Of women and poverty in Nigeria

With the current reports and statistics backed by researches which aver that Nigeria has more people living in extreme poverty than any other country in the world, there is no gainsaying the fact that poverty currently walks on four legs in Nigeria. However, at a time like this when markets and states are undergoing dramatic and rapid changes, “feminised poverty” seems to be deepening even while strengthening gender inequalities in the country and thus should spark a conversation on how poverty strikes the weak components of the society. As a matter of fact, not only does poverty affect more women than men, but the impact of poverty is more severe on the former than the latter and as a consequence, there has been a continuous increasing share of women living in extreme poverty in Nigeria. By all means, poverty is one of the most hellacious, multifaceted, and pervasive issues to plague a nation as it brings forth hunger and malnutrition, circumscribed access to education, much as it denies victims other basic services. Yet, it has to be stated that for women, poverty comes with even more risks and challenges.

For one thing, 15 million girls, compared to 10 million boys, will never get a chance to learn to read or write in primary school; much more than that women are 2.6 times more likely to do unpaid work than men.  Moreover, poor girls are more than twice as likely to marry in childhood, only to then face possible life-threatening risks from early pregnancy, and very often lose the opportunity of a good education and a better income, and In this case, find themselves forced to feed the poverty cycle by living in poverty with their children or simply put, their poverty becomes a self-sustaining cycle. Not too long ago for instance in one of the IDP camps in Nigeria, we read about a couple who gave their underage daughter out in marriage in exchange for food just to survive; the truth is just that the selling of the daughter would not relieve the pains of their poverty but would only extend it as the daughter would start the process of poverty grinding all over again.

Equally, the burden of health risks is borne by the disadvantaged in societies especially women and children who are often poor, have very little formal education and low occupations. For these reasons, they often suffer from lack of protein and energy, the adverse health effects of which are frequently worsened by deficiencies in micronutrients needed by the body for proper functioning. Also, during times of food shortage, the food intake for women decreases as they always eat last after ensuring that everybody else has eaten, resulting in malnutrition. In this wise, their daily calorie intake is frequently not sufficient to cover their heavy physical workload as frequent child bearing makes extra metabolic demands on them.

Important to realize however is that feminists have long attributed the feminisation of poverty to women’s vulnerability reinforced by the patriarchal, sexist, and gender‐biased nature of the society, which does not value protecting women’s rights and wealth. In fact, the submissions of the concept of femininisation of poverty—a phenomenon, in which women and girls experience poverty at disproportionate rates – are not exactly new to the nation as poverty has a more severe impact on women and girls than on men and boys with most compelling evidence showing that more than half of the Nigerian poor population are women. Yet, the reasons advanced for the existence of feminised poverty include discrimination against women in the labour market; or that women tend to have lower education than men and therefore are paid lower salaries in the workplace. In this case, women at the bottom end of our labour market are unfortunately carrying the heavier burden of the ongoing poverty in Nigeria.

In essence, poverty is a disease that saps people’s energy, de-humanises them and creates  a sense of helplessness in every member of the society. But women are, and have always been, more likely to experience abject penury than their male counterparts.  Similarly, gender inequality has been one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality in the world. It denies women their voices, devalues their work and makes women’s position unequal to men’s. Despite some important progress to change this in recent years, in no country have women achieved economic equality with men, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty. However, the socio-cultural factors that tie women with the ropes of poverty should and must be deliberately destroyed, forbidding the exhibition of misogynistic behaviours by members of the society. This will then give the women the freedom to stand and be all that they could be, because it would seem the society places a lot of restrictions on them, much as it frowns at females who go beyond the patriarchal expectations. As a consequence, women are enslaved in their own minds as they internalise these notions of them as restricted humans to further feed the poverty circle.

In the last analysis, halting women’s poverty and providing better economic opportunities for all women will require specific policy actions to ensure that women receive the pay they deserve and have equal work condition. The proven social return of investing in women and girls makes a strong economic case for prioritising gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in all facets of life especially when it comes to education, health and opportunity. For example, funding specific national early childhood education and care for girls would lead to more jobs later in life and more less child marriages and much more distancing from poverty. In the end, the poverty of women is the poverty of society and humanity at large, and harsh times like this remind us that fighting extreme poverty cannot be accomplished unless gender inequality is first prioritized and addressed accordingly.

Yakubu is of the Department of Mass Communication, Kogi State University, Anyigba, Nigeria.

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