5.0 Gender in the PRSP and its relationship to the National Budget in Uganda.

• Position: Gender Dimension of PRSP Processes and the Relationship to the National Budgets: The Experiences of Egypt, Mali, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia - Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper - Report

5.1 A gender analysis of indicators for the key PEAP sectors.

The Uganda Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), which also doubles as the country's PRSP, has 136 performance indicators that have been selected to monitor and evaluate achievements. This gender analysis shall focus on key indicators for those sectors that are both pertinent in addressing gender concerns and at the same time have been identified as the priority PRSP sectors namely:

* Agriculture

* Health

* Education

* Roads and Works

* Water and Sanitation, and

* Justice, Law and Order.

5.1.1 Agriculture

Agriculture continues to provide a significant share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 85 per cent of export earnings, 77 per cent of total employment (UBOS, 2005) and the bulk of raw materials used by the mainly agricultural-based industrial sector. At the sectoral level, men and women make differing contributions. In Uganda women contribute about 70 percent of the country's agricultural GDP, while men contribute about 50 percent to the GDP from services.

Three key socio economic indicators are:

* Growth rate of agricultural sector

* Agriculture products marketed as a % of total agricultural production

* % of households with land titles for agricultural production

In terms of livelihoods, majority of Ugandans (68%) are subsistence farmers, while 15 percent are engaged in some employment income activities. The rest (16%) are engaged in either business enterprises (6%) or other activities.

If we decompose the employment further, it is clear that in agricultural subsistence work, women are mainly producing crops (60% compared to 49% of men). There is limited occupation diversification by women, with 'sales' (stalls, small shops etc.) providing the only real diversification. The same trends manifested themselves in all regions of the country (see Annex Table U-1).

The contribution to this agricultural growth and therefore the accrual of benefits; depends on the area of operation. As was noted, most women are subsistence farmers specialising in food crop production, while the men dominate the cash crops. A review of the recent growth trends (1999/00- 200 4/05, shows that livestock and cash crops have shown the most consistent positive GDP growth rates in the sector, while the food crops sub-sector has lagged behind (Table 5.1).

A number of reasons may explain the consistently poor performance of the food crop sector that is dominated by women. Some of the plausible reasons are limited control over productive resources, particularly land, and credit; as well as limited access to agricultural extension services. These are briefly examined below.

(a) Land Ownership

Land assets are particularly, important for the majority of Ugandans, in income generation activities. Women's land rights are limited in Uganda both by the inequitable legal structure and by traditional practice. Data show that female-headed households have less land than male-headed households, even when corrected for household size, if the head is married, divorced or single (see Annex Tables U-2 and U-3). Women own only 7% of the registered land in Uganda. Gender inequality in ownership of land is a fundamental determinant of women's poverty and social disadvantage- it affects the stability of marriages and contributes to continuing high fertility rates.

To ensure security of occupancy, the Land Act provides for spousal consent with respect to disposal of registered land on which the family depends for its livelihood. The effectiveness of this provision is diminished in two important respects. One is that, as indicated, land registration is not common. The second is that spousal consent is problematic in a context in which consent assumes equal rights of spouses and balanced power relations within marriage, which is largely non-existent in many households in Uganda.

From the survey findings (1992-2003), women headed households (WHHs) consistently reported less cultivatable land among their assets. On Average they had 2.2 acres compared to 2.7 acres for male headed households in 1992, which reduced to 2.15 acres compared to 3.6 acres respectively in 2003.

Comparing land ownership with contributions to agricultural production shows a clear reverse with the most "active "farmers--the women hardly own any land. This has implications for control over proceeds from agricultural produce, and therefore incentives for enhancing production levels.

(b) Access to financial services

Financial services are essential at all stages in order to optimise the rate at which efficient operations and adoption of appropriate technologies can take place. Unfortunately, the current financial products do not favour agriculture the main employer of women. The domestic credit to the entire agricultural sector stood at 10 percent in 2004.

Most women accessing credit are in the services sector. However, only 20% of overall micro-finance activities are rural based.

(C) Access to Agricultural Extension services

Since 2001, the Government has been gradually implementing and expanding the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) programme to replace the unified extension system that had been in operation since the late 1980s. The NAADS programme is an innovative public-private agricultural extension service delivery approach. About 58% of these agricultural households indicated they had a need for extension services, but only a modest proportion of them reported receiving extension visits from any service provider during the preceding 12 months.

Households headed by men were somewhat more likely to receive extension services than households headed by women (14.1% of male-headed households reported one or more extension visits during the pervious 12 months compared to only 11.4% of female-headed households. Among male- and female-headed households active in crop and livestock production respectively (and expressing a need for extension services), there was no difference in the proportion of households receiving crop or veterinary services (chart 5.1). On the other hand, households headed by persons with substantial (7) education were more successful in obtaining extension services (whether by paying for services, or asserting their needs by other means) than similar households headed by persons with only a few years of primary education or no education at all.

[GRAPHIC 5.1 OMITTED]

There were similar disparities among small and larger farms--with households cultivating more than 3 acres more than twice as likely to receive the crop extension services they "required" as households cultivating 1 acre or less. As was noted earlier women headed households had less land compared to their male counterparts.

5.1.2 Health

A healthy and well-educated population is both a necessary condition for development and one of the central objectives of development. The overall development goal of the health sector as laid out in the National Health Policy (1999) is "the attainment of a good standard of health by all the people of Uganda, in order to promote a healthy and productive life". While good health is a prerequisite for a productive population and consequently a major input for poverty reduction, in Uganda, ill health has been reported as the most frequently cited cause and consequence of poverty in the 2001 Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Study (UPPAP) (Republic of Uganda, 2002). Therefore improving the population's health conditions and ensuring access to health care for all is an essential component of the overall government strategy of reducing poverty and promoting economic growth.

The PEAP/PRSP (2004/5-2007/8) results and policy matrix identified key indicators to measure health sector performance and determine the contribution of the health sector to overall national health and broader outcomes.

The key socio economic indictors are:

* Infant mortality rate

* Maternal mortality rate

* Population undernourished

* HIV/AIDS Prevalence rate

* % of facilities without any stock outs of drugs

* % of deliveries in health care centres

* % met demand for family planning services

* Utilization of outpatient services

* % of children immunized

The status of some of these indicators is given in the summary gender profile, Annex II. However, many did not have gender disaggregated data to allow for further analysis. This section therefore will carry out the gender analysis on existing data where feasible.

(i) Need for and Use of Health services

Females had somewhat higher incidences of sickness (and injury) than males. For all age groups combined the incidence was 13% higher among females. However the gender differences were negligible among children under age 13. Women of age 18-64 were sick 32% more often than men in the same age group.

This pattern of differences in incidence of sickness between males and females was observed in both rural and urban areas. Rural residents in Central and Eastern regions reported much higher incidences of sickness than urban residents (while the rural-urban differences in Northern and Western regions were small); and in all areas females, and especially women of age 18 or older, had much higher incidences of sickness than males in the same age group. Similar patterns of higher incidences among females were observed when analyzing the data by household expenditure quintiles.

Unfortunately, it is the same women that have limited control over household resources and therefore limited effective demand for the health services.

While the incidences of sickness differed among males and females, in each region and nationwide the proportion of sick males and females who sought treatment from formal health facilities (government, private or NGO health centres or hospitals) were virtually the same. Nationwide, two-thirds of sick males and females (65% of sick males, 67% of sick females) sought treatment at such health facilities. The remaining third went to pharmacies or drug shops...