By Rose Rwabuhihi*
Yes, women have their rights in Rwanda today. They can own land, have a job, and are protected from all forms of gender-based violence. Everything we didn’t have three decades ago, we have now.
For once, we can say that men and women in Rwanda are more equal today than ever, and this is something the rest of the world aims to achieve. But if women today can go to work and be independent women, why do they remain poorer? Why is there a significant gap between men and women in the labor force?
Well, for starters, women could go to work, but why do some choose to not stay, or choose to look for something more temporary? Some of the factors include gender gaps in the workplace that exclusively affect women. At the Gender Monitoring Office (GMO), we identified critical challenges; the gender pay gap, sexual harassment, and the lack of work-life balance.
Statistics show that although 46.9 percent of the labor force in Rwanda are women, they are engaged in low-paying jobs such as farm laborers, domestic cleaners and helpers, shopkeepers, and flag wavers on road construction sites, among others.
They also show that one in 10 women, personally or at least one of their workmates, experience cases of sexual harassment at the workplace. Furthermore, 7.2 percent of women have stopped working due to pregnancy and family responsibilities.
GMO was mandated by the Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda of 2003 revised in 2015 to oversee compliance to gender equality principles in the Public Sector, Private sector, civil society, and Faith based organizations.
It is in line with the above mandate that in our 2017-2022 strategic plan, GMO, the Private sector Federation (PSF), with the support of UNDP and UN Women, we initiated and launched a program geared towards promoting gender accountability in the Private Sector dubbed the “Gender Equality Seal Program” (GES). This was aimed to enhance gender accountability in Rwanda’s private sector for inclusive growth and sustainable development.
The GES initiative is a collective effort to establish and achieve standards that promote gender equality and women empowerment in the workplace. It seeks to address six critical areas in the workplace which include; eliminating gender-based pay gaps, increasing women’s roles in decision-making, enhancing work-life balance, enhancing women’s and men’s access to non-traditional jobs, eradicating sexual harassment at work and using non-sexist communication.
Although the Government of Rwanda has been intentional in promoting gender equality, various monitoring findings and statistics by the time of launching the program showed that the private sector still lagged behind in gender equality yet it is the engine of the national economic transformation as spelled out by the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1).
It was evident that much as the sector employs almost 90 percent of the total labor force in the country, the number of women was still very low, especially in technical fields which earn more salaries or wages. At the level of decision-making, women were unequally represented and gender gaps were observed in business ownership and access to finance.
At the initial phase of the program, we started with big companies that were also members of Golden circle but when you look at the nature of the companies it had both staff that are permanent and casual workers which we believe to some extent benefits community members beyond the targeted business companies. Under this program, we have also engaged Private sector and local leaders at decentralized level to ensure that gender responsive business perspective is part of their priorities and local leadership have committed to take this forward.
From a particular note, Partners in the Program have committed to scale-up the initiative in Small and Medium enterprises (SMES), a category that employs more women. This has already started in the selected 10 companies which we believe will give us lessons on how to better advance gender accountability in such business environment.
The program also has a component on work life balance which aligns to the parental leave for both male and female parents, and we have seen different companies chose to increase parental leave for fathers which to our perspective is a good move towards mindset shift on supporting mothers and babies in their first days. So if the leave is used as intended, it would support the mother and the family at large especially in domestic obligations which traditionally lies on the shoulders of mothers even when they have given birth and still need to recover.
In total we have 38 companies and public institutions that have enrolled in GES Program, and more have recently joined. Some are awarded with the ‘Gold Seal’ upon completion, but we cannot say they have graduated. It is a continuous process, and if after three years the company is no longer up to the standards of the award, then they lose their Seal.
It would be hard to quantify how many people have benefited from this program, but definitely, the program results speak to different categories, mainly because promoting gender equality means that you put people in the center of what you are doing.
One of the most notable, is that more than 150 young girls from Secondary schools and IPRCs have been supported in study visits to companies operating in technical sectors such as in energy, transport, and telecommunication. This exposure has inspired the girls to pursue careers in technical fields which are non-traditional for women. As a result of this, the programme is supporting an internship programme for female STEM graduates in male technical industries which are male-dominated.
Also, private companies have deployed remarkable efforts in promoting a gender friendly work environment. Some of the achievements include establishing of child care friendly facilities- and breastfeeding rooms which contributed to safer and more secured spaces for children which improved women productivity.
Additionally, some financial institutions implementing the gender equality seal programme have designed gender responsive financial products. For example, Bank of Kigali’s “Zamuka Mugore” and ECOBANK’s “elevate” products both provide services designed for women in business as an affirmative measure of addressing gender gaps in access to finance. BRD has integrated gender equality in key performance indicators for managers to ensure that gender equality is part of their deliverables.
In some companies, the number of women has increased in companies involved in non-traditional/technical domains including mining. For example, the number of women in Wolfram Mining and Processing Company has almost tripled within one year: from 8 percent in 2020 to 22.93 percent in 2021.
If more companies enroll in the program, there is promising progress that gender equality in Rwanda will also be achieved in the workplace.
Rose Rwabuhihi is Rwandan Chief Gender Monitor
