#theme:gen_work

Girls receive a disproportionally small share of the total development dollars invested globally each year, but the field is primed for even greater action and investment. Before charting the way forward, it is important to understand more about current efforts underway on behalf of girls... This report presents the key findings from this exercise, describing what we have learned about the donors and organizations engaged in girl work, the policy and program efforts underway, and current and future directions for the field. It is hoped that the findings and considerations emerging from this mapping exercise will contribute toward a more strategic and coordinated effort to mobilize additional actors, resources and ideas on behalf of girls around the world.

"Telling Our Story: Women and Business" focuses on how IFC is working with strategic partners to identify innovative approaches to promote women in business and helping create opportunities to transform local and global markets. The Telling Our Story series puts a human face on IFC's work, featuring short profiles of leading projects and the people whose lives they improve.

This summary, written under the aegis of the Center for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalisation (CASAM), presents the preliminary results of the first pan-India survey on sex workers. These preliminary findings have been developed for an event in Mumbai on 30 April 2011. The authors appreciate the opportunity to discuss their research with an audience of critical stakeholders. A report which provides their final analysis and data relating to male, trans sex workers, sexuality, stigma and discrimination as well as the 0.5% of 15-17 year olds in this sample will be published later in the year.

SPLC researchers interviewed approximately 150 women who are either currently undocumented or have spent time in the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. The women all have worked in the U.S. food industry in Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, New York or North Carolina. A few have now obtained legal status. The interviews took place from January through March of 2010. Researchers also interviewed a number of advocates who work with immigrant women and farmworkers.

This newsletter reports on the issues, news, struggles and life experiences of Asian women workers. “Women Workers at the Frontline of Sustainable Solutions” is the theme of this issue of the AWWN Newsletter and it sends two singular messages: • That women workers must be at the driving, and not receiving, end in a global economy shaken to its roots by deep recession; and • That solutions must be sustainable, taking root in people’s life and work, informed by a larger vision of the commons for the common good.

Women make up roughly three quarters of the world’s poor. Despite often having to perform the duties of both a breadwinner and head of household, women earn a mere tenth of global income. Subjected to the most precarious jobs in cities and rural areas, women are also far more likely than men to be unemployed.

Over the past 30 years, hundreds of thousands of young women have spent their lives working day and night in the garment factories of Honduras. While jobs in the production plants of export processing zones, or maquila, have offered women the opportunity of work and economic independence, this has often come at a terrible cost. Low wages, forced overtime and inadequate health and safety provisions have taken their toll on the health of thousands of women, many of whom are now unable to work as a result.

In Egypt, an estimated 2 to 2.5 million children between the ages of 6-15 are working as street vendors, domestic workers, agricultural labourers, factory workers, laundry workers and helpers for mechanics (ECWR, 2008, U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs), with the vast majority (83%) working in rural areas (National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, 2004 as cited by Social Research Center, 2007; Gazaleh, Bulbul, Hewala & Najim, 2004). Overall, more boys than girls in Egypt are working but it is not clear whether domestic work is sufficiently counted in child labour estimates as child domestic workers are explicitly excluded from Egypt’s child labour laws and so remain unaknowledged (Gazaleh, Bulbul, Hewala & Najim, 2004).