RURAL WOMEN’S PERCEPTIONS OF POVERTY AND INEQUALITY IN MUNGWI DISTRICT
6.2 Perceptions of poverty and inequality
6.2.2 Description of a poor woman
When asked who a poor woman is? It emerged from empirical evidence that there were many different answers, but some similarities were also observed. This section describes some of the aspects of a poor woman. A poor woman is one who has no income, she is abused by her husband, she is not respected in society and she is socially excluded. She is noticeable from her appearance, behaviour, and lack of confidence. A poor woman is vulnerable to many calamities. Above all, a poor woman lacks education and capacity to educate herself. She walks long distances to access clinics, markets, and other services. A 28-year-old respondent with two children defined a poor woman as follows:
Apart from all the difficulties she must go through, a poor woman is one who has no time for herself.
When women elsewhere find time to entertain themselves and to develop themselves, a poor woman dedicates all her time caring for others. She is overwhelmed by the care for husband, children, and house
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chores. She has time for everything but lacks time for herself. Similarly, a poor woman walks long distances on foot carrying her produce to the market for sell on her head. Her fatigue or tiredness is enormous. When she returns home, she does not stop to rest. She only rests when she is sleeping (INT9, aged 28, Married, Grade 9 Education)
Regan (2006) describes a situation whereby women have the responsibility to do almost everything that needs to be done in a household. Regan (2006) writes that a woman does everything from cooking to fetching firewood and water, looking after children’s wellbeing by bathing, feeding, and nursing them. Additionally, women also must fend for their husbands.
To help us understand why the participants above says that women have no time for themselves, Regan (2006), asserts that women are in most cases over-laden with household responsibilities, Abdourahman (2010) argued that,
“In countries where time use studies have been conducted, it has been shown that women work significantly longer hours per day than men. In rural areas especially, most women’s time is spent on household and subsistence activities. Little time is left for market related and remunerated activities.
Compared to men, women have very heavy time loads due to the need to balance the demands of their multiple roles: productive, reproductive, social, and community. The patriarchal foundation of the distribution of roles by gender is the major cause of gender inequality, the heavy time-burden on women and girls, and ultimately the feminisation of poverty.”
I concur with Abdourahman (2010) that to emancipate women, there is a need to focus on time poverty. It seems to me that poverty for women is rarely given enough attention in literature and by development agents. Some of the descriptions of the poor woman by the responded coded in NVivo are presented in figure 6.1 below.
167 Figure 6.1 Description of a poor woman
Similar to the participants' submissions shown above in figure 6.1 of the NVivo codes, Chamber (2006) lists twelve disadvantages of poverty and some of them include social relations, material poverty, poverty of time, insecurities, lack of education, lack of information, physical ill-being, institutions and access, lack of political clout ascribed and legal inferiority.
These disadvantages are the same as suffered by the rural women of Mungwi District. To understand poverty and inequality, the women of Mungwi District were asked to explain how poverty comes about or how people sink into poverty. The following section explains how poverty comes about.
168 6.2.3 Sinking into poverty
There are many reasons why the poor may find themselves in a cycle of poverty. According to empirical evidence collected from the women of Mungwi District, there is general acknowledgement that in Mungwi District women may be poor because of government negligence. The women felt that they have been neglected for an exceedingly long time. The government has not assisted women as desired by bringing the development to the area to improve their lives. A 24-year-old respondent and a school leaver expressed herself in the following words,
It seems to me that we are all poor here in the village. However, I also believe that some people are poorer than others. We find ourselves in poverty because we have been neglected. The government does not worry about us. We are good for nothing. So, the major reason why we are poor is that our area is poor. We are isolated and we are far from everything schools, hospitals, and all other things to uplift us from poverty. There is no government assistance which comes our way. But some are poor among us because they are sick or lazy. They do not want to plough and plant anything when it rains. In the end, they become vagrants (INT13, Single, aged 24, Grade 8 Education).
In support of these sentiments above, another key participant submitted that:
People find themselves in poverty because they do not want to try to uplift themselves. Those who try to help themselves are not disappointed they always have something to eat and something to wear. The lazy ones suffer (INT4, Single, aged 30, Grade 12 Education).
Rural people always depend on each other. Parents try with all their effort to assist their children. When children grow up, they must reciprocate the same generosity towards their parents especially when they move to towns and cities where they can make a bit of money.
However, this is not always so some children forget their parents. The following statement by a 61-year-old key participant supports these assertions:
We who are not young any longer, we find ourselves in poverty because some of our children, forget about us when they migrate to towns. Instead of sending us some money, we are forgotten. At the age of 65 one needs assistance from children. Those who are helped through money sent to them by their children find life much easier. We give birth to children hoping that when we grow old, our children will help us. Elderly people in our country do not have a pension, the pension is our children (INT5, Married, aged 61, Form 2 Education).
I sympathised with participant INT5, but I could not allow myself to show emotions. I utterly agree with INT5 culturally that Bemba people are obliged to help their parents when they are elderly. However, people who leave rural areas to go to cities or towns do not necessary get good jobs to afford to look after their parents. I think that matter that needs to be addressed is the lack pension for the elderly in the rural area. The sustainable livelihoods approach calls for
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people to have access to financial capital to achieve livelihoods (Peter and Pedersen, 2010).
The elderly needs constant income for them to survive and improve their lives (Fletschner and Kenney, 2014). The human needs theory also supports the idea that human beings need physiological needs such as food, clothing and housing which are met through access to financial capital. Similarly, for human being to be fully satisfied they need to achieve safety and security needs (Aruma & Hanachor, 2017). The circumstances of the elderly as mentioned above points to a lack of safety and security, particularly economic security. The policy on pension is not extensive to cover the elderly in the rural areas. To reduce hardships the rural elderly people go through, NGOs could find ways to assist the elderly through self-help projects and diversification of livelihood strategies. Other respondents explained that women found themselves in poverty due to alcoholism and intergenerational poverty. Below is a direct statement from one of the key participants aged 65 years:
Alcoholism and failure to find work, and intergenerational poverty can drive people into poverty. In other words, for some family, poverty runs in family veins from one generation to another and cannot easily be broken. Only when something deliberate happens can the generational curse be exorcised. Poverty lives in our families, and we have it in our blood (INT3, Married, aged 65, form 2 Education).
In support of the thoughts above from interviewee INT3, poverty being in blood means it is carried from one generation to the next. In other words, it is intergenerational and perpetual. It affects even future generations. Previous studies agree that people who have inherited property from previous family generations have benefited economically and have been buttressed against economic shocks (Cooper and Bird, 2012, p. 527-528). A 55-year-old participant with five children and numerous grandchildren submitted that poverty is often caused by natural disasters in Mungwi District. She said,
Sometimes we find ourselves in poverty due to famine caused by drought or pestilences. One time we had completely no food in our village because of the drought. That year we did not have rain; all our crops dried up. Unfortunately, we did not receive much assistance from the government. We have also faced years when locusts destroyed crops and caused hanger and desperation. But poverty can be due to many other factors such as lack of education and poor health (INT7, Married, aged 55, Form 3 Education).
In direct contrast to the above submissions regarding why people descend into poverty, the following is what one participant had to say:
Poverty must not be blamed on the government or natural disasters or on lack of remittances from relatives who are well off. People must work hard. Waiting on the government to deliver is what leads people into derision of poverty. Similarly, waiting for remittances from relatives cause people to be lazy.
I think poverty for most people is self-inflicted because people lack initiatives and do not want to work.
A lot of people in Bemba land could be well off if they worked hard because they have access to land
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and for many years, we have received good rain. As much as we are poor, bad poverty cannot be blamed on the government (INT25, Married, aged 23, Grade 12 Education).
I agree with INT25 that while people are generally poor, extreme poverty may be caused by lack effort from an individual. However, when natural calamities such as droughts, floods, pestilences strike, the rural poor have no control over them. Rural communities are prone to natural disaster, and they cannot protect themselves and their livelihoods against the natural disasters due to lack of early warning systems (Venkateswaran, 2014, p. 51, OCHA, 2019).
Above we have dealt with women’s perception of poverty. In the following section of this chapter, I consider women’s perceptions of inequality in Mungwi District as per empirical evidence.