Women Around the World

Voices from the Field features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is authored by Emily Arnold-Fernandez, the executive director of Asylum Access. Refugees around the world held their breath as last Thursday approached: U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s second executive order barring refugees and others from the United States was scheduled to take effect at 12:01 pm EDT. Thankfully, Yusra and her children were already in the United States. United States is a critical safe haven Yusra (an alias to ensure her safety) is an Asylum Access client. She and her children fled Somalia, leaving their home behind to escape pervasive and unending violence. Somalia is a deadly place to be female. Sexual violence is particularly pervasive in the country’s deteriorating security situation: women interviewed by rights groups in recent years testified to the normalcy of asking each other, “Were you raped today?”  But Somalis, including women who have faced grave human rights abuses, are among six nationalities the Trump administration wants to bar from entering the United States – along with all refugees. Yusra and her family sought safety in Thailand, where 30-day tourist visas can be purchased on arrival. When they arrived, however, Thailand had no asylum system – which meant Yusra and her family soon were undocumented migrants. Eventually their luck ran out. Yusra and her children were arrested by Thai immigration police and detained in a filthy, overcrowded Immigration Detention Center. In mid-2016, Thailand suspended its immigration bail system, leaving Yusra and others like her facing indefinite imprisonment. The only way out of detention was via United Nations-facilitated resettlement to another country like the United States. Yusra and her children had completed the myriad steps of the U.S. resettlement security and screening process and were booked on a flight. Before they could board, the first executive order barring refugees was issued. The flight left without them. After a federal court halted that executive order, Yusra and her family were rebooked on a new flight. They arrived in the country just days before the second executive order was to take effect. Other governments have greater impact While the number of refugees able to resettle in the United States will decrease if the Trump administration succeeds in its plans to limit or eliminate resettlement, the resettlement program is open to less than one percent of the world’s 21 million refugees. The vast majority of the world’s refugees never reach our shores. For most refugee women and girls, the policies that touch their lives are those of governments in Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), and Latin America, where most refugees remain. In many countries hosting most of the world’s refugees—such as Jordan, Kenya, Pakistan, and Turkey—refugees are not allowed to move freely, seek work, attend school, open a bank account, or take other steps to rebuild their lives.   Refugees land at a beach on the island of Kos after crossing the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece on a dinghy early May 27, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis   Some are confined in internment camps, as most camps require refugees to remain inside at all times, with few exceptions.  Others live in hiding on urban margins, afraid of being arrested and detained like Yusra and her family. Many refugees spend decades in this limbo: protracted refugee situations, which account for about half of the world’s refugees, last for an average (!) of 26 years. The effect on refugee women and girls is profound. If they are raped in a refugee camp, they’re not allowed to move elsewhere – instead, they are often compelled to live next to their rapist.  If they work without permission, their employers can abuse them with impunity.  Women and girls bear the brunt of unjust laws that confine and oppress refugees around the world. To change this, we must change national laws and policies in refugee-hosting countries. Today, however, most donors do not invest in advocacy to improve the laws and policies affecting the vast majority of the world’s refugees. Our global response to refugees meets basic survival needs for most, but provides no pathway for them to thrive. A shift that redirects some funds into advocacy for better refugee policies would provide exponential returns: policies that allow refugees to work yield positive effects on wages, working conditions, and economies overall. Dividends are observed when women, in particular, are economically empowered. To get better policies, we need advocates who will fight to change laws – not only in Washington, but in Amman and Bangkok and Nairobi. This means we need to fund them. If we don’t invest in laws that give refugees access to safe, lawful work, free movement, equal protection, and access to state services, refugee women and girls will continue to have their lives constrained and their potential suppressed. Donors and advocates fight to open opportunities for women all over the world. We believe women should be able to work and earn money and control assets. We believe girls should be able to attend school. We believe a woman should be free to leave her residence without permission from someone else. It’s time we started fighting for the same opportunities for refugee women and girls, too.

Anne Connell is the assistant director of the Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday, March 22, is World Water Day, an internationally-celebrated day dedicated to collaboration between the United Nations, governments, and non-governmental organizations to tackle the world’s water crisis. Ensuring universal access to safe water by 2030 is identified as a critical component of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’s mandate to eradicate extreme poverty. The global water crisis is not only deadly—lack of access to clean water claims more lives each year than AIDS, breast cancer, terrorism, and all the world’s conflicts combined—but is incredibly economically costly. And the opportunity cost of water shortage, contamination, and inadequate infrastructure falls disproportionately on women and girls. In communities around the world, women and girls spend much of their days walking long distances to seek out safe water, fetching or drawing it, and carrying heavy containers back to their households. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, an average trip to collect water covers over 3 miles and takes 33 minutes each way—and in a number of countries, such as Mauritania, Somalia, Tunisia, and Yemen, the trip takes longer than an hour each way. In South Africa alone, women collectively walk the equivalent distance of sixteen times to the moon and back every day just to collect and transport the water their families and communities need to survive. Water availability also affects whether or not girls—especially those from poor, rural, or marginalized families—are educated. The gender gap in water-related work begins early in life: young girls between the ages of five and nine spend an estimated 40 million more hours a day on household chores than boys, and girls aged ten to fourteen years old spend 120 million more hours each day. If, like in many sub-Saharan African communities, fetching water takes several hours, it considerably shortens the time girls have available for schooling and disincentives families from prioritizing girls’ education. The burden of water collection is not only felt by women and girls themselves, but has far-reaching effects on broader prosperity. The 200 million hours women and girls spend every day collecting water globally is time that could be spent carrying out income generating activities and contributing to the formal economy. Indeed, experts estimate that lack of ready access to clean water causes annual economic losses of up to 7 percent of GDP in some countries: in India, for example, it’s estimated that the time women spend every year fetching and carrying water is equivalent to a national loss of income of 10 billion rupees, or $160 million.   Women carry metal pitchers filled with water from a well outside Denganmal village, Maharashtra, India, April 21, 2015. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui   Given these strong connections between lack of access to clean water and other development areas—including gender equality—governments, multilateral organizations, and private sector leaders are investing in projects to build and repair wells, bring water sources closer to communities, and install solar pumping technologies. Evidence suggests that these efforts would be strengthened by investment in women’s access to and ownership of water tools and technologies: when women run water cooperatives or own water pumps, for example, they are significantly more likely than men to invest profits and time saved back into their communities. In one program in Nigeria, a social enterprise model for women-run water centers not only reduced the time spent collecting water for over 6,000 women, but successfully provided better access to clean, affordable water for over 30,000 people and led to improved economic, health, and educational outcomes across the community. Efforts geared toward improving the management of the world’s resources and extending access to safe water should thus capitalize on the central roles women already play in water management. It is clear that lessening the burden of unpaid water work that falls on women and girls is not only essential as a matter of human rights—it unleashes a range of positive economic and development outcomes.