9. Such data as are available indicate that poverty is high among families headed by females. Those income-earning activities that can be combined with child care are of the marginal and badly-paid type. The earnings of female "heads of household have been shown to come mostly from jobs in the informal sector of the economy. It seems that several factors linked with the early stages of development, e.g. mechanisation of agriculture and drift to the cities, produce the conditions which lead to a larger number of women-headed households. But it does not follow that an increase in women-headed households is a catalyst of economic development. Evidence from the Carribbean suggests that the highest proportion of women-headed households occurs in those countries with lowest per capita incomes.

AINEK VII

Co-operation with GOS

The main points emerging from the discussion on the involvement of Non-Governmental Organisations in aid activities for the promotion of women in developing countries were as follows:

Belgium intends to organize in May several information days, to which representatives of all women's organisations in the country and of other organisations active in development cooperation will be invited, with a view to creating a better awareness of women's problems in Africa.

The Canadian authorities are supporting a programme called Match, which functions as a clearing-house for some 125 Canadian NGOs and as a direct link with women's organisations in LDCs by keeping a roster of Canadian women who can be given the administrative responsibility for contacts with women in LDCs and by channelling requests from individuals or organisations in these countries to suitable organisations in Canada.

Danish GOs play an important role in the field of development education by arranging courses, seminars, conferences, etc.

- In the German Women's Council, which serves as an umbrella organisation for 24 NGOs, a working group has recently been set up with a view to collecting information about on-going aid activities and future plans in the private voluntary sector.

-The Norwegian authorities have the possibility to work directly with international NGOs or similar organisations in LDCs if this proves, in certain instances, more expedient than going through organisations based in Norway.

- Mrs. Sipilä (United Nations) stressed that the lack of coordination between women's organisations in the donor countries impeded the creation of closer contacts with such organisations in LDCs, thereby depriving the latter of a valuable stimulus to mobilize women for the participation in the decision-making process and in the planning and implementation of projects.

In the United Kingdom, NGOs have, in addition to their direct development co-operation with sister organisations in LDCs, a far-reaching collaboration with the Ministry of Overseas Development through joint funding of undertakings where the Ministry and the NGOs in question contribute equal amounts.

The United States authorities are planning to involve to an increasing extent private voluntary organisations in assistance activities focussed on women.

APPENDIX 3

REMARKS BY HON. JOHN J. GILLIGAN, ADMINISTRATOR, AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AT THE PARTNERS OF THE AMERICAS 1977 INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION, NOVEMBER 18-22

I am pleased and honored to address this gathering.

I am not a stranger to the work of the Partners of the Americas. As Governor of Ohio I served as Honorary Chairman of the Ohio Partners and took an active interest in the exchanges between the citizens of Ohio and those of the state of Parana in Brazil.

As you know, two other governors have been actively involved with the work of the Partners. One is now the President of the United States. Another is governor of the state of Michigan, the Honorable William Milliken, who will address you later in this convention.

Today I would like to discuss with you what I consider to be one of the most important-and neglected—aspects of economic development.

I would like to discuss with you the role of women in the economic life of the Third World.

For I believe that it may well be women, not men, who will be the decisive force in seeing to it that the world's poor have enough to eat, drink clean water, eat nourishing food, live to adulthood and become literate.

I believe that survival and social development in the Third World may well depend more on the women than the men.

Frequently when we speak of economic development we think of such matters as the transfer of technology, the development of trade policies and the exploitation of natural resources-all of which, of course, are essential.

But in doing so, we tend to minimize the fact that the real key to economic development is people. The most important resource within the borders of any nation is its men and women.

From the beginning of our history the United States recognized that our people were the heart of our land. We were the first nation to perceive that education for all our children was a key to our social and economic growth.

Despite that fact, until recently we denied ourselves the full talents of more than half our population; we denied ourselves the full potential of women and blacks. To the extent we did that, we are a poorer nation.

Therefore, as I address myself today to the economic development of the Third World, and to the fact that the role of women in that development has been largely neglected, I do so with humility.

We haven't done so well ourselves. But we have learned. And I hope that what we have learned can be of use to the less developed nations. Things have changed for North American women. I believe the efforts and example of our women in recent years cannot fail to advance the rights and role of women everywhere. With that preface, let me give you some facts about women in the developing world today.

Women are responsible for forty to eighty percent of all agricultural production in the less developed countries.

Women are directly responsible for the health and nutrition of their families. Women are the first, and frequently the only, teachers of the young. Women are fifty percent of the partnerships that produce children and hence are critical to the planning and implementation of a population program. These are facts that are basic to the prospects for economic development of less developed countries. Yet they are facts that have been dimly perceived and largely ignored in practice.

Let us explore, for a moment, the issue of women and agricultural development. We know that if agricultural production in the Third World is not significantly increased there will be malnutrition and starvation on an increasingly massive scale within the next two decades.

We also know that not only are women responsible for a major portion of agricultural production, but their burden is becoming heavier. The lure of the city and cash-producing work is drawing the men away from the farms. The women remain behind to work the land, tend the livestock and raise the children.

It is estimated that some thirty percent of rural families in the Third World are now headed by women. A 1969 census showed that in Kenya alone about 525,000 households had women at the helm.

But what is being done to improve their position or give them the training that would increase agricultural productivity?

Not much.

In nearly all developing countries, agricultural training is given to men only. The result is male instructors who turn their attention to male farmers. The wives, daughters, and hired female laborers are ignored.

Women are additionally handicapped in their efforts to get more from the land they work because of their generally "inferior" social position and the fact that they rarely have legal status, access to credit, or property rights.

The conclusion can be only too clear: If agricultural production and productivity are to increase, development planning in the Third World must give an equal place to the women-particularly rural women.

If rural women have been ignored in agricultural planning, they have fared better-but not much better-in another critical field of Third World development: the planning and implementation of health and nutrition programs.

No country can develop economically if most of its people are undernourished or sick.

Four-fifths of all Third World people have debilitating intestinal parasites. One hundred million children under five there are always hungry.

Fifteen million children there die each year from the combination of infection and malnutrition.

In the United States the caloric requirement of a typical working woman is about 2100 calories per day. Most North American women receive what they need. A typical woman working in agriculture in the Third World, because she is smaller, requires about 1700 calories per day. She gets about 1500. In many developing countries, women eat what the men leave.

These are sobering statistics. If something is to be done about them it is surely the rural women-those closest to these problems, who will have to do it.

In some cases, because of the depths of their poverty there is little they can do to improve nutrition and diminish disease.

But in many, many cases malnutrition and disease are the result of ignorance. The fact is, miracles could be wrought with simple changes of diets and food habits if women only had the knowledge to make these changes.

Nutrition specialists in Africa, for example, have found that there is almost no village where women cannot find the right food for their families, or the right combinations of food, if they know what to look for.

A few greens, frequently found growing wild-a few beans-an occasional egg. A mixture of these ingredients, prepared so it can be spoon fed, and fed daily, can save a child's life.

Public health workers in Malaysia noticed that Chinese children there were surviving and Malaysian children were dying, despite the fact that the same food was available to both. When the situation was investigated it was discovered that Chinese mothers understood the importance of diet-particularly of protein-and the Malaysian women did not.

In short, a small amount of elementary nutritional education can make the difference between life and death.

Fortunately, some governments in the developing world are beginning to recognize the importance to economic development of nutrition education for rural

women.

I recall, for example, a recent trip I made to Ghana and a village I visited up-country.

A village girl had received some training in nutrition from a government extension agent and had persuaded her village friends to plant a kitchen garden outside the local clinic.

They had introduced spinach into that garden and called it "clinic weed." During the visit, the women sang a song for my benefit. I won't try to sing it for you today, but I can tell you that it extrolled the wisdom of planting corn at reasonable intervals, just as it extolled the wisdom of having children at reasonable intervals.

It was a nifty little program and a perfect example of what can be done if you get the information to the people who can do the most with it-the rural women. If a little information and training can accomplish miracles in nutrition, it can also accomplish miracles in health.

In most of the Third World, women provide whatever health education and care there is. An African proverb says, "Educate a woman and you educate a family.” That ought to become a motto for all developing countries and for all of us who are trying to help them.

But if a woman lacks elementary education-if she does not understand how or why disease occurs or how it is transmitted-she has no understanding of the importance of keeping food covered or water clean.

If she has no notion of what viruses or bacteria are, she has little incentive to observe even the most elementary sanitation precautions.

Yet, the single major cause of disease in developing countries is related to the failure to observe elementary household and village sanitation.

But in the Third World, health education for village women has barely begun. Health and nutrition planners are only beginning to recognize and work with a self evident fact: if a country's economic development hinges on the health of its people and if most of the people are rural, women must be brought fully into the mainstream of health plans and programs throughout the Third World.

We all know that as long as population growth equals or exceeds economic growth, standards of living cannot improve.

That has begun to happen, for example, in Nigeria and Ghana. Because of its burgeoning birth rate, Nigeria has been forced to become a food importing nation. Fortunately the country has the money from oil to pay for the food. Ghana hasn't been so lucky.

But what these countries are experiencing may well be the wave of the future, if population growth is not better controlled-and soon. If that is to happen, women must play not only their traditional role, but a new one.

We know that fertility rates begin to fall when two things happen:

First, when a woman is able to nourish her children properly and keep them healthy, thus assuring that they survive to adulthood. Only then are couples in poor countries apt to believe that they dare limit the size of their families.

And second, fertility will decline when the educational level of parents rises. The educational level of the father is important. But that of the women is more so. In Latin America, for example, studies indicate that women who have completed primary school will average about two children fewer than those who have not. And yet, here again, when it comes to education, women in the developing world get very short shrift.

Most of the literate people in the world today are male. Women comprise nearly two-thirds of the world's illiterate population. More than a half billion women cannot read or write. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of illiterate women increased by forty million.

Development planners have emphasized the centrality of education to economic development. But it is long past time that we start finding the ways to educate Third World women to the limit of their great potential. For it may well be that the future of the Third World rests predominantly with them.

I have been pleased to note the emphasis the Partners of the Americas have placed on the role and importance of women.

Under your aegis home economists from Louisiana have worked with rural women in El Salvador to help increase their income through the fabrication of handicrafts, using local materials such as sisal and coconut fibers.

Nutrition specialists from Oregon, under your sponsorship, are working together with their professional counterparts in Costa Rica in the development of audio visual education to be used in rural areas.

Women on the altiplano of Bolivia now have better opportunities to learn to read as a result of a school construction program conducted by the Utah-Bolivia Partners. With teaching materials developed by Brigham Young University, those who are already literate can teach their neighbors to read.

I commend you for your work on behalf of women.

I commend you for your efforts to build a partnership with the people of the Third World.

I salute you for your efforts to liberate human beings from disease and malnutrition, poverty and ignorance, so that their full potential can be realized in a better world for all of us.