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Table of contents

From developmentalism to post-adjustment
Women's participation and informal sector activities

The poverty framework
The gender framework
The labour and or market framework

INTRODUCTION

The post-adjustment 90s bring about important challenges impacting on women's positions. Paradoxically, after the shrinkage of the state resulting from reform policies, the State re-appears as the most relevant actor in a context which had been previously dominated by NGOs and voluntary organizations: if these groups had focused their activities in a rationale linked to antipoverty struggle, the state, today is trying to support the IS and the microenterprises sector with a market friendly rationality, focused on the development of employment opportunities. When the State becomes the main actor, actions focused on small efforts, with small financing and contradictory policy frameworks are up-scaled and mainstreamed as a result of state intervention posing new challenges. Experiences which had been centered in women's empowerment may now become state policies. Only a growing awareness about the need to consider gender-specific demands will allow us to proceed into the globalization period without leaving aside our interests of gender equity and justice.

In its first section, this paper will describe changes in women's and labor force participation and in informal sector activities, with the background of changing productive patterns in the region; in the second, it will discuss policy experiences both from the NGO world and the state to improve working conditions in the informal sector, with special focus on Argentine. This section will deal with the different policy frameworks which have been used to develop those experiences. Finally, it will design a tentative research agenda directed to new problems resulting from this upscaling developments.

I. WOMEN AND LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION.

1. From developmentalism to post-adjustment.

Thus, for those in traditional older occupations, economic activities allowing them to take care of family reproduction and productive activities were performed usually at home and within the domestic unit; the others, in traditional economies and societies, especially in less developed rural and urban areas, activities performed by women formed a continuum, in which it was not easy to differentiate among reproductive and productive work. Inasmuch this kind of work usually implied a distance of the model, it was less accounted for or plainly unaccounted, usually being considered "housework" by male biased census and surveys collectors.

It was during the late sixties and seventies, when feminist criticisms of economics, sociology and development were taken into account, that we could assess the ideological roots of these biases. A consensus emerged, finding that the key point in understanding women's work pattern was the double burden of women's reproductive and productive responsabilities.

Contrary to the development model, at the same time, economists became increasingly concerned with those types of work force which became a relevant feature of Latin American labour markets. Rather than a mere "lag" the concept of "informal sector" appeared as a key issue to be addressed, in fully understanding regional economies, mixing high-low productivity sectors. Instead of dissapearing as a result of modernization, these actitivites persisted and grew steadily. In most countries, work in the informal sector has been " female work": women selling in the streets, washing clothes at home, cooking and selling their products, while at the same time taking care of their children. These are perhaps the most common pictures of poor Latin American women (Arizpe, 1977). However, these traditional activities reshaped themselves and evolved from historical to new occupations (like those related to electric industries, for example) although still remaining informal sector activities. These old/new occupations become "functional" and integrated to the modern component of the economy ( for example, the maquila productive process, in Mexico and the Caribbean region).

At the same time, empirical evidence showed that, far from developmentalist dreams, women's participation in labour markets grew steadily only in the service sector both in modern and/or traditional activities. Today, modern Latin American cities combine both types of female work: the one in the modern, globalized sector of the economy and, at the same time, traditional women's work. The high profile, highly educated woman in a corporate structure is always supported at home by some kind of help, from a less-educated woman in domestic service. Both women and both jobs shape the complex pattern of labour force participation at the regional level (ECLAC, 1994).

As it was previously stated, the long term became a favorable context for the growing of the informal sector, stressing long standing trends under a new context. The " lost decade" - as ECLAC has designated the 80s - has been a period of marked downturn for Latin America as a whole, for individual countries within the region, and for various sectors of the population among them primarily, the poor. The context of a general drop in economic performance and the decrease of GNP in almost all countries, resulted in social budget cuts and the increase in foreign debt. These cuts fell specially hard on workers and on the lower middle classes. Certain groups suffered the consequences of the crisis more intensely, particularly women and children.

In order to respond to the challenge posed by the lost decade women have borne the costs of the "invisible adjustment", basicallly using their resources as workers, either at home or in the work place (UNICEF, 1987). In order to provide monetary resources for their families, women have been forced to increase their workload within and outside the family. In doing so, they have taken on many of the functions previously performed by the state but curtailed as a result of budget constraints affecting social services and in order to provide monetary resources for the livelihood of their families. Rather than economic growth inviting them to enter into the market, the economic and social shrinkage of the lost decade compelled them to enter into the labour market. Ironically, crisis has pushed them into the social arena in larger numbers and with a greater intensity than would have resulted from the rhythm of growth during the seventies (Feijoo, 1996).

Structural adjustment policies, supported by international lenders like the World Bank, IDB and the IMF, were applied all over the region from the mid eighties onwards. As a result, economies, markets and states were reestructured through development of friendly policies about markets. The reform of the state implied important cuts in expenditures, including privatizations of public enterprises and a strong adjustment in state employment, altogether with decentralization and privatizations. As regards markets, protective barriers dissappeared changing protected inward strategies to a model of free competiton. State investment in social services has tended to decrease thus affecting social policies which had previously shaped the regional version of the Welfare State (Haggard and Kaufman, 1992; Cortes, 1995).

If all these policies led to better macroeconomic performance, they did not always translate into an improvement in living conditions for popular sectors. As a result of reestructuring, changes in labour markets produced growing unemployment and underemployment. Added to the cuts in social spendings, these tranformations increased poverty.

Women's responses to economic crisis have not centered only in changes at the household level or in their participation in the labour market. In fact, they have developed a complex set of strategies, focused either on their personal capacities or on the resources of the household/domestic unit (Jelin and Pereyra, 1990). As regards the household, new members besides women were sent to the market to be gainfully employed; changes in the structure of income and expenditures were produced; expectations and family projects - like schooling or investment decisions - were adjusted to the objective probabilities of reaching them. Many others, even those staying at home but closely involved at the grassroots level, devoted themselves to domestic/reproductive work, developing a new set of "survival strategies". Different from those known during the seventies which focused only on the household, these new types of strategies are more collective implying the articulation of household members with external actors, ranging from state social programs and civil servants to NGOs agents. These new social actors and programs supported the building up of the so- called Third or solidarity sector (Feijoo, 1996).

As a result of different processes, among others, the growing rates of female labour force participation, the increase in the male unemployment rates, the presence of women in neigbourhood and grassroots activities, one of the problems which may now be posed is about the appearance of changing patterns in the traditional sexual division of labour: have these models been challenged as a result of these changes or are they just readapting to the changing conditions? In- depth studies must be conducted in order to go beyond statistical approaches which will have to address to cultural and ideological aspects.

Latin American neigbourhoods which were traditionally 'cities of women' are growingly becoming men's realms. However, it is difficult to foreseee if these changes are only crisis driven or if they are shaping a new set of values and attitudes about gender relationships both in the household, the neighbourhoods and labour markets.

2. Women's participation and informal sector activities.

Table I

Latin America : Participation Rates by gender, 1980 and 1990
(Urban Population aged 15 and over)

Table I shows the consistent increase of the female participation rates, in almost all countries in the region, while showing, at the same time,the stabilization of male participation rates. In some countries like Argentina and Brazil, the increase goes to almost 6 to 8 points each decade . With data from urban household surveys, women of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area increased participation from 38.4% in 1980 to 46.4% in 1992 (FLACSO, 1994).

Table II

Latin America : Female Activity Rates by Age Group, 1990
(Urban Population aged 15 and over)

In turn, female activity rates by age group (Table II) show changes in the trend to participate: in the Argentine case, it moved from a traditional mode previously found in the age group of 20-24 ( before women married and had children), to a new pattern showing a growing tendency of women to go back to labour market after the reproductive period. This new model draws a bi-modal distribution with 53.4% of women in the labour market for the age bracket of 40-44. These high rates of participation are even higher if women are heads of households. As ECLAC poses, these new figures debunk some traditional myths on women's paid participation, among them, the idea that female participation curve is shaped like an inverted U, the idea that the female labour force is secondary, the stereotype of LA women as housewives with many children, the belief that women in the labour market have low educational levels and the assumption that all Latin American women have domestic employees at home.

However, far from drawing an optimistic picture, this increase in women's participation rates is explained by their growth in a small handful of activities. Among them, traditional domestic service accounts for about 20% of all women in the EAP. However, as frequently noted, the measurement of the number of people in the informal sector has been a controversial issue as a result of conceptual problems linked to its definition. As Pollack (1993) poses "since the concept of the informal sector first came in use, scholars have applied it to a wide array of empirical data; the result has been near total confusion as to the actual nature of the sector". The way in which it is defined will have important consequences not only in terms of its size but in terms of policies to improve employment conditions. Following Pollack, in 1989, the IS accounted for about 30% of the Latin American region's EAP. Additionally, the sector has been growing at an annual rate of 6.7% during the period 1980-89, a number which almost doubles the 2.8% annual rate for the total labour force of the region. As regards data on women from different sources, they show that about three quarters of workers in the IS for Brazil, Costa Rica and Chile were women, while the percentage of women employed in the IS reached 14.9% for Brazil (1985) and 22% for Chile (1990) (FLACSO, 1995).

In the Argentine case, during 1980-1992, data from household surveys for the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires show a small increase in waged activities and a small decrease in domestic service (FLACSO, 1994). A 1990 measurement of the IS, as non-waged positions, shows a distribution ranging from 16.9% in the southern city of Rio Gallegos to 40.8% in Tucuman, while for women, 11.2% in the first and 36% in the second. These data show that the number of non-waged workers would be higher for men than for women. However, this relationship depends on the definition of domestic workers as waged or nonwaged. For Greater Buenos Aires, non-waged women would reach 21.6% if not including domestic servants but the number would go up to 42% it this activity were included.

Obviously, measurement problems as regards the IS are not only related to conceptual decisions about domestic service. The self employed sector, its size and the number of people employed in each micro-enterprise pose the same kind of problems, for example, as regards the number of employees which is the ceiling to define a microenterprise. Another problem stems from working conditions: unprotected and precarious work, a strong characteristic of the sector, is usually synonymous with informal sector activity. Nevertheless, this is an erroneous assumption inasmuch as not all precarious employment is informal, whilst all informal is precarious. In terms of the argument we are posing, one of the important contradictions arising from these definitions is that while the "orthodox" definition of the IS is focused on the economic unit, policies are most often directed toward workers, that is, individuals.

II. POLICY EXPERIENCES IN THE INFORMAL SECTOR.

As a result, women were again de facto excluded from these actions, on the one hand, because they are not usually owners of property to qualify for credit assistance and, on the other, because frequently they cannot go through the formalities of banking institutions. Thus, programs and projects specifically addressed to women were designed to overcome the gap. However, policy experiences to support women in the IS are, in a way, embedded with some of the problems mentioned in the first section. Policies directed at supporting and improving women's performance appeared after microenterprise projects without a gender perspective were conducted.

Projects may be different in terms of their gender component: some are only directed to women; others include a gender component in the design while the third are so-called integrated projects. Each of them has different advantages and disadvantages which must be carefully scrutinized on a case by case basis, specially, since the way in which a program is drawn is closely related to its capacity to mobilize resources.

Lycete and White (1988) offer a summary of projects supported throughout the region, up to the 80s. It is important the fact that besides credit facilities, all the projects incorporate some kind of technical assistance, either with economic and administrative aspects or those related to production. Almost all of them have been run by NGOs either at the international, regional or national level. The nineties are really a turning point in policy trends. The main characteristic of the post-adjustment scenary is the appearance of international lending and banking institutions and states, promoting these kind of policies. Programs run by the state appear for the first time in relevant proportions. This is the result, on the one hand, of the pressure of banking institutions strongly stressing this line of work, and stressing awareness to gender components; on the other, because, as it was posed in the first section, besides the expected macroeconomic results, the post adjustment scenary shows some challenging trends, like the increase in unemployment rates and growing levels of poverty which need to be quickly addressed.

Thus, if the first generation of productive projects based on credit may be understood as a result of NGOs and voluntary organizations, the second generation results from State actions, fully active in the design and implementation. As early as 1984, Mayra Buvinic discussed what she called the "misbehaviour" of women's productive projects, calling attention on the difficulties they faced, as in the case of women's consumption of assets directed to promote their activities ( like hens or rabbits). Obviously, the passage from NGO to state policies does not automatically solve these problems. Rather, the change of scale related with state intervention makes them perhaps, more prominent during this new phase.

Now, one of the most relevant characteristic to be taken into account is not only related with projects design but with the framework of policies in which they are included. Both for NGOs and states, programs, projects and policies supporting women in the IS may be put into at least three different frameworks, namely, more predominantly defined as programs directed to a) women and gender issues; b) poverty and survival activities or c) labour or market strategies. Obviously, almost all policies, programs and projects include varying components of these elements but determining main objectives and frameworks, will have important results in terms of both implementation and assessment. Additionally, each of these frameworks will provide alternative rationales.

The poverty framework.

Another comparable experience implemented through the poverty and subsistance framework was one supported by Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) a local NGO supported by the local Catholic Bishop and funded by UNICEF. The project Amasando la esperanza, (Kneading Hope) involved thirty groups of families which operated microenterprises to produce fresh pasta for consumption and sale at the market in order to provide income generation.Women worked in small groups for about three hours a day to make the pasta; besides the pasta they took home for family subsistence, they earned about 0.80 dollar cents a day . These earnings were possible because inputs like flour came from donations. Had they needed to invest in flour, eggs or the machinery, earnings would have been much lower. The project could never have been considered a success if a plain rationale of cost-benefit were applied. In any case, the women felt satisfied with those small earnings because the meaning and outcome of the project had to be assessed on much broader terms than those of economic rationality. Additionally, only taking into account their near indigence living conditions, the "difference" the project made could be understood as a success (Feijoo, 1991).

As mentioned earlier, it is only because these are reproductive activities which take part in the public realm that they may be found satisfactory, both for women and NGOs involved in their implementation. And even if they solve livelihood problems, in very poor households, they are quite different from "work" in the historical sense of the term. Or perhaps for that reason, they may be defined in terms of women's work. Rather than formal activities with market criteria, the type, size and implementation of these projects puts them more in the context of the solidarity economy than in the market economy.

There is consensus in the literature about the difficulty of promoting projects involving the poorest sectors of the population. If projects are going to be succesful, a minimum level of living conditions and educational advantages has to be granted. This assumption may mean that to address the most vulnerable groups, only welfare support policies - either traditional or non traditional - should be used, rather than strictly productive projects. In fact, results show that they have a strong trend to become social development microprojects instead of productive ones.

The gender framework.

Madres de Maria Pueblo (Mothers of Maria Pueblo) was a group of poor women working informally, supported by the Inter American Foundation, to build a microenterprise to sell food to middle- class markets. A non-reimbursable donation was made which allowed them to purchase the cooking and refrigerating equipment they needed, the building, the van to distribute food and the technical assistance to run the microenterprise. In addition to this income-generating strategy, they took part in solidarity activities in the neighbourhood in which they lived thus combining market activities with social participation. However, their market constraints were the result of the gap between lower class consumption habits and those of the middle classes. Additionally, the growing impoverishment of middle class sectors affected their development. Organized as a cooperative, they had very low earnings in order to assure their capitalisation process. Nevertheless, had they been given a credit instead of a donation, they would have been unable to make payments. As usual in these cases, it was the strong leadership of two participants that allowed them to keep on growing. And the gender-aware framework in which the cooperative was rooted did not make them put aside economic rationality in order to evaluate the group's development (Feijoo, 1990).

In Argentina, since the creation of the National Council of Women at the federal level, several gender-aware policies have been developed. Among those relevant for this discussion, are the PIOME (Program of Equal Opportunities for Women in Employment and Professional Training), the Program of Support to Productive Reconversion and their subprograms: Nurseries of Enterprises, to train and support women developing microenterprises; the Intensive Program of Work, transitory employment for women with long unemployment histories, focused on communitary assistance and the program with 350 millions IDB support, Empleo Joven (Young Employment) which is gender aware but directed to men and women with no quotas (Consejo, 1994).

Nevertheless, a general pattern may be drawn from these experiences: if they are focused on gender they usually have less financial support. The short term experience on the running of these programs shows that focus has been moved from access to credit to training and technical assistance, with credit also supports in many cases. But as one of the consultants noted, they are finding greater constraints on women's positions among families in the working sectors, which do not facilitate decision-making on their own productive projects.

The labour and or market framework.

The most important programs are:

- The Global Program of Micro and Small Enterprise, with 30 millions dollars IDB support. This is a credit program, with moderate interest rates, directed at micro and small enterprises in all economic sectors, ranging up to 10 000 dollars as an average. Complementary objectives of the project are training and technical assistance. An equal opportunity policy is a central trait of the Program. In the city of Buenos Aires, about 50% of the people being trained are women, while in the metropolitan area, men are the majority.

- The Nursery of Enterprises ( included in the gender pespective) run by the National Council of Women, which has gone through a pilot phase in which 80 women beneficiaries were reached. During the training period, they had scholarships of 200 hundred dollars a month. Eight microenterprises emerged from this training period, however, none of them could solve gender obstacles linked to the familiy realm ( like for example the capacity to invest small family savings in these projects). Thus, a relevant discussion appeared among planners about how to deal with these constraints, which cannot be addressed thorugh the project design.

In some provinces, other experiences are being supported, which deserve a most careful analysis; the same, in the city of Buenos Aires, PROMUDEMI has distributed about one million dollars in 600 loans, directed to vulnerable groups, among them, women. The returns allowed the funding to increase by half million. However, results are controversial inasmuch the program shares the rationale of the first and the second generation projects.

Few of the NGOs involved in the poverty approach have been able to adapt themselves to this new trend which we have called labour or market oriented. The prominent position they held in a scenary in which the state was almost absent has radically changed. At the same time, their traditional involvement in poverty alleviation actions make it difficult for them to enter in a new realm in which a new economic rationality must be taken into account. At the same time, the appearance of new social actors in the NGO world - like traditional but evolving philantropic groups like CARITAS, is bringing about important changes which have not yet fully shaped new courses of action.

Some NGOs are going through a difficult transformation process themselves, moving from the more traditional approaches to market rationale. However, this is a very difficult process of change because it implies a cultural change for multiple social actors. For the new ones, built up around this rationality, the task is easiest. Among them, we must cite Emprender, linked to Action International, IDEMI (Institute for the Development of Micro and Small Enterprises) and the new Foundation of the Women's World Banking, recently created. However, all of them, new or old are increasingly aware of gender issues.

CONCLUSIONS

At the same time, there is a wide gap between NGOs and the new players. If experience is not synergized, it may dissappear. The gap between first generation projects to the second generation must be bridged. Research policy oriented and re-training of the practitioners, becomes the most appealing challenge we are confronting. If ten years ago, information about the voluntary sector was enough to map actions over the complete scenary, to day we are confronting a much more complex, diversified scenary. At the same time, in order to run these new programs the state is appealing to multiple social actors. As it generally happens when changes are too fast, we are playing catch up to understand and trying to make them more equitable in social and gender terms. A new agenda is being opened and we must have a voice on it.

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