WHY WOMEN EMPOWERMENT MAKES ECONOMIC SENSE

In 1991 government allowed women 1.5 points towards their entrance into public universities. At the time male students feeling a bit hard done by the initiative, but not wanting to show it, turned it on its head as more evidence of why women are the lesser of the specie.

They soon got tired of the teasing, as the men on campus were not really the aggrieved parties. They had made it to campus anyway.

Recent graduation ceremonies at Makerere university suggest that the ladies are having the last laugh. For the last five years or so, more ladies have graduated with first degrees than men, despite the fact that more men are enrolled to the university in each of those years.

To dismiss this as just numbers –“What have the female graduates done for their fellow women?” is to miss the point or worse to totally ignore the power of example that these ladies in their various endevours provide for younger females looking up to them.

Since independence we have seen that education has been the best tool for social climbing. Most of us reading these pages are probably second generation educated, meaning our parents went to school, immediately after independence you could count them on one hand, those families with parents who were literate and they were most concentrated in central Uganda.

This may have worked against them in the 1970s when the elite were spat upon and worse. In the last 40 years we have accelerated literacy levels and therefore the competition for the few formal jobs the economy can generate a year.

In patriarchal society where women find themselves always coming from the back, you can imagine what would have happened if there was no active effort to get them advanced education. Of course, the drop out rates in lower levels for girls is still atrocious, speaking to a need from a more holistic solution for girl’s education, but that can be a subject for another day.

With increased university enrollment women over the last 30 years have been given a better chance to compete in the market place than they would otherwise have. Credit to them they have embraced the opportunity and run with it. You can take a horse to the well but its another thing altogether to get it to drink.

Beyond expanding the ranks of the educated women on a macro level it makes so much sense to empower women, in any society, but especially for underdeveloped countries like Uganda.

For starters to pull us out of our underdeveloped state we need all hands on deck. It does not make sense to disenfranchise more than half your population due to some outdated male chauvinist hangover. The reality should not allow it.

 As the economy becomes more formalized and global, the skills needed, especially the ability to learn, have their roots in formal education.

And as women have got more empowered, especially by being more knowledgeable but also through accumulation of property, their relationships have changed. Because women now have a better sense of self. This is inevitable and both sides of the gender divide will have to acknowledge this and deal with it-

While the work of balancing the genders will never be done, the next frontier of achievement for women will have to be property accumulation and business ownership.

Initiatives to make credit more easily available to women is a step in the right direction, though I believe like all other businessmen, improving financial literacy and business management would show a better return on investment than cheaper credit.

But also Uganda’s businesswoman does not have very high standards to aspire to, as their forerunners – the men, have been content to keep their businesses only as big for their own subsistence.

The other day I was listening to a podcast about Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote and you have to marvel at the vision of the man. His refinery, which can handle 600,000  barrels of oil a day – more than the consumption of NIgeria, has been in production barely a year.

Dangote is clear that his efforts in oil – cement and wheat flour before, are not about serving Nigeria only but about uplifting the whole continent. So with a man like Dangote at the head of the Nigerian community, one shudders to think what dreams Nigerian businesswomen are habouring.