I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to testify today.
You've already received a wealth of valuable testimony over the course of the preceding weeks from an impressive array of experts and practitioners, including Dr. Goetz who spoke before me. Much of what needs to be included in Canada's national action plan on women, peace and security has already been spelled out and discussed, often more than once. Rather than reaffirming the importance of the compelling recommendations already offered, I'll use this opportunity if I could to add one proposal to what is, admittedly, already a very crowded agenda.
The proposal I'd like to make is that Canada make the right to work a central element of its strategy for preventing the outbreak and recurrence of armed conflict, and that women's empowerment and gender equality be at the forefront of the government-run employment programs that will be created to operationalize this right in fragile and conflict-affected states. While this proposal falls most directly under the relief-and-recovery pillar of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, it's intended to be just as relevant to the participation and conflict-prevention pillars as well.
I'll start with some background. Works programs to provide temporary employment have been used in many post-conflict settings, and have received financial and technical support from UN agencies and other international actors. The specific approaches adopted are varied, but the general thinking has been that a lack of livelihoods drives popular disaffection, and that providing even temporary employment through such programs, doing things like repairing drains, painting road signs, and so forth, could serve as a visible peace dividend in places where conflict has decimated economic life.
Government provision of waged labour would, in other words, enhance state legitimacy and reduce the incentive to return to violence. That's been the logic. Guidelines for the operation of temporary employment programs have been issued by the International Labour Organization, and in recent years have included provisions to ensure gender parity in access to such programs. The UN committed to fulfilling this commitment in its seven-point action plan on gender-responsive peace building, which was introduced in 2010. UN Women is working to advance this objective.
The international community's approach in this area needs to be much more ambitious, I would argue, if employment programs are to reach their full potential as instruments of both peace building and women's empowerment. Not only have too few conflict-affected and fragile states actually had jobs programs, but where these have existed, such as in Sierra Leone for instance, they've been far too small and extended for much too short a period of time.
Three other crucial shortcomings should be noted of these employment programs in post-conflict settings. First, they have not been conceived in terms of rights or a rights-based approach to development and recovery. Second, they lack the means of ensuring public participation in the prioritization of the works projects that will be undertaken through such programs. Third, they lack civil society engagement in ensuring accountability for how funds are used. Yet, it is by carefully designing each of these three key elements—rights, participation, and accountability—that gender equality and women's empowerment can be placed at the forefront of large-scale employment programs in conflict-affected and fragile states.
As it happens, a rights-based framework, avenues for public participation, and civil society engagement in program accountability have also been defining features of what is currently the world's largest and most successful public-sector jobs program, which is India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly known as NREGA.
NREGA, which I should mention is the subject of a forthcoming book I co-authored with Professor James Manor of the University of London, fulfills the right to work by guaranteeing every rural household in India 100 days of work annually at the statutory minimum wage, on government-operated public works projects located no further than five kilometres from their homes, to be made available within 15 days of workers submitting an application. NREGA is a legal obligation of the government, not a temporary relief activity. Workers build roads, dig wells, maintain irrigation works, and undertake many other activities. But crucially, the program has built into its authorizing legislation a far-reaching set of institutional mechanisms to ensure participation, transparency, and accountability.
Local residents and workers engage in a consultative process for identifying which works to undertake, and they work with civil society groups to carry out social audits of the projects for which financial and administrative records are made publicly available.
In addition to its many benefits for distressed rural communities, NREGA's design and the way it's been implemented have provided direct benefits for women. Thirty per cent of the workdays created must be allocated to women, and it has often been 50% or more in practice, which is very unusual internationally.
Child care must be provided at NREGA work sites, and NREGA creates opportunities for women to serve as work site supervisors. Research has shown that women's priorities are different from men's, for the most part, and women's priorities for which types of work projects to carry out get a fair hearing and are often adopted.
NREGA wages are the same for men and women, which is not usually the case in private employment in rural India and many other places, including the United States, I should mention. Women must be paid their wages directly rather than through their spouses.
India's employment guarantee scheme also makes indirect contributions to gender equality by creating opportunities for women to enter the public sphere in places where this has been constrained by cultural practice, and by incentivizing women to enter the formal financial sector by setting up individual bank accounts to receive their NREGA wages.
One study found, on the basis of research conducted only in certain parts of India, that women who participate principally in NREGA experience lower rates of domestic violence. While NREGA was not conceived as a means of reducing conflict-related violence, recently conducted research has found that the extension of NREGA to districts in rural India where anti-state armed group violence had been prevalent has led to a decrease in the levels of violence they experienced.
This is a finding of relevance far beyond India, including for practitioners in the field of conflict prevention in general, and women, peace, and security in particular.
India is of course not a conflict country as such, though it faces a number of long-running insurgencies that might allow it to qualify according to some definitions. India is also endowed with a functioning state bureaucracy, an enduring democracy, and growing financial means, so replicating India's right-to-work experiment in war-torn countries that have none of these assets is not what is proposed here.
The proposal rather is for Canada to advocate and financially support, both in individual country settings and through its engagement in multilateral institutions, the creation of suitably adapted forms of rights-based employment programs in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and to do this on the basis of a model that makes gender equality and women's empowerment an explicit and highly visible element of these efforts. This would apply to countries that have not yet descended into a state of armed conflict, just as it would to post-conflict countries.
As a first step, Canada could work with like-minded governments and international actors, official and non-governmental, to develop a model program and assess potential buy-in amongst its partners. Among the multilateral settings where this might be pursued are the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, etc.
Of particular note is the possibility of undertaking a rights-based and gender-equality focused “jobs for peace” initiative through the Commonwealth, of which Canada; India, whose technical expertise would be essential here; and many conflict-affected states are members.
Let me close by echoing a former senior UN official, Graciana del Castillo, whose research has demonstrated that the economic policy dimension of peace building, including its gender dimensions, are far too often constrained by excessive faith in markets to speed recovery and move on to long-term development. Supporting entrepreneurship and promoting market access—useful in training women entrepreneurs—and easing their access to credit are worthwhile endeavours, but market-oriented solutions are insufficient and budget austerity can make matters worse.
Ambitious public sector action financially and technically supported by international partners is a necessary complement. Placing the right to work at the centre of such an effort through a rights-based, government-implemented employment program that forefronts women's empowerment can send a strong signal about a fledgling state's commitment to transformative and inclusive peace building.
I look forward to any questions or comments the committee may have, and I thank its members again for the opportunity to speak here today.