AGDI Gender
Outlook Series
11 MALI
The African Centre for Gender (ACG) Gender Outlook #11 aims to benchmark Mali’s performance on the African Gender and Development Index (AGDI), highlight challenges and offer prioritized policy recommendations to accelerate progress towards gender equality. The AGDI is based on two components. The first is the Gender Status Index (GSI), a quantitative snapshot of 44 indicators that capture gender disparities1 in the social, economic and political arenas. The second component is the African Women’s Progress Scoreboard (AWPS), a qualitative self-evaluation of government performance in the implementation of more than 30 treaties, declarations, and resolutions affecting women’s rights and women’s empowerment in the social, economic and political arenas. All data2 are provided by stakeholders in Mali, including various ministries and civil society organizations. This profile draws on the results from the AGDI Country Report for Mali, one of the 14 countries in Phase 2 of the AGDI3.
Key Messages
• Women in Mali are in desperate need of support across all components of the GSI and AWPS. Weaknesses in
1 The GSI for most of the indicators are calculated by dividing the indicator for female achievement by that for male achievement for the particular indicator. A tolerance level of 3 per cent is set around the full gender parity score, leading to a parity bandwidth of 0.97-1.03 whereby scores below (above) this bandwidth indicate gender disparity against women (men).
However, there are eight reverse indicators, i.e. stunting, underweight, mortality, prevalence of HIV/AIDS, share of women under poverty line, time spent on non-market activities and domestic care and volunteer activities and youth unemployment rate, that follow a slightly different formula such that overshooting in these normatively negative indicators are neutralized for the consistency of the index.
2 The Country Report from Mali was received by the ACG in September 2012. While the ACG has strived to update various indicators using international databases, e.g. Demographic and Health Survey and Inter- Parliamentary Union, the majority of the indicators are from 2012 and were provided by the government of Mali.
3 Other countries that were part of AGDI 2 are Botswana, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, Togo and Zambia.
the education system translate into major constraints against women in the labour market. In the absence of meaningful participation by women in national/local politics, the state apparatus and civil society, the likelihood of progress towards gender parity is discouragingly low.
• Women’s economic empowerment is facing severe constraints in the form of skills deficiency for decent jobs, time poverty from an early age, lack of access to means of production and a highly segmented labour market, particularly in the formal private sector. In addition, there is highly visible occupational segregation in the public sector.
• Despite political will at higher levels for nominating more women for elected positions, no concrete steps have been taken through formal affirmative action. This leaves women’s participation in politics highly limited and virtually at zero at local levels. The judiciary, a career refuge for some women in the public sector, is in need of stronger policy action, since a decreasing trend in female representation at various levels of the judiciary is in the making.
Figure 1 provides a comparative perspective on Mali’s GSI and AWPS. The composite GSI score puts Mali little more than halfway towards gender parity. Mali is among the few countries that managed to collect data on all 44 indicators of the GSI, thereby enabling an accurate portrayal of the gender situation. On the GSI, gender parity is not achieved in any block. The Political Power block has the lowest score relative to the parity benchmark despite the promising policy implementation observed on the AWPS. Consistent with its composite GSI score, Mali obtains an average score in its self-evaluation of its efforts to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. While Mali’s policy commitment in the Economic Power block is encouraging, much more commitment is needed in the Social and Political blocks. A
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AGDI Gender Outlook Series
key insight regularly repeated in the AGDI Country Report is that while Mali has signed a variety of international and regional instruments that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, major weaknesses persist in implementation due to the lack of human and budgetary resources and lack of harmonization between modern and customary law, particularly on issues relating to violence against women and safe abortion.
Figure 2 sheds further light on Mali’s GSI performance relative to parity. Three points stand out. First, Mali is lagging significantly behind in the Education sub-component.
Enrolment rates not only disfavour young women but are also low in absolute terms. Second, despite this unfavourable situation in education, the outlook is promising in Wages and Income, particularly if the other two sub-components in the Economic Power block (Time Use and Employment and Access to Resources) receive a policy boost. Finally, women’s representation in the Public Sector is minimal and shows a negative trend at national level.
• The Social Power block is made up of the Education and Health sub-components. Significant quality and quantity interventions are needed to improve Malian girls’ human capital formation.
In Education, there are major weaknesses both in quantity and quality. Mali records extremely low scores for girls’
primary enrolment and completion, secondary enrolment
and literacy, even after large improvements since 2006.
In tertiary education, gender disparities are even more pronounced. While girls slightly exceed parity in pre- school education, this is largely due to a limited number of well-off households in urban areas. The urban-rural divide and disparities in income levels are important factors in enrolment rates as they are linked to opportunity-costs for schooling. For instance, enrolment rates are 15 times higher among richer households in urban areas relative to very poor households in rural areas. In addition, conditions that result in children – especially girls – spending substantial time to fetch water and collect fire wood, combine with high student-teacher ratios to obstruct progress towards increased access to schooling and retention of students. As with other countries surveyed as part of AGDI Round II, Mali suffers from sociocultural constraints on girls’ schooling – high dropout rates due to early marriage and pregnancy are not uncommon, especially in rural areas.
In Health, the first set of indicators relate to child health. As with some other countries in Round II, Mali reports more boys than girls affected by stunting, while the prevalence of underweight children is at parity. Child mortality rates have decreased drastically from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, partly thanks to the Expanded Programme on Immunization, but the average in Mali is still much higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, albeit with gender parity. On the HIV/
AIDS front, prevalence rates are around 1 per cent. However, Figure 1: African Gender and Development Index Snapshot - Mali
0.00 0.50 1.00
Composite Social Power Economic Power Political Power
GSI AWPS
Figure 2. Disaggregating Mali’s Gender Status Index
0.68
1.13
0.77 0.67
0.48
0.09 0.19
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2
Education Health Wages & Income Time Use &
Employment Access to
Resources Public Sector Civil Society Mali Parity
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AGDI Gender Outlook Series
prevalence for women is three times the rate for men. As in other countries, significantly more women are using ART services. Due to the high score in access to ART, the overall score in the Health sub-component exceeds parity. Finally, Mali obtains high scores on all health indicators in the AWPS with the exception of safe abortion where essentially no action has been taken.
• The Economic Power block is made up of the Income, Time Use and Employment and Access to Resources sub- components. Over 90 per cent of women in Mali work in the informal sector, with a handful in the public sector and virtually none in the formal private sector. Each sub- component exhibits large gender disparities for women in the labour market.
In the Wages and Income component, large wage gaps are found in the formal sector, driven by massive discrimination in the private sector. While wages in the public sector and in the agriculture sector are around parity, there is non-wage discrimination – i.e. social benefits and entitlements – in the public sector, where women also predominantly occupy the lowest ranks. Focusing on income, there is evidence of a
smaller gap in wage income from the informal sector relative to small agricultural household enterprises which can be traced to disparities in access to resources such as land and credit. Note that women earn only half as much as men from informal enterprises. Interestingly, Mali is among the few countries where male-headed households are much more likely to be under the poverty line relative to female-headed ones. Since there are only a handful of female-headed households, however, unbiased comparison is difficult to make and thus this result should be interpreted with caution.
In Time Use and Employment, Mali is among the few countries that report data on all indicators and in a disaggregated fashion by age group and location. As with other African countries, women spend many more hours on a daily basis on non-leisure activities. The gap between males and females is particularly stunning with regard to domestic chores, especially in rural areas for 6-14 year-olds. Specifically, rural girls aged 6-14 spend 24 times more of their daily time on domestic chores relative to boys in the same group. Given this scale of time poverty across all age groups of females, gender disparity in primary and secondary enrolment rates Figure 3a. GSI Education Indicators Figure 3b. GSI Health Indicators
Early Childhood
Education
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary Primary
Completion Literacy
Mali Parity
Stunting
Underweight
Child Mortality HIV/AIDS
Access to ART
Mali Parity
Notes: ART = anti-retroviral treatment; mortality relates to the mortality rate of children under the age of 5 years; HIV/AIDS relates to prevalence for people between the ages of 15 and 24.
Figure 4. GSI Economic Power Block Indicators
Wages - Agriculture
Wages-Civil Service
Wages - Formal
Wages - Informal Income -
Informal Income - Agriculture
Women in Poverty
Mali Parity
Time - Market
Time -Non- Market
Time - Domestic Agricultural Non-
Employment Youth Unemploymen
t
Mali Parity
Land Ownership
House Ownership
Livestock Ownership
Credit Employers
High Civil Servants Professional
Syndicates Account …Own-
Mali Parity Time - Market
Time -Non- Market
Time - Domestic Agricultural Non-
Employment Youth Unemploymen
t
Mali Parity
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AGDI Gender Outlook Series
is not surprising, along with women’s minimal presence in non-agricultural employment, which is less than 3 per cent.
Finally, female youth unemployment, particularly in urban areas, must be at the top of the policy priority list for action to strengthen women’s presence in the labour market. The minority of girls and women who find wage employment in the formal sector are often faced with much lower job quality relative to that of men.
In Access to Resources, women have much less access to means of production such as land, livestock and credit than men, particularly in rural areas where female financial exclusion is stark – only 17.8 per cent of agricultural credit flows to women who constitute only 2.2 per cent of all chief farmers. While there was a positive trend in land ownership between 2004 and 2009, further improvements at a sustainable pace are vital for closing the gap in land ownership. Female-headed households are more likely to own the house they live in, but this phenomenon pertains to a small minority in urban areas. Regarding Management, gender disparity is narrowest for own-account workers and greatest for high-level civil servants. While close to 40 per cent of all professional male civil servants are at the highest staff level in the civil service, i.e. hierarchy A, this proportion drops by half where women are concerned.
• The Political Power block is a function of the quantity and quality of female participation in the public sector and civil society. Despite the political will among higher authorities to support women’s political empowerment, Mali’s score in this component has reached only one- tenth of the ideal benchmark.
In the Public Sector, there is no indicator in which Mali exceeds 20 per cent of parity. Negative trends since the early 2010s in women’s participation in national politics are equally discouraging. The most significant decrease
has been observed in the Cabinet where Mali’s GSI score dropped from 0.26 to 0.19, with only 16 per cent of the Cabinet being female. In parliament, recent data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union suggest that the share of women has fallen below 10 per cent as of 2016. Other indicators in this component are no better. Mali lags significantly below parity in female representation across the judiciary, civil service and security forces as well as local councils. Given that 70 per cent of the population reside in rural areas where traditional rulers and judges play crucial roles in daily life, it is of great concern that women are barely present in any capacity, especially in conflict resolution. The Gender Advisory Committee established in 2009 within the Ministry of Justice has been trying to raise female participation in the judiciary by boosting women’s capacity during a competitive recruitment process and promoting women’s access to justice and gender equality before the law. However, large disparities in tertiary enrolment need to be tackled as they contribute to the fact that women constitute less than 10 per cent of members of the Bar Association.
In Civil Society, unlike in most other study countries, Mali exhibits a promising trend in female representation in trade unions, although currently, it is less than half that of males.
Given occupational segregation and wage discrimination in the formal sector, trade unions are at the forefront of campaigns to improve women’s conditions and the first step for this engagement necessitates more female representation in trade unions. Women’s presence at higher levels of political parties is less than 3 per cent while the average for African countries with available data stands at 22 per cent Another large gap is observed among employers.
This is not surprising given that there are less than half as many female as male employers in Mali. As mentioned earlier, women’s presence is minimal across a variety of professional associations, and even among NGOs, Mali’s score needs to increase by almost threefold to reach parity.
Figure 5a. GSI Political Power Block
Parliament
Cabinet
Civil Service
Security Forces Higher Courts
Lower Courts Local Councils
Mali Parity
Figure 5b. GSI Political Power Block (contd.)
Traditional Judges
Traditional Rulers
Political Parties
Trade Unions Employers'
Associations NGOs
Mali Parity
