SUPPRESSED POTENTIAL
WOMEN IN THE INFORMAL ECONOMY MUST CROSS A MINEFIELD OF CULTURAL IMPEDIMENTS TO GROWING THEIR BUSINESSES.
by Dr. John C. Cross
A decade ago, academics and development experts argued that women in the Third World constituted an untapped engine of development. If women, who represent half the population, could be freed from traditional barriers against economic participation, they could help bring their communities’ economies to critical mass while simultaneously improving their own status. Since patriarchal barriers to female work participation were supposed to predominate in the formal sectors of many economies, advocates targeted the in-formal sector the sector of the self-employed as the proving ground for theory.
In many instances, this focus proved highly effective. The dream of female-based development was itself based, in fact, on the successful experience of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, which organized women in the informal economy to push for government recognition and assistance and provided the loans and other support women needed to develop regular businesses. But this dream has failed to come true in Egypt and much of the Middle East. The unfortunate reality is that the informal economy has proved to be even more resistant to the full-fledged participation of women than the formal economy, meaning that an important opportunity to boost growth is being missed.
A stroll down any street in Cairo will provide ample evidence of what is known as the informal economy, the source of 90 percent of the nation’s private sector non-agricultural jobs and 30 percent of its GDP. It lies among the street vendors, workshop owners, curbside parking attendants and the myriad of other workers whose occupations fall outside the formal economy of banks, boutiques and shopping malls. One thing, however, seems to stand out: the virtual absence of women. Informal parking attendants, for example, are almost universally male, and you would have to scour thousands of traditional workshops to find even one that includes a working female. A census of workshops in the traditional neighborhoods of Bab El Shaaria and El Gamalia found that women constitute just 3 percent of the workforce and all were seamstresses. The exception to the rule seems to be street vending, where women are visible although still in the minority. In the 1986 national census, almost 350,000 women in Cairo reported that they were working. But fewer than 13,000 of them less than half of 1 percent of the total female work force reported that they were self-employed. By contrast, of the 1.5 million men in Cairo’s labor force, almost 20 percent reported that they were employers or self-employed.
Despite these figures, the fact is that women are active in the informal economy, and very much so. The problem is underreporting, which is rooted in cultural norms that dictate that women should remain in the home and subordinate to men norms that are particularly strong among the poor. As a result, unless women are formally employed, they tend to deny that they work at all.
Dr. Alia El Mahdi of Cairo University says that there is also a definitional problem at work: much work done by women is done within the home and is usually seen as an extension of their household duties. While her own survey of informal enterprises in Shaikhat Mahrouf, close to the 26th of July Bridge in Cairo, showed that women constituted only 5 percent to 6 percent of those employed, she argues that the numbers don’t reflect reality. "Women’s involvement in the informal sector is much higher than that probably around 25 percent," she says, "But we didn’t include women who work inside the home, where they make things for sale or work as maids."
The invisibility of women is constantly reinforced by men. Yunis Abdel-Tawwab, the sheikh of a souq in Maadi, seemed insulted when asked if his wife and daughter helped him sell in his market. "They do not know the man who owns the next stall," he says. "And even if they do by chance know his name, they will not know what he looks like." He dismissed other women obviously working in the market as widows, implying that women can justifiably work only if they do not have a male provider. In reality, many of the women were in fact married or single at the time, and Abdel-Tawwab later admitted that his wife did help him to prepare his goods for sale.
The minefield of cultural norms that women must maneuver in order to work creates real impediments and encourages an unhealthy caution, both of which keep them from turning their operations into real, thriving businesses that are capable of fueling development. The need to work in-side or close to their homes, for instance, usually limits women to petty street vending or home-work mainly sewing clothes or assembling simple objects that are sold by others. Nineteen-year-old Sara, the surrogate mother for her younger brothers and sisters after the death of their mother, started to sew in order to supplement the meager earnings of her elderly and often sick father. She bought a sewing machine with money from a rotating credit fund called a gamaeyya, but finds she can only get occasional work from her equally impoverished neighbors. Searching for orders from stores or factories outside her neighborhood, however, is not an option. Her family is very traditional, she explains. "Nobody goes," she says simply. "It isn’t possible."
Women who do manage to get outside the neighborhood are often reluctant to fully exploit the ad-vantages of mobility. Heba, for ex-ample, bought a sewing machine last year from her aunt after learning the trade at an income-generation project. She sews shirts and pants for a store in Ataba introduced to her by her aunt, but is hesitant to approach other stores by herself. As a result, her earnings follow the store’s seasonal gyrations. She gets steady work in August and September as the school year starts, but the orders nearly evaporate by the New Year. With this unreliable income, she still has not been able to pay off her sewing machine.
The lack of mobility of women not only limits their output, but their inputs as well. Unlike male workshop owners, women are unable to search for their own raw materials and are forced to depend on their client-stores for supplies. This, in turn, limits them to working at a piece rate that rarely translates into much more than £E 10 a day. While cooperation might seem to be a good idea, with some women getting orders and others filling them, women tend to be competitive and secretive about their clients, and only very close friends and relatives share information for fear of losing what little income they have.
Among street vendors, the same general pattern emerges. While men are able to travel easily to wholesale markets to get cheap fresh meats and vegetables, women are usually dependent on higher-priced truckers who bring merchandise to their stalls. Even when they can travel, women are more likely to be limited in the number of merchants they are comfortable dealing with. Little wonder then that women street vendors tend to concentrate around the lowest rungs of the trade, dealing in low-value goods that provide scant profits.
As discussed last month, the enormous potential of the informal economy to contribute to Egypt’s development has yet to be exploited. Considering the sector as a whole, the main problem seems to be a set of intentional and accidental government incentives that perversely encourage contraction rather than growth. Regarding women, however, the problem is social and therefore considerably more complex and resistant to solutions. The results of female-oriented development in India and elsewhere are encouraging. But until poor women are allowed to reach their entrepreneurial potential, Egypt will have to find another way to grow.
Dr. Cross is an assistant professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo and an expert on the small business sector.
[Reproduced on this website with permission from Business Monthly]