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Northern Ireland: what rural women want

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women's region consoritum, rural women, disadvantaged women, paper, outlining priorities, Pressing concerns and important priorities require urgent attention from policymakers.

A paper exploring women’s perspectives on what policies the government should prioritise to address the persistent disadvantage of women in NI was published recently.

The overall aim of the paper – Policy Prioritisation for Disadvantaged Women: Women’s Perspectives – was to capture the perspectives of a cohort of women, living and working in deprived and rural areas of Northern Ireland, on the subject of policy prioritisation in respect of disadvantaged women’s needs and interests.

In providing this policy platform, the project responded to the constraints placed by the ongoing political impasse in the region on stakeholder opportunity to hold the government to account for, and seek remedial address to, this disadvantage.

The paper is the product of a collaborative project undertaken by the members of the Consortium for the Regional Support for Women in Disadvantaged and Rural Areas, known as the Women’s Regional Consortium, and which is made up of Training for Women Network (TWN); the Women’s Resource and Development Agency (WRDA); the Women’s Support Network (WSN); Northern Ireland’s Rural Women’s Network (NIRWN); WOMENSTEC; the Women’s Centre Derry; and Foyle Women’s Information Network (FWIN).

It was prepared by Dr Caroline Walsh, of the Women’s Support Network.

Participants identified the following as pressing concerns and important priorities, implicated in women’s experience of disadvantage in Northern Ireland, requiring urgent attention from policymakers:

The gendered childcare dilemma correlated with women’s educational exclusion, lack of economic participation, benefit dependency and poverty; threats to the sustainability of community-based anti-poverty women sector provision, particularly the women centre delivery model, entailing the integration of Women’s Centre Childcare Fund (WCCF) delivery with educational opportunity and frontline support;

The absence of meaningful gendered job creation policy targeting ‘work that pays’ for disadvantaged women (i.e. employment that provides a genuine living wage indexed to the actual cost of living);

The actual and projected adverse impact of ongoing austerity on women’s poverty and vulnerability, particularly that linked to tax and benefit reform;

Austerity-aggravated tenant vulnerability in the social housing and private rented sectors, as manifest in rent affordability problems and housing-related poverty;

The persistent unmet need/demand for different kinds of social housing;

The enduring relationship between women’s disadvantage and the legacy of the conflict, particularly in respect of mental wellbeing;

The persistent systemic underfunding of mental health and its deleterious impact on service access and delivery as well as affected cohorts’ life outcomes;

A systemically underfunded social care delivery model, and its adverse impact on women as both service users and primary carers;

Public service inadequacy depicted as correlated with ongoing austerity retrenchment and a failure to plan on the basis of objective need; misrecognition and non-accommodation of minority group need in public sector service design and delivery(especially in health, education and housing), particularly with regard to black and minority ethnic (BME, including immigrant/refugee) and transgendered cohort need; the socioeconomic and infrastructural impact of reported regional disparity in public sector investment, especially in respect of rural and north-west regions; and, endemic paramilitary ‘bullying’ and intimidation at the level of the community.

These findings have informed the following recommendations:

Childcare affordability and women’s lack of economic participation

The government should seek to take proper account of the enduring relationship of prohibitive childcare costs in Northern Ireland to women’s lack of economic participation and financial autonomy.

Due consideration should be given therein to (i) austerity constraints on low-income households’ ability to pay for childcare, especially in disadvantaged areas; and,(ii) sectoral concern that intervention under the proposed childcare strategy for the region may ultimately prove insubstantial.

Childcare and job creation: work that pays

While women’s lack of financial autonomy may correlate with a lack of appropriate childcare, it may also correlate with a lack of meaningful employment (work that pays when childcare costs are factored in).

In taking forward its childcare strategy, the government should seek to give due regard to this nexus, integrating meaningful gendered job creation ambitions into its wider anti-poverty policy framework (such as would promote the notion of a genuine living wage linked to the actual cost of living).

Women sector community-based provision

The government should take seriously the case for sustained and enhanced women-only intervention at the level of the community – especially the integration of childcare, educational opportunity and frontline support services under the women centre delivery model – in addressing vulnerable cohort need, enhancing women’s prospects of economic participation and progressing anti-poverty policy ambition.

That undertaking should expressly incorporate proper consideration of the projected cumulative adverse impact on the vulnerable of any cessation of the currently at-risk WCCF delivery model.

Women and austerity: cultivating a rights-based perspective

The government should endeavour to properly capture and remedially address the cumulative impact of gendered austerity on women’s equality and wellbeing, cultivating a robust rights-based perspective on this debate such as might allow it to identify more fully the wider social justice issues at stake.

Women’s educational disadvantage

It is recommended that the government seek to develop a robust, integrated approach at the level of strategic policy development to properly identify and address the learning needs of educationally marginalised, disadvantaged women.

Disadvantaged women and health and social care

The government should also seek to effect a more efficacious integrated, inter-agency delivery model across health and social care in pursuit of substantively improved outcomes for disadvantaged women, as both service users and primary carers.

In pursuit of improved mental health outcomes for such cohorts, the government should attend to the cumulative mental health impact of ongoing austerity and the legacy of the conflict, while also ring-fencing mental health from any further fiscal cuts under extended austerity.

Women and housing disadvantage

The government should attend to the incidence of austerity-aggravated tenant vulnerability in the social housing and private rented sectors, as manifest in rent affordability problems and housing-related poverty. More generally, the government should attend to the question of unmet demand for social housing and its impact on women’s vulnerability.

Public service access: minority need and objective need

The government should ensure proper recognition and accommodation of minority group needs and interests in public sector service design and delivery, particularly in respect of black and minority ethnic (including immigrant/refugee) and transgendered cohort need.

Due regard should be given therein to any significant disaggregated data gaps such as might threaten to undermine efficacy in such design and delivery.

It is further recommended that the government give due consideration to the case for planning public service delivery and investment based on objective need.

Community wellbeing: paramilitary intimidation

The government should commit to enhanced intervention at the level of community to address the incidence and impact of paramilitary intimidation in disadvantaged areas, giving due regard therein to the case for enhanced community policing.

Provision for rural need: rural proofing

In respect of all the policy prioritisation categories at hand, the government should allow for robust rural proofing, providing investment and delivery mechanisms that properly address the interacting structural and other barriers to accessing services, correlated with historic underinvestment and associated chronic infrastructural shortfalls, which particularly impact women in rural poverty and isolation.

Equality responsive budgeting

The government should take due account of the accountability and efficacy case for equality responsive budgeting – including gender budgeting – across all policy and planning processes, in pursuit of improved equality outcomes across variegated cohort need and section 75 grounds.

Gender disaggregated data gaps

The government should attend to any gender disaggregated data gaps in the available evidence base such as might undermine the effectiveness of remedial intervention across the policy prioritisation categories identified in this paper.

Disadvantaged women’s voices: inclusion in policy development

Finally, across all of the policy prioritisation areas identified here, the government should commit to providing for more meaningful stakeholder engagement with disadvantaged women across all implicated policy development, monitoring and review processes, ensuring their voices are explicitly heard and their perspectives, needs and interests properly recognised and accommodated.

To read the full report, click here.

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