Article

Change

Climate

16 May 2023

5 min read

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.

Interview

Change

Politics

S&U interviews

30 April 2024

7 min read

Stephen Timms: still on mission

The MP on five decades trying to prove a Christian Tory wrong.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man in a suit turns to look at the camera and behind him is a gallery of large painting

Stephen TImms MP.

The day before the February 1974 election, the first in which he was old enough to vote, Stephen Timms says an elder at the Brethren assembly that he then attended – near his home in Fleet, in Hampshire – took him aside. The Brethren are a non-denominational, non-conformist evangelical Christian movement.

“You will be voting Conservative, won’t you?” Timms recalls the man asking.

The assumption surprised Timms, who had thought there was an “obvious connection” between the social justice elements of Christ’s teaching and parties that sought greater equality. He told the elder – Mr Gilmour – that he would be voting Labour.

The incident was an early sign of how Timms, now 68, would spend a life that has brought together an evangelical Christian faith with attachment to the Labour party.

His career has taken him as high as the Cabinet – where he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury for a year in 2006 and 2007. He became Sir Stephen in 2022. He also has a reputation as one of the MPs most dogged in pursuing case work for constituents. That commitment nearly cost him his life in 2010 when a constituent, angry at his support for the Iraq War, stabbed him twice at a constituency surgery. Timms is standing again at the coming general election for East Ham, the constituency which, with some boundary changes, he has represented in various forms since 1994.

“I suppose I’ve spent 50 years trying to prove Mr Gilmour wrong,” Timms says. “[He was] a delightful man but I never agreed with him about that.”

There is a “very clear trend” of economic justice in the biblical message, which the Labour party represents and seeks to realise, Timms goes on, over coffee at an arts centre in his constituency.

“The Christian roots of Labour are absolutely clear,” he says, pointing out that Keir Hardie, the party’s first leader, was an evangelical Christian and many of its other founders were Methodists. “I’ve always seen Labour values and Labour aims as wanting to realise that commitment to economic justice which is such a clear thrust of the Bible.”

He sees no attempt in the Conservative party to realise that vision, he says.

“It’s just not a subject of interest, I don’t think,” Timms says of Conservative supporters. “For people in the Conservative party, there are concerns about maintaining order and respectability and all those things and I can understand how you might find those in the Bible. But I don’t think that’s what the Bible is about.”

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’.”

Timms’ attachment to his small area of East London is almost as strong a thread in his story as his Christian and Labour party commitments. He first came to the area while a maths student at Cambridge, in the summer of 1976, as part of a two-week mission by the Christian Union of Emmanuel College to Forest Gate. It was a formative experience.

“It was the first time I could see how what I believed could shape my life,” Timms recalls.

He returned to the area in 1978 when, after leaving university, he was recruited by Logica, then an information technology and management consultancy, working in the west end of London. He joined the church that the 1976 mission had planted – now called Plaistow Christian Fellowship. He continues to attend the church with his wife, Hui-Leng, originally from Singapore, who was also part of the 1976 mission.

His joined the local Labour party.

“Very quickly, I was asked to be the secretary of my local branch Labour party, which was Little Ilford branch, and then very quickly after that I was asked to be the secretary of the constituency Labour party,” Timms recalls.

Timms was chosen as an office bearer, he believes, because of his neutrality in a bitter feud. Left-wing activists had tried to oust Reg Prentice, Labour MP for the constituency, then called Newham North-East. They claimed he was fundamentally a Conservative. Long-standing local activists had successfully defended him. Both sides had been left dismayed when Prentice subsequently defected to the Conservative party.

“It was a terrible mess,” Timms recalls.

His first elected office was as a councillor on Newham Council, fighting in an unusually high-profile council byelection in 1984. The party had, surprisingly, lost the three Little Ilford wards to representatives of the then Liberal-SDP Alliance. But it emerged that two of the Alliance councillors had given false addresses and there was a byelection.

“Ken Livingstone came down; Neil Kinnock came down,” Timms recalls, referring, respectively, to the then Labour leader of the Greater London council and the Labour party nationally. “We threw everything at it.”

Timms was leader of Newham council when, in 1994, the previous MP, Ron Leighton, died of a heart attack. After being chosen as the Labour candidate, Timms won the subsequent byelection, in June 1994.

His connection with his church has remained critical, he says. A group in the church offered to pray with him every month when he became a councillor. They increased the frequency to weekly once he became leader of the council.

“We still do that and that has been a very important source of support for me through all the ups and downs of the intervening 34 years,” Timms says.

Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that an evangelical Christian would form such a strong bond with, first, Newham North-East and then East Ham, as the constituency has been known since 1997. The seat has, according to the 2021 census, the eighth-highest proportion of people – 41.2 per cent – identifying as Muslim.

Timms insists the tension is less than it might appear. The first person to urge him to stand as an MP following Ron Leighton’s death was the chair of the Alliance of Newham Muslim Associations, he says.

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’,” Timms recalls.

There are points of connection between different faith groups in the area, he adds. He has a particularly strong connection with Bonny Downs Baptists Church, in Beckton, which has an active food bank and many other social ministries.

“If you look at the people who around this community are really doing things to help here, it’s the faith groups,” Timms says. “It’s Bonny Downs Baptist Church; it’s some of the Muslim groups.”

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,”

Timms’s sense of affinity with his Muslim constituents, however, did not prevent the most distressing incident of his career – when Roshonara Choudhry tried to kill him at a constituency surgery in Beckton in May 2010.

Medical staff described the two stab wounds, to his stomach, as “life-threatening” and Choudhry is serving a life term for attempted murder. She had been radicalised by online Islamist extremist sermons and acted because of Timms’ vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq war.

“It was a very, very unpleasant episode,” Timms says, with characteristic understatement.

In March this year, he says, he received a reply from Choudhry, part of a correspondence that began after she wrote to him expressing remorse for her actions.

Even the stabbing, however, underlined the community’s goodwill, Timms insists.

“I was absolutely inundated after that episode with people sending cards and good wishes – including Christians saying, ‘We’re praying for you’, and quite a lot of similar things from Muslims saying, ‘We’re praying for you for a speedy recovery’,” he says. “I hadn’t had that experience before of Muslims telling me, ‘We’re praying for you’. So it left me with a stronger sense, I think, of being supported by my Christian and Muslim constituents, which I appreciated very much.”

Timms nevertheless remains an unapologetically partisan politician. He wants a Labour government under Keir Starmer, he says, to resolve problems he says have built up over 14 years of coalition and then Conservative government since 2010.

“I think the country is in a sorry mess,” he says. “I think we very urgently need a change of direction. I think that the prescription that Keir Starmer has set out offers a hopeful way forward.”

Timms, who is currently chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, says he would be “delighted” to return to a ministerial role in a Starmer government. He is standing as an MP again in the hope of being able to support a new Labour government.

“It would seem a shame to leave just when we might be on the brink of a Labour government again,” he says.

Nevertheless, the way he links his work as an MP with his Christian faith sets him apart.

“I experienced a calling to be in this area,” Timms says.

As far back as when he came to East London, his thinking about faith, what to do with his life and politics were all “intertwined”, he adds.

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,” Timms says.