district councils where decision making takes place. Women have also been given job opportunities by the
international agencies in the formal sector in the country.SUDAN
INTRODUCTION
Due to the lack of understanding of the complex and multi-dimensional relationship between development and the advancement of women, the Sudanese Government in the 1980s believed that economic growth would automatically benefit women. This led to insufficient progress in the implementation of policies and programmes targeted to women resulting in fragmented efforts with minimal benefits to women.
Lack of commitment by development staff of technical ministries to women's issues together with the absence of women administrators and executives have retarded action to promote women in development.
Furthermore, male-dominated decisions and choices marginalized women's needs and priorities as they were considered welfare problems. Programmes targeting women emphasized their domestic role and nutrition education; home economics constituted the main line of technical knowledge and skills extended to women.
In the Three-Year Investment Programme (1981/82-1984/85) for example, development programmes at the district and regional levels focused on female education and rural extension. The National Conference on the Role of Women in Agriculture and Rural Development (1987) and the workshop on Strategies and Policies for Integrating Women in Agriculture and Rural Development (1990) both called for full recognition of the economic role of women and their integration into the development process in the light of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies. Other fora have called for structural change, recognition of women's economic, social and political role, in addition to the institutionalization of women's issues and their integration into the development process.
According to the 1993 census, the population of the Sudan is 24.9 million with a population growth rate of2.63 per cent; 17.5 million (70.3 per cent) of the population live in rural areas and 12.4 million (49.8 per cent) of the population are women. The Sudan is exhausted by civil war and a poor economy; it is looking for progress and stability which can be achieved only by the effective utilization of all human resources to attain sustainable development. Women who make up about half of the population live at the edge of life with men dominating life to the utmost. The attitude of the society has deliberately underrated and under-estimated women's capabilities and this has deprived many women from giving assistance and has suppressed all incentives to cultivate their talents.
SITUATION ANALYSIS BY SECTOR Political participation/decision making
Women in the Sudan acquired political rights in the 1960s when they exercised their rights to vote and be voted for. During that period, one woman succeeded in the general elections and entered parliament.
The period 1980-1985 witnessed significant progress in women's political participation when 25 women from different parts of the country were appointed to the People's Assembly. During the period 1986-1989, parliamentary membership was subjected to free competition in the general elections: two women (0.6 per cent) out of a total of 301 members were elected. Recently, the National Salvation Revolutionary Council (1992) appointed 25 women (8.3 per cent) out of the 303 members in the Transitional National Assembly (8.3 per cent).
Sudanese women have held ministerial posts mainly as ministers of State or deputy ministers of State but the percentage has varied between 2.6 and 16.6 per cent (when there were a total of six women). There has always been only one woman minister, except in 1988-1992 when there were two.
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The number of women at the policy planning level at different technical ministries is negligible.
Only one State member was appointed in the government at national level. At state level, five females were appointed as state members out of 130, representing 3.7 per cent. Women in parliament who influence higher policy level are 25 out of 250, representing 10 per cent. At the technical ministries which have a direct link to agriculture, women decision makers are increasing in number; at the Ministry of Economic Planning and Investment, only one female held a decision-making position (1980), representing 2 per cent;
in 1985, there were five (7 per cent) out of 72 female decision makers; in 1993, the number increased to 11 (14 per cent) out of 80. Women are therefore gradually sharing power and decision making at higher policy level but not to the extent that influences policies targeting women.
In local governments, women have been appointed as deputy executive director (one out of 21), assistant executive director (one out of 60); other appointments have included six (47 per cent) local government first inspectors (against 128 men), 23 (8.3 per cent) local government inspectors (against 278 men), 16 (110 per cent) assistant local government inspectors (against 146 men) and 49 (7.8 per cent) assistant administrative officials (against 632 men).
In the Foreign Ministry, 22 women were appointed as delegated ministers and ambassadors during the period 1970-1988. In 1990, 13 of them were dismissed for political and other reasons. At present, there are two women delegated ministers, three women first secretaries and four women second secretaries.
In the general labour force, women in labour areas are 6.7 per cent employers and 12.6 per cent own account workers; in the rural areas, they are 7.5 per cent employers and 24.3 per cent own account workers.
In the professional, technical and related fields, women represent 31.1 per cent in the urban areas and 25.7 per cent in the rural areas; however, the total national ratio is 71.3 per cent men to 29.7 per cent women.
Among administrative and managerial workers, women in the urban areas represent 3 per cent and in the rural areas 0.2 per cent; at the national level, the percentages are 97.6 per cent for men and 2.4 per cent for women. These latter negligible percentages reflect the negative position of women, particularly in the rural areas where the society is subjected to male domination and where women are only instruments for implementing decisions.
Employment
With the exception of Khartoum, all other regions are rural and in the Sudan, 80 per cent of the labour force are in the rural areas. The western and southern regions have 92.3 and 80.2 per cent of their labour force respectively in rural areas and the large-scale movement to other regions results in the phenomenon of female-headed households. There is also a large-scale migration of seasonal labourers (about 30 per cent), leaving women to face limited resources and obligations of subsistence to their families.
Women who suffer higher rates of unemployment are involved in unpaid family labour (4,096,567 women compared to 1,237,177 men). There is need for a rural employment policy to tackle this situation which influences the living conditions of 57 per cent of the economically active population.
In local government positions, there are only 96 women (6.9 per cent), compared to 1,383 men.
In the general labour force, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures, total male employees are 85.5 per cent and females 15.5 per cent; there are 92.16 per cent male employers as against 7.4 per cent female and 77.2 per cent of male own account workers against 22.8 per cent of females. Of the total labour force, 71.5 per cent are men and 28.5 per cent are women.
Education
In spite of the increase in number of schools and pupil enrolment at primary level, literacy rates are still low: 18 per cent for women and 44.32 per cent for men (1980). In 1990, gross enrolment for girls
in primary schools was 49.8 per cent, compared to 56.3 per cent for boys. The most important problem is the low output of graduates from intermediate level of knowledge necessary for agricultural and rural development and the number of female graduates per year from these institutions is too low in a country where 80 per cent of the population is rural and where 58 per cent of the food is produced by women.
If basic and non-formal education and rural extension are to improve the quality of life for rural women, conditions must be created to ensure that they receive at least primary education, health and extension training and support to improve the quality of life.
In spite of the long-term policy of achieving equity in education and the short-term policy of universal primary education by the year 2000, the male-female gap in education is far from being narrowed.
Some progress has been achieved in the last two decades but budgetary constraints and population pressure pose a challenge.
Although women continue to concentrate on arts and social sciences and traditional specialized fields such as nursing, education, secretarial, home economics, etc., they have made progress in scientific areas such as medicine, agriculture, veterinary and laboratory technologies. This progress has raised fears among the authorities that females with such specialization would not necessarily take up jobs in hardship posts and that they are likely to get married upon graduation.
Vocational training: Specialized training for females is provided mainly in education, nursing, secretarial, arts and handicrafts. Vocational training such as auto mechanics, general mechanics, electricity and construction appears to be a male domain since females appear to refrain from joining training centres either because of social and traditional reasons or due to low female labour demand. For example, the percentage of participation in these courses between 1987-1993 ranged from 0.1 to 1 per cent when there were 10 females out of 962 students.
Agriculture
The Sudan has great potential for becoming a major agricultural exporter in the Middle East region.
However, desertification, soil degradation and drought have increased regional imbalance in food production that tend to turn into famine in some areas in times of unfavourable climatic conditions. Nevertheless, agriculture continues to be the backbone of the Sudanese economy as it provides livelihood for about 80 per cent of the population and accounts for 40 per cent of the GDP; women farmers in the irrigated sector represent 49 per cent and in the traditional sector about 57 per cent.
The Government's ten-year strategy projected an increase in food grain in the irrigated sector from 35 to 80 per cent of the total food grain produced. Women play a crucial role in the implementation of the strategy as a major human resource in the traditional sector where the Government has put more support and emphasis on small farmers to fulfil the objectives of food self-sufficiency and food security programmes.
In the traditional sector, women constitute the majority, representing 84 per cent in the western region, 80 per cent in the eastern region and 76 per cent in the modern irrigated sector in the central region.
Due to the importance of agriculture in the Sudanese economy and due also to the dominant and important role of women in Sudanese agriculture, most of this report tends to emphasize the agricultural aspect of development in the country and the role of women in it. Policy measures have been adopted to enhance the role and status of women in the development process and particularly in the area of agriculture.
Several constraints facing women in agriculture have been identified and proposals made for overcoming them.
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Women's access to resources
Land: In the Sudan, land is the most crucial resource needed for agricultural production and serves as collateral for loans used to purchase agricultural inputs. Land ownership sometimes gives eligibility to cooperative membership, access to agricultural extension and production technology. Where women have land title to their names, they have direct access to production inputs.
Women's access to land is subject to the land tenure conditions which vary from region to region.
There are four main land tenure systems: (a) government- owned land which is open to both sexes; (b) government land given on lease to large private farms; (c) privately owned land (small farms around the city and the banks of the Nile and are usually registered in the name of the head of the household); and (d) customary land tenure (the majority of subsistence farmers operate under this system and access and use by small farmers is uncontrolled as the land belongs to the Government).
Women have land ownership (13,000 women in Gezira have land titles to their name) but in most areas, because of socio-cultural values, a woman surrender her rights to her husband or brothers who crop the land, unless she is the land manager or she crops the land herself.
Credit: Credit plays an important role in the mobilization of productive resources and the distribution of income. A growing number of lending institutions give credit to women for agricultural production, livestock production, food processing and other income-generating activities.
Women have benefited from credit facilities through their membership of cooperatives to which some of the lending institutions give credit. With the Nuba Mountain rural development project, loans were provided in 1983-1989 to small farmers for the purchase of machinery and production inputs and majority of the beneficiaries were women. For loans disbursed for dairy and poultry production, only four (0.08 per cent) women received loans, compared to 4,910 men in 1980 and in 1993, only 10 (10.6 per cent) women received loans compared to 94 men.
The Livestock Bank, established in 1993, has made substantial loans to women cooperatives.
Lifting of collateral from credit has increased the number of women entrepreneurs and the establishment of more cooperatives in different regions.
Agricultural extension and training: The agricultural extension service in general is linked with cash production in the modern sector. Thus, in the Gezira scheme with 120,000 farmers, where the women
number only 13,000, extension messages are targeted at male farmers. Because of the separate communication network on the basis of gender in rural areas, women farmers who represent 84 per cent of
traditional farmers have very little benefits because of the low number of female extension agents.In 1993, there were 337 agricultural extension agents, the majority of which were employed in the urban and modern sector. More female extension agents are required for rural women to implement the programmes for food production, poverty alleviation and malnutrition among the rural population.