Chasing the rains: why gender equality matters in development

An encounter with a Maasai woman, leaves Jane Cacouris pondering another encounter at a well.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

Girls stand in the northern Kenyan scrubland holding water bottles.

Tucker Tangeman via Unsplash.

Rural communities living within Kenya’s vast, desolate and beautiful arid and semi-arid Lands have suffered over the past two years from the drought that has hit the entire region. Rainfall during the “rainy seasons” has been in decline, and with more than 80% of Kenyans reliant on agriculture to survive; livelihoods and food security are at risk. Livestock numbers have depleted, and the cattle that are still alive are underfed and unproductive. Women and girls, their skin shining with perspiration as they carry yellow jerry cans strapped to their heads, trek for up to tens of kilometres a day.

They are in search of life-giving water for their livestock and families, returning home each day with shoes and feet scuffed with sun-scorched red dust. This is not an image from decades ago… before we started working towards global sustainable development goals and COP targets. No, this is happening right now in our world.

Speaking to a Maasai woman living in a remote part of rural Kenya on a recent work assignment earlier this year, I asked her about the impact the drought was having on her community who are mainly rely on nomadic cattle herding to live. She explained that the men were leaving for months on end in search of pasture for their cattle; “they are chasing the rains” and leaving women to run the households and try to make ends meet, looking after children and extended family.

But the women at home lack authority to make any decisions; about the land, about supplementing income with other employment, or about crops or food choices. They are disempowered by the social and cultural norms within their strict patriarchal Maasai society, and unable to stem the cascading flow of worsening poverty.

Extreme weather events also increase the work burden of women and girls and their ability to perform their everyday tasks. They must walk further to collect firewood and water due to dwindling resources.

ccording to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, people in poverty are more susceptible to climate change than wealthier people. Their livelihoods and assets are more exposed and they are more vulnerable to natural disasters that bring disease, crop failure, spikes in food prices and death. The World Bank estimates that without immediate action, climate change could push 120 million more people into poverty by 2030. And of those, the threat of climate change on agriculture in Africa could push 30 million people into extreme poverty.

Gender inequalities present in many countries and societies exacerbate this already existing vulnerability of the poor to climate change. And women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change. For example, an increase in child marriage has been observed in communities as a means of coping financially when a disaster occurs, such as a drought or flood. Families raise much needed additional funds through dowries. Extreme weather events also increase the work burden of women and girls and their ability to perform their everyday tasks. They must walk further to collect firewood and water due to dwindling resources. Women often lack land rights that are passed down through generations along patrilineal lines, as is the case in Kenya. Women’s access to climate emergency funding - in areas where such funding is available – is therefore limited as they don’t possess the collateral, in the form of land rights and ownership. In short, women and girls fare significantly worse than men and boys when it comes to the impacts of poverty and climate change on wellbeing.

So what does Jesus think about gender inequality?

Jesus treated all people with equal love and respect. Gospel writer Luke, records that He talked with respect about the Samaritans who were seen by the Jews as racial inferiors, he reached out to prostitutes, and to lepers who were social outcasts. He without doubt had a special sensitivity to those on the margins and towards those who are poor.

And Jesus goes one step further. He also demonstrates a radical approach to gender equality in the Bible. For example, John, the writer of another gospel, describes his encounter with a woman at a well. As Jesus passes through a town on his journey through Samaria, he is tired and stops to sit by a well. When a Samaritan woman approaches to draw water, he asks her for a drink, and begins a conversation that leads to Jesus showing her that he is the son of God. This speaks about gender equality in several ways.

First, Jesus spoke to the woman at a time when it was forbidden for a man to talk to a woman in public, even a wife or daughter. Jesus was also a rabbi which would typically create multiple barriers between him and the woman; in terms of race, gender and lifestyle. But these things were not barriers for Jesus. He spoke to the woman as a human being. He demonstrated equality.

Second, Jesus is vulnerable with her, asking her for a drink because he is thirsty. Here is a man asking a woman for help, openly admitting he needed something from her.

Third, Jesus ignores The Talmud, a Jewish commentary on the Pentateuch, that taught it was immoral to teach a woman the Law.

“Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water”.

He discusses theology with her. Jesus did not regard his Jewish racial identity or being male as superior. Jesus clearly demonstrates through his actions in this passage that all who trust in Christ are equally God’s children, valued without differentiation or discrimination based on race or gender.

As Jesus shows in this passage in John’s gospel, he doesn’t consider women feebler, less capable or less intelligent than men. Throughout the Bible, he continually recognises their value. In parallel, much evidence shows that greater gender parity in the world today would make it a richer and more sustainable place for human beings, biodiversity and the environment. Improved nutrition, food security, livelihoods and health come from greater access, benefit-sharing mechanisms and employment opportunities for women.

For example, when women have greater control over household resources, spending patterns shift towards catering more for families’ food and education. According to the OECD, in Kenya and Malawi, levels of malnutrition are found to be lower among children in female-headed households. An NGO project that worked with women in agriculture across six countries found that when women were given ownership of land and when women’s participation was improved in farmer’s collectives, income from agriculture increased between 40 and 165 per cent. If vulnerabilities caused by poverty are reduced by supporting and recognising women as equal to men, this translates into households and communities that are less vulnerable and more resilient to the effects of climate change. It is all connected.

Humanity can not “chase the rains” forever. In our race to find more stability and sustainability in this changing world, perhaps it’s time to take Jesus’ lead and really recognise and value women equally to men, both as people, and for the contribution they can make to lives, livelihoods and our world.

Article

Books

Change

Mental Health

17 June 2024

5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.