make up 70% of the poverty population, and it remains around that percentage regardless of nation.

Okiocredit performs loans in the countries of Bulgaria, Kenya, Peru and the Philippines. We found the story about the study in the business website, BDaily.

Dr Shobha Arole, Oikocredit board president said: “A lack of access to basic education, economic and property rights means 70% of the world’s poor are female.

“These are the groups who are marginalised, victims of violence ad vulnerable in every sense of the word.”

Oikocredit offers microfinance to families in poverty around the globe, reaching 69 different countries, with 16.8 million people assisted by the private cooperative financial institution since it was established in 1975.
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One of the problems highlighted by the report is that even if microcredit is taken out in a women’s name, she will not necessarily have control over it.

The report said: “It is possible that a husband or male family members use the money, with the woman taking the microcredit simply because she is more eligible.

“Some writers state that women, instead of benefiting, actually suffer if they have access to microfinance funds. It is suggested that their husbands may see this as encouragement to decrease their contribution to the household.”