Bücher von Lawalley Cole

This 1991 study depicts how Gambian women, in general, do not have access to formal credit and depend a great deal on their husbands and other relatives for financial help. Such women desire much more financial help than their relatives can afford to give them. The situation is notably worse for women who have had no formal education, and those who live in rural areas. There are also social and cultural barriers that inhibit women's accessibility to credit resources and the formal financial system in general. Thus, most women who have nowhere to turn to for financial help depend a great deal on traditional savings and credit systems apart from the help expected from their husbands and relatives. Women are not able to afford the terms and conditions required by formal credit institutions and, therefore, are virtually forced out of formal credit systems. However, since the formal financial sector will most likely continue to be the primary source of credit in developing countries, policy-level changes will be vital for improving financial resources available to women. Through policy changes, we can have an impact on the direction in which financial institutions develop.

The lot of women in The Gambia, as elsewhere in the developing world is a hard one. Economic development should therefore be geared towards genuinely benefiting them. Programmes to help women should have a very wide impact. Any development plans, programmes and projects that could have an impact on women should be examined to remove any elements that might harm their interests. Rather, elements that could help should be built in. In small-scale industry, it would be vital to organize women into cooperatives and be helped to improve their productivity, quality and marketing. This UNDP project was instituted over 32 years ago in The Gambia when I was a doctoral student. This project established a basic structure for the Gambiäs Women¿s Bureau. The substantive long-term work plan developed in this report are in line with the objectives and priorities of the Women¿s Bureau. I hope that they were followed closely. The project should have been able to establish a system utilizing the existing resources and structure in the most efficient and effective ways. By 1990, the Bureau appeared to have been structurally well organised to effectively implement projects.

In The Gambia, statistics on the number of women employed in the informal sector are not available. Statistics are not even adequate for formal sector wage-earning employment. On the other hand, while we see the apparent interest in Gambia's informal sector, both the interest and the data have mainly been male-oriented. The viewpoint of, and implications for, women have largely been ignored and are only now beginning to come to light. The densest concentration of informal sector activities may, in no small extent, be found mainly in peri-urban areas. These businesses are in authorized and unauthorized market places and sidewalks. A large proportion of these activities are home-based, and this enables women to escape harassment from various authorities and also combine trading with domestic responsibilities. From these places, women and their children, in particular, female children, offer invaluable services to the population. There are issues of a lack of a favourable policy environment, general management skills, finance, access to credit, business records, problems concerning marketing, production, and to a limited extent, personnel management issues.