GENDER REPORT ON STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT IN SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO

March 30, 2004 – (ENAWA) Gender Action has recently released a report examining the gender impacts of structural adjustment loans. The report, entitled "Structural Adjustment's Gendered Impacts: the Case of Serbia and Montenegro," was written by Elaine Zuckerman, President of Gender Action, and Aleksandra Vladisavljevic, from the Economic Policy Initiative of the Association for Women's Initiatives, Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro and 2003 Network of East West Women Economic and Social Policy Fellow. Gender Action, established in 2002, is a nonprofit global advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring that International Financial Institutions promote gender equality and women's rights in all their investments worldwide.

Gender Action's analysis questions the appropriateness of SALs given their painful social impacts in general, and in particular in fragile young democracies like those in Serbia and Montenegro. Because SALs have composed at least four-fifths of Bank loans to these republics, they constitute a particularly interesting adjustment case study. The objectives of SALs in Serbia and Montenegro are characteristic of this type of loan. These objectives consist of cutbacks in public expenditures and civil service reforms including in the social sectors (e.g., health, education, labor and social protection programs); closing, restructuring and/or privatizing State Owned Enterprise (SOE); and, bank commercialization and downsizing. Because women depend more heavily than men on a variety of public sector services to allow them to participate fully in society and the economy, cuts in these types of services affect women more dramatically.

According to Zuckerman, a prominent effect of SALs in general is that they have "…very seriously and harmfully impacted social services. Health and education expenditures have been cutback and fees have been imposed. These services have become unaffordable to the poorest people who depended on these public services, since the better-off almost everywhere use private schools and private healthcare facilities. It is the poor people that depend on the less fantastic, but accessible, public services. With cutbacks or closing of public services the poor no longer have access to them. Gendered impacts include women having to take over previously public healthcare services and girls being the first to be kept out of school when parents have to pay fees. Since the mid-1990s social sectors expenditures are supposed to be protected from SAL cutbacks but this rule has not been consistently implemented."

Gender Action's report contains a detailed general and gender analysis of SALs and practical recommendations to reduce their negative impacts. It explains how SAL measures affect poor women and men differently. Gender Action found a distinct pattern of SAL neglect of gendered impacts. Gender Action plans to produce similar SAL analyses in other countries as a basis for advocacy to ensure IFI investments better promote women's rights and gender equality.

From: http://www.enawa.org/scripts/wwwopac.exe?database=brief&%250=208