{"id":1126,"date":"2004-09-30T04:21:40","date_gmt":"2004-09-30T12:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/09\/30\/how-third-world-debt-hurts-women\/"},"modified":"2004-09-30T04:21:40","modified_gmt":"2004-09-30T12:21:40","slug":"how-third-world-debt-hurts-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1126","title":{"rendered":"How third world debt hurts women"},"content":{"rendered":"

An “Alas” reader – I apologize, but I don’t remember which one – pointed out this excellent British article on how the third world debt crisis harms women<\/a>. Here, for instance, is a discussion of what happens with the World Bank and IMF impose “austerity plans” on third-world governments:<\/p>\n

Take the capping of public expenditure. One of the first things that governments don’t do in order to meet this particular requirement is invest in infrastructure development like water and sanitation. This disproportionately affects women because it is women in developing countries who, as a result, walk up to 15km each day to collect water; it is women who on these journeys risk their own security. The Sudanese militia, for example, has been reported to prey on the women in Darfur who have to walk long distances to find water. It is girls who become “prisoners of daylight” because of a lack of toilet facilities, fearful to go for a pee until it is dark.<\/p>\n

The reining in of public expenditure hurts girls in other ways, too. In order to meet this requirement, almost all developing countries have adopted a policy of charging for healthcare and school fees. And when parents faced with school fees have to choose between spending their money on sending their daughters or sons to learn, guess who gets to go to school? When the state doesn’t provide healthcare, it is daughters not sons who are taken out of school to become care-givers; it is girls who become the unpaid nurses. […]<\/p>\n

In the most extreme cases women become a key source of foreign exchange themselves. The export of women from Thailand and elsewhere in south-east Asia to work as domestic servants overseas is a well-documented key foreign exchange generating industry for many developing world governments, an industry actively encouraged by the World Bank. A less well-known and highly disturbing fact is that the Philippines government, in the late 1970s, actively promoted the mail order bride industry in order to repay its debt.<\/p><\/div>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a>. Also, while we’re on the subject, Pinko Feminist Hellcat has a post on sweatshop labor in the third world <\/a>I’ve been meaning to link to for a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An “Alas” reader – I apologize, but I don’t remember which one – pointed out this excellent British article on how the third world debt crisis harms women. Here, for instance, is a discussion of what happens with the World … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-the-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}