The portrait of poverty is often given a female face, and it is a fact that women are over-represented in poverty. Yet, women’s agency is rarely given much thought in poverty-reduction projects. It is falsely assumed that they benefit equally in regaining control over their lives as do their male counterparts from the projects. Poverty is gendered in its experience and impact and any projects that fail to recognise this almost inevitably have a pro-male bias. Specifically targeting women in poverty-reduction efforts is a more moderate move than having an overt element of women empowerment, but it is an effective start to helping poor, disadvantaged women obtain control and attain a better future.

Impoverished women tend to be harder hit by poverty. Adopting a women-orientation in poverty-reduction projects would help level the playing field for women in providing them with a fairer chance of regaining control. Gender-based power relations translate into impoverished women generally  experiencing poverty differently and more intensely than their male counterparts.

Within the household, the ‘anti-female bias’ results in a male preference when allocating food and healthcare. Inequitable distribution of household resources extends to poor men withdrawing portions of their income from domestic collective funds for personal consumption like alcohol. This may be around one-third in Honduras to a half in areas like Nicaragua and Mexico. Hence, women and girls in the family usually experience sharper poverty than husbands and sons.

In the sphere of public policy, poor women have difficulty accessing welfare benefits in their own rights and have to act through being dependants of male relatives. Poverty-reduction projects ought to rectify this flaw through targeting women in particular and enabling direct access to resources. Additionally, women may work long hours every day in the household, but this is often ignored when the government or household members account for the respective inputs of women and men in the family’s joint prosperity.

When scrutinising the labour market, poor women are shown to be economically active, and yet they form a majority of the world’s poor. This is because they are often limited to jobs with little or no income. Unless, poverty alleviation projects are women-centred, it is difficult to address women’s poverty issues on equal terms as that of men.

Having a female focus also better-place these projects to tackle the additional obstacles women have in comparison to men in overcoming poverty.  It allows poverty alleviation results to be more gender-balanced, especially in helping beneficiaries obtain greater control over the circumstances they live in. In a context with a rigid and in-egalitarian socio-economic order, women are unable to utilise opportunities presented by development as effectively to improve their welfare.

The unjust order may manifest in legalised discrimination in property rights and income-earning rights. In many countries including Namibia and Swaziland, husbands are permanently the custodian of married women who have no right to manage property. Even where that is not the case, husbands can limit their wives’ outside employment. Less attention is also given to the intellectual and cognitive development of women. Poor women are thus comparatively less endowed with physical assets (e.g. land) and essential skills like literacy. A downward spiral persists as they are then often bypassed in typical poverty reduction strategies due to such approaches mostly attempting to build upon existing assets to produce results.

Specifically, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) as prescribed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) by organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme focus on income, salaries, commodities transactions. There is a significant lack of women involvement in those areas, often leading to women being omitted as aid recipients. Informal sector work, especially that of unpaid, domestic work, in which women are the primary labourers, is rarely considered in poverty discourse, despite the long hours required and its contribution to formal income-generation.

A gendered approach is more critical in targeting a group identified as the majority of the world’s poor, women. According to DFID, they make up about 70% of the world’s 1.3 billion people in. Gender must be taken into account in efforts to reduce women poverty and poverty as a whole. This means recognising that poor women have differentiated needs from poor men. For instance, women’s high concentration in the unstable, low-wage informal sector when compounded by gender discrimination indicates that they have more pronounced problems of inadequate social security and limited access to credit.

Helping poor women regain control requires a prior understanding that they are also  ‘time-poor.’ This arises from their dual roles in ‘reproductive economy’ as primary family caretakers and in outside labour markets. For example, according to the World Bank, water collection already takes up to 40% of a woman’s day in some rural areas of Kenya, not withstanding her other duties. It is clear that poor women are in acute need of labour- and energy-saving technologies and strategies catered to their context. This, women-centred poverty reduction projects are better-positioned to introduce to grant them greater autonomy in how they spend their time.

Also, it must be realised that women are not a homogeneous bloc. The question of ‘which women’ must be asked; in that poverty-reduction efforts must be differentiated to target different groups of women who require help in different ways. There exists a  ‘geography of poverty’, in which the extent and kind of help women required depends on how the patriarchal structure in a community disadvantages them through defining gender-specific roles and powers.

Finally, programmes must also consider individual economic positions: For instance, women who are poorest of the poor are often still excluded from microcredit scheme targeting women. Culprits are problems like the vicious cycle of having no initial entrepreneurial projects required to access loans that are needed to start such projects.

Human dignity demands that people have sufficient control over their lives to create meaningful livelihoods. Poor women, a marginalised group within a marginalised group, face much deprivation in this aspect. Poverty is harsher for them, they have weaker social mobility to overcome poverty and they have largely unmet female-specific needs as the majority of the world’s poor. In order that they are given the redress due them, more needs to be done in poverty-reduction efforts. Not all contexts are suitable for having an explicit element of women empowerment in aid programmes, but  having more programmes specifically target women is a good step forward. It will be helpful that governments facilitate NGOs co-ordinating such programmes by working to:  improve women’s education, launch public campaigns to counter gender discrimination, and adopt gender-balanced policies in the public sector. Globally, concerned citizens could petition these governments or their partners in aid development such as international aid organisations and donor governments to address the issue. Making the invisible women visible, paints a brighter future for them.