CSCS1301A COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND INTERNATIONAL AID 2020,S2 ASSESSMENT EVENT 3Research on International community development project and critically analysis its role in social change .Words Limit...

Gender equality for Development is an international community development project that I want to research about. This community development project is led by the world bank. This project focuses on areas like economic development, empowerment of women, human capital and access to finance. Gender equality is a basic human right that focuses on a sustainable, peaceful and a progressive world. (Gender, n.d.) It focuses on areas like reducing the systematic differences that both genders have in their earnings which we generally refer to as pay gap. A gender gap surely exists but researchers are still not sure on how to close these gaps. Women’s access to economic opportunities are also very much limited. For instance, a female farmer will not be able to put enough information regarding agriculture because the whole agricultural community has been dominated by men. Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, women are disproportionately limited in their land ownership and transfer rights. (Gender, n.d.) A study regarding women in India shows that women who participated in women empowerment movement and were an outspoken feminist and had contributed in rural livelihood programs had improved access to loans, accumulated assets, and invested in education, which further made them feel more empowered. Moreover, a huge proportion of population has been deprived from basic social services in developing countries.
Gender discrimination is an abolishment in progress. There has been a lot of progress over the last ten to fifteen years. More girls have been going to school now, female infanticide has reduced, child marriage has been reduced, comparatively, more women are now dealing with politics than women were, ten years ago, new bills are being passed and laws are being reformed in order to ensure gender equality. Although the amount of work done is not very high as we expect it to be. 21st century India, with respect to gender discrimination, is expected and only expected to be better then what it is now.
Let’s come to the reasons now. Well, the first one is undoubtedly the patriarchal society we live in. First off, the men are considered to be the primary figure in the society, the man of the family. If we can recall this, we have been taught in our educational institutions that the father is the head of the family, when we were hardly ten. Men mostly occupy roles of political leadership as well. In most rural families only, men control the property. And goes on the never-ending list of things that man control, including the female members of the family. Men hold authority over them. Inheriting family property and surname comes in handy. There are females who inherit family property as well but this is a recent trend and many are deprived till now.
Moving on to the second reason which is son preference. Sons are deemed more useful than daughters and surprisingly people put forward ridiculously “rational” reasons to support their statement. Some of which are religious practices can only be practiced by sons for their parent’s afterlife and parents lose their daughters to their husband’s families and hence there is no apparent reason in educating as her education can no more be used by her family. Plus, most families think that spending money on educating a girl is useless and rather save it up for her marriage and the dowry that her in-laws are going to demand. Mostly, in rural areas, the birth of a girl child is still not accepted with open arms by many families and parents openly express sadness when a baby girl is born in their families. They put forward
statements like a girl is a burden as she bags the dowry with her to her in-laws. More then 800 women die everyday around the globe due to complications related to child-birth and pregnancy. Women being the soul of reproduction and giving birth to the next generation should be given more and more facilities regarding their health. Giving child labor classes to pregnant women and teaching sex-education to both the genders at young age is very much important to ensure a society that provides equal importance to the health and safety of men and women. People generally term feminism and human rights activists as bad. The reason is privilege. Privilege has blinded them so bad that they cannot even see the injustices caused against women, the oppression and the sexist remarks that they have to face in their everyday life. Some women thing that...