Globalization and its impact on women’s life
“ Women’s education on employment and income generation issues”

Speaker: P. Altantstseg
Position: The head of UB city women’s council

Dear Participants, Ladies:

Let me extend to all of you the Greetings of the day. It is a great pleasure for me today to have this opportunity to discuss with all of you and exchange views on various issues women are facing today. 
First Section: Employment

Tremendous changes which characterizes the world economy during last ten years such as globalization, structural adjustment, economic transition, liberalization, privatization and technological innovation had directly affected Mongolian economy as well as women’s life in a positive and negative way. Various form of ownership emerging since 1990 had become a part of our life brought a lot of changes in an employment structure.
The workers of trade, food industry, service, agriculture and other sectors which mostly employ women have become either the owners or shareholders of the enterprise. As a result of such development the living standard difference has become much more extreme, creating a group of wealthy business women on one side and on the other side the army of poor women without any life guarantee, who has got nothing but her own labor force to trade in the market to support the life of her children and herself.
The history of Mongolia remembers many cases when women played a major role in the economy by their education and professional capability. However during last few years the share of women in economic activity has got a tendency to decline and therefore women’s participation in the labor 
market is obviously lower as opposed to men’s. Women are increasingly becoming a subject of dismissal and there is an evidence of women exposed to unsafe and unhealthy labor environment by being forced to do mostly manual and low paid work which does not require professional skills. 
There is an attitude towards women that they require better social safety conditions and therefore employers are reluctant to hire them, which is the case of sexual discrimination. The role of women in the family and especially in the animal husbandry is significant in our society. Privatization in the agriculture and inadequate use of modern tools and equipment in the household tremendously increases women’s work load at home and makes them work in average 10-12 hours a day. However the system of assessment, evaluation and recording of women’s work is highly insufficient. 
State statistics do not cover entirely women’s and men’s share in terms of banking loan acquisition, technology and property ownership status. Thus there are many obstacles which keep women away from active economic activity.        
One of the new element in the market economy system is private sector. Democratic developments initiated in 1990 made private sector an integrated part of our life and opened many challenges for women to compete and survive in the market economy. Today the share of women in the private sector is 46.2 %. Despite the initiative and enthusiasm of the women working in the private sector, and increasing number of well doing enterprises they still face serious problems in expanding and promoting own businesses. Among many problems women face working in the private sector  such as insufficient financial status, inadequate employment opportunity, educational and professional skills, psychological barrier, rough labor tools and unproper management there is dangerous tendency of women’s rights violence. There are many cases when the labor law provisions are violated, overtime work payment is not provided in cash on time and according an initial agreement and lack of health and social 
insurance coverage. This affects negatively employment perspectives in the sector. According to statistics of the economic transition period the women’s unemployment constantly far exceeds the men’s and as of 1996 it has reached 7.2 %,1-2 points higher than men’s unemployment. 
One of the main prerequisites of country’s sustainable development is to provide for women and men an equal opportunity to participate in the economic life and to have an equal access to scarce resources. Therefore it is vitally important to create employment promoting favorable conditions, which would increase significantly employment and economic security of women.     
Second Section: Income generation

It has been not that long ago when many women in the service and trade sectors were excited about becoming owners of property by acquiring equipment and tools they have been using as a result of privatization process taking place during transition to market economy. However, this excitement did not last for long. The fixed capital such as buildings and storages of vast majority of enterprises they have been working on were transferred from state to private hands through auctions, resulting on dismissal of many women. At the same time some enterprises undertook structural adjustment and some of them went bankrupt because of poor management and financial insolvency. Among many people victims there are women whose number is increasing day by day in the army of unemployed.
Most of unemployed women had no income but her earnings and hence had to rely on others support to survive. This is the main reason of social inequality in our society. 
Unemployment rate did not fall during last few years. Moreover, regional studies show that it remains high in Eastern and Western aimags. Unemployment rate in Eastern aimags is 13.4 %, whereas in Western 
aimags it is 8.3 % with the highest rate of 15.8 % in Dornod and 13.6 % in Bayan- Olgyi aimags. 
Unemployment primarily affects household well-being, constraining family main consumption and shrinking per capita income. Average annual income of the households is 55445 tugrugs, whereas it is 37735 tugrugs for the family which is below poverty line. These are people who mainly have low rank positions and who are engaged in low paid unprofessional type of work.. As a rule they are single mothers with many children or handicap, elderly people with very limited opportunities for income generation. For these people it is not a solution to obtain one time grant money. The proper solution would be to enable them to carry out their own family mini business by giving low interest highly concessional credit. 
In this regards it is extremely important to give due appreciation and to promote the activity of NGO’s which deal with women’s income generation and employment issues by establishing “ Women’s revolving fund” and “Savings- Credit cooperative”. The organizations like Mongolian Women’s Association and its branches, Mongolian Women’s Brain Pool, the organization which represents women’s vulnerable group, women’s training and information center “AVID”, the organization which deals with women’s political education, conducts surveys and provides with information “Women in social Progress” movement and Women’s research and information center are the main leading and driving force in any women’s issues. 
Old social safety net has collapsed during transition period, however, it is yet to be replaced by new system. 
Although vast majority of population is covered by health and social insurance, the purchasing power of retired elderly people or people with fixed salary is rapidly declining. Moreover, increase in salary and wages are not enough to compensate dramatic rise in prices. Another words, due to lack of success in halting rapid increase of food, consumer goods and 
services prices there is no considerable increase in household income and, thus there is not much progress in meeting basic requirements of the family member. 
The cornerstone of any measure towards promotion of women’s economic activity should be credit policy. The women are actively applying for credit to generate an income through running small and medium size businesses. However, due to tough  credit interest and customs regulations they are not in a position to repay that loan. In fact, it is very rare when woman owned entity gets loan.
Out of 57 enterprises, which obtained loan under the Asian Development Bank “Job creation” project, only 20 % are female headed. This is not sufficient indeed. The commercial banks are not interested in considering this kind of projects, because as a matter of fact, these projects are small. The main obstacles which constrain greatly the development of small industry is short term and high interest rate of banking credit. 
From what I said earlier it is evident that the policy of coordination of unemployment and poverty alleviation issues with industry rehabilitation through family business promotion is failing.
Therefore, an emphasis needs to be given to establishing of small credit extension system through women NGO’s which deal with job creation and income generation problems. Also it is extremely important to help women to develop skills to process agricultural by-products and to produce final goods using traditional technology.
/ I hope that Ms. Nadmid, the Director of training and information center “AVID” will touch upon this issue in greater details./
Section three: Economic education improvement
 
It is truism that the outcome, success of any endeavor and effort depends on one’s education level. The educational and professional level of most of our women is highly compatible, however, some of  them were not ready 
emotionally and financially to accept and adjust to the changes taking place during economic transition and thus suffer from lack of confidence. On the other side, they face a serious need to be retrained to survive and be competitive in a new environment, because there is no more market for the skills they have been trained for before. Therefore it is essential to:
•	help women to adopt market behavior, to acquire marketing and management skills;
•	teach enterprise management skills, by proper selection of trainers and forms of training taking into account local specifics;
•	teach modern techniques and technology, to provide with necessary information;
•	conduct retraining;
•	identify properly professional training needs;
•	expand women’s living condition survey.

In addition to Government efforts to improve living standard of the population by developing Poverty alleviation Program, which calls to utilize domestic resources, many international organizations and donor countries are actively involved in this field providing external financing and humanitarian assistance. However, it is becoming obvious now that some of these policies are failing. 
In order to increase women’s participation in economic activity it is important to improve work performance evaluation system, change their employment attitude and to set up women’s support fund to achieve certain goals such as: to establish women’s bank, rationalization of credit mechanism, expansion of training activity on market economy, to strengthen the social safety of working women, additional job creation through domestic and foreign investment, provide an equal participation for women in income generation projects. All these needs to be done in close cooperation with women's various NGO's.

First survey on gender issues /conducted in 1977/ is one of the important key documents which has great impact on gender policy formulation, female and male equal participation in economic activity and enables women to equally benefit from social and economic wealth. /Ms. Oyuntsetseg will highlight you on the survey./

The following are my suggestions to contribute to the resolution of this plenary session:
•	to set up East Asian Women's cooperation network in order to facilitate women's employment , improvement of labor conditions, information exchange and expansion of labor market,
•	to set up women's training centers taking into account the specifics of certain region,
•	to create legal framework to expand small loan to women with women's NGO intermediation,
•	to teach women agricultural by-product processing techniques and traditional technology.

Thank you for your kind attention.