TIRANA, Sept. 21 – Albania’s rural women are overrepresented in informal employment, unpaid work in family farming and domestic and reproductive activities, a United Nations study has found.
Widespread informality is a key issue often preventing women from maternity leave and retirement benefits.
“The agricultural sector employs more than 54 percent of all economically active women, 87 percent of whom work as informal or family workers. Due to high levels of informal employment, only 19 percent of women from rural areas received maternity leave, compared with 59 percent of their urban counterparts,” says a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“Informal work increases women’s exposure to the risk of falling into poverty in older age because of their limited entitlement to pension schemes,” adds the report.
“If a woman is engaged in agriculture, the chances are very high that she is doing it informally. This effectively excludes her from social services and benefits such as maternity leave,” said Aroa Santiago Bautista, a FAO gender specialist closely involved in development of the FAO Albania report.
Stereotypical attitudes and practices in rural areas also remain widespread.
“In family farming, there is a rigid gender-based distribution of tasks. Male gender roles are associated with tasks that involve control over agricultural assets, mobility and decision-making, and female gender roles are associated with manual work in agriculture and livestock, including pre-harvest and post-harvest activities, food processing and household tasks. This distribution of labour has resulted in women’s limited access to, and control over, agricultural assets and decision-making,” says FAO.
Female farm managers represent only 6.47 percent of the total number of farm managers. In many cases, women only become farm managers in the event of widowhood or the husband’s absence.
More than half of all women who work are engaged in the agricultural sector, and of these, more than 87 percent are contributing to the family farm. Yet their access to land ownership, training possibilities and even to markets remains limited.
“It is much easier to meet women in their houses, and to gather women in home conditions, especially if the coordinator or trainer is a woman. When they are outside domestic environments, you can see how they feel more uncomfortable, more insecure. When they are in front of their husbands or other men, you can see how they are insecure and afraid of making mistakes,” says Petrit Dobi, a trainer and extension services specialist.
The creation of women-only associations can be difficult due to the barriers that women farmers may encounter, including a lack of financial or management skills, a lack of access to credit, transportation and agricultural inputs, and, especially, a lack of mobility and time to engage in activities outside the household.
Some women may even need the permission of their husbands to engage in these activities, says FAO.
“During field research conversations, when a woman farmer and member of a mixed association in Berat was asked about the possibility of creating a women-only association, she replied that, “this would depend on how kind husbands are,” adds Dobi.
FAO says the first steps to alleviating the problems of rural women in Albania have already been taken, but gender inequalities are still deeply rooted in society and change needs to be accelerated.
“Traditional gender roles are more entrenched in rural communities, and gender inequalities have remained socially accepted,” said Raimund Jehle, FAO Representative to Albania and Regional Strategic Programmes Coordinator for Europe and Central Asia speaking at the launch of the report this week.
“To bring about change on the ground, at the level of the individual, strong commitment and a sense of ownership are needed – at the highest levels of government, in civil society, and the private sector,” Jehle added.
FAO recommends the agriculture ministry and other government bodies should ensure that all agricultural policies, programmes and projects are developed using gender analysis and comply with national obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women which Albania ratified in the early 1990s soon after the collapse of the communist regime.
FAO recommends addressing the high levels of informal employment, particularly in family farming, to increase access to social protection schemes for rural women and men and support income diversification and the creation of off-farm employment for women and men.
Agriculture accounts for 50 percent of the country’s population but provides only 20 percent of the GDP.
Experts say the small size of farms, lack of appropriate management of land and agricultural infrastructure and technology make the Albanian agricultural sector more problematic compared to other countries in the region.
Albania climbed 13 steps to rank 70th among 140 countries in the 2015 Global Gender Gap report published by the World Economic Forum on improved economic, educational and political indicators. The result marks Albania’s best ranking since the inaugural 2006 edition when Albania ranked 61st out of 115 countries.
Albania ranked 85th out of 188 countries in the 2015 Human Development report examining the intrinsic relationship between work and human development, lagging behind most of its regional peers, according to a report by the United Nations Development Programme.
The human development index (HDI) is a summary measure for assessing long-term progress in three basic dimensions of human development including a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living.
