Analyzing women’s participation in privatization processes brings more light to gender unequal dissemination within the sphere. Less than 25 % of privatized businesses is owned by women, its overwhelming majority disseminated in trade, public services and health, and representing mostly small and medium enterprises. Moreover, women business owners lack necessary technology, market knowledge, information how to operate, even starting capital, and access to credit loan. In addition to all the above, professionals claim (and being informed about Georgia’s reality one can well understand why) that tax laws are completely unregulated and burdensome, and almost the entire body of inspectors are corrupt. These inspectors provide heavy inhibitor particularly for women business-makers by threatening the viability of their business.
While conducting the research, the assessment team found major barriers to business growth in three policy sections: taxation, corruption, and credit. Being especially egregious for women business-owners, they represent threat towards development in general and women’s share into the business in particular. Thus, lobbying for advancing relevant laws is of great importance for the improvement of the situation.
Working towards developing a commercially viable and sustainable energy sector is of vitally importance for Georgian community, where improved energy supply would lessen double burden of women’s work. Unfortunately, the reality shows severe underperformance of electricity, oil, gas, and water. Recurrent work stoppages due to blackouts are usual, they cause major economic losses and hamper women’s labor.
As for gender distribution in the energy sector, women and men are huddled within the industry in stereotypical positions: women hold administrative, operational and clerical roles, they do not attempt to attain higher managerial positions and are “practically invisible in energy policy circles”. Meanwhile men hold technical and leadership positions.
In the Assessment the team pointed out several issues that demand attention, namely to arrange better collection of utility payment, to liberalize price, to increase private sector involvement, to enhance energy supply availability, to create public awareness of reform initiatives and to improve the energy sector investment climate. Besides, they recommended identifying women for managerial positions in order to women’s awareness of energy sector policy and encourage their participation in its development. Moreover, development of payment methods must take place so that small customers be allowed to “make payments through banks, postal offices, or authorized businesses thereby eliminating door-to-door collectors who use the opportunity to pressure women”.
Picture depicted under the strategic objective named “Democratic Process and Market Reforms” shows grave difference between the law and its actual enactment in the Georgian reality. Georgia is a traditional country with a long patriarchal history, where the main obstacle for women is a traditional approach towards them. This encompasses consideration about family as the most significant social unit, where the women’s “decision-making” includes care for the home, for the children and for the husband, while the major decisions are the sole responsibility of the men.
According to the new civil code, women and men are equal within the family. But religious and customary laws dictate the opposite. According to the same code, men and women have equal rights of inheritance, but by tradition and in practice women are considered as secondary heirs, possessing fewer rights than men in the division of inherited property. Furthermore, no specific legislation exists to prohibit discrimination against women. As for women, they either do not know about their rights, or can not realize they (these rights) are violated, or even they are aware of the violations but lack knowledge of how to challenge the violators. And even when they know about the existing laws, traditions and customs restrict women from exercising this right. Besides, they simply do not view enforcing mechanism (court) as trustworthy instrument to achieve justice.
These all are especially surprising when a researcher juxtaposes high standard of women’s education in Georgia with the lack of understanding of their legal rights. This is one of major problems for women along with bride kidnapping (abduction, still widely practiced in Georgia, especially in the rural regions but acceptable for society in the capital too), divorce, domestic violence, and trafficking in persons. Strategies to empower women through public awareness of their existing legal rights and mechanisms to support legal access of women to pursue these rights are very important to eradicate all these old-fashioned traditional practices and abuse of women’s humans rights.
After careful consideration of all the above mentioned, it is clear that laws must be either changed or enacted in correspondence of the modern societal needs. However, this will never happen without women’s adequate representation in politics, as, according to numerous feminist scholars, women can not be represented by men but only by women themselves. Women’s participation in elections and their existence on decision-making levels are highly recommended by the Assessment as well. Sadly enough, according to USAID, women in Georgia are almost invisible in the politics at the decision-making positions. This is because they are not attracted by “dirty” politics (they claim that the political climate is hostile to them) and do not view it as a mean to better their overall conditions and situation.
As goes for statistics, women comply less than 35% of the total amount of party members. Their representation in local government councils is also below parity. Out of 18 ministries only two, ministry of culture and ministry of environmental protection, are directed by women. As for women’s NGOs, only few out of 60 are active, but without adequate financing and deficient number of trained personnel they are not powerful forces to call for changes in Georgia. Besides, their majority is located in the capital, while rural areas deserve more attention in some issues that the capital does.
USAID names impediments to enhanced participation of women in politics to be but few: organizational structure of parties being neither transparent, nor participatory, nor member-oriented; vague and suspicious financing of the parties; and excluding women from decision-making processes.
Media must be important source of making awareness of gender’s issues and promoting understanding of women’s problems. However, referring to various sources, the researchers claim that women’s issues in Georgian media are under represented. Even when women are represented in media, it is often accompanied by an erotic picture, without clearly making a link between the subject’s matter and the image printed. Moreover, this limited representation tends to cover areas concerning education, social spheres, and healthcare services. Another observed type of articles containing information about families somehow consider the practices of bride kidnapping, family abuse, stereotypes women seen as only wives and mothers with no societal life abilities to be widespread and generally acceptable by broader public. Thus, instead of promoting society’s understanding of women’s issues, media blurs the real situation and even worsens it. To train journalists (the overwhelming majority of whom are women) and editors (only a few of them are women) and teach them basic business skills, quality writing, and most importantly ethics in journalism is seen as the key affair at this stage of representation, because “without a strong media, the NGO sector will not develop and gender stereotypes will be reinforced”.
For further development, USAID considers conducting project’s outset and customer evaluation surveys with disaggregated gender data, as this knowledge at the primary level to be important for subsequent determining of gender-sensitive issues. Furthermore, significant “capacity building training” of women employees, strengthening the leadership skills of already established or promising women leaders, assisting them in running political campaigns for offices, and increasing citizens (both female and male) awareness of their roles and responsibilities as well as of democratic processes is suggested by the Assessment. In doing so, special attention should be paid towards changing men’s attitudes about women in political office.
Two problems specifically pointed out by the Assessment are trafficking in persons and domestic violence. These are the main obstacles for women’s full social and personal realization.
Trafficking in persons is an acute problem in Georgia, calling for special attention. Georgia is classified by US Department of State’s 2002 Annual Report on Trafficking in Persons as a Tier 2 country. Having no legislation (not a single word to frame trafficking as a separate offense in the criminal code), few programs and limited (if any) official data makes fighting against it extremely difficult. Besides, one must consider this problem through local social lenses, which means that it is “aggravated by patriarchal social attitudes that discourage open discussion on the issue”.
According to the one (and the only) NGO “Women in the Future” running a hotline to collect data about the victims of trafficking, total number of the victims reach 300, 2/3 of whom are women. However, I have enough evidence to consider this data depicts only very few cases. The most desired and accessible countries for Georgians are Turkey, France and Spain.
Assessing team has several suggestions to improve the situation, starting with the collection of the relevant information and ending with legislative reform. Besides, they advocate for increasing the support to women’s economic activities, so that they will not have to migrate anymore; for campaigning to promote public awareness of the problem; for protection and assistance of the victims, including their vocational training and social integration; and the last but not the least for training judges and the police to address the issue with the responsibility and by their full attention.
Another significant problem stressed in the Assessment is domestic violence in Georgia. This is actually considered to be the most serious problem for women in Georgia, as it is entangled with the archaic social understanding and values and thus becomes very difficult even to assess, saying nothing about the remedies. Having no legislative document (the same as for trafficking) prohibiting domestic violence, it is extremely troublesome to name and fight against domestic violence. The attempt to this latter is undermined by widespread social understanding of family life being private and thus tabooed for further discussion.
Even when named, victims of domestic violence would rather hide than announce for their experience, because they fear that the court can provide no valuable mechanism to protect them from following recurrence of the case. Besides the law, there are no specific shelters for the victims and their future after making the “private” issue public is vague and obscure. Thus, they would rather prefer to stay unseen and untouchable.
In the Assessment USAID team strongly encouraged NGOs, different organizations and the people concerned (and who are not concerned?) to elaborate on several points to combat domestic violence, or at least facilitate unbearable situation of its victims. They claim, that the reactions chain should include drafting relevant legislature, gathering and analyzing of the relevant data, making issue widely discussed in media, providing shelters, and conducting training for police and especially encouraging female policemen to be included in the list of aid-providers.
Before elaborating on the general conclusions, which the Assessment drew in order to better women’s materialization in every field of life, let me briefly analyze the reason of main differences between key important issues concerning gender which are stressed in the Assessment of Georgia v. several other Assessments.
Gender Assessment in Romania carried out in February 2002 elaborates more on economic, democratic and social transition, yet it specifies the same vulnerable areas of concern as in the case of Georgia, that is, domestic violence and trafficking in persons. Domestic violence is recognized as a way serious problem in the country, where it obeys no socio-economic pattern by eradicating all social, cultural, and economic boundaries. What for trafficking, “to the extent data exists on trafficking in women in Romania, the problem is severe and requires immediate action”.
On the contrary to above, the gender assessment conducted in Guyana in May 2003 stressed HIV/AIDS pandemic rather than domestic violence by stating that the “reduction of risk of HIV/AIDS transmission will be the largest program to be implemented by the Mission during the next strategy period”. This is because HIV/AIDS pandemic is one of the major important issues in Guyana where “the growing threat is intimately intertwined with the economic, social, and political issues facing the country”, and besides, the disease is identified as “a more visible problem for women,… [who] tend to be ‘blamed’ for spread of the disease”.
Thus the similar problems make Gender Assessments from Georgia and Romania to have more common crossing points than for instance the assessments from Georgia and Guyana do.
On the other hand, Gender Assessment for USAID/Morocco pays almost no attention to any problems discussed in the works above. The USAID evaluated the main goals of the country to be the development of business, in particular, agriculture and related agribusiness, as well as creation of new business opportunities and improvement of business practices. For this, eradication of illiteracy (which is as high as 70 % in rural population, and for rural women it achieves yet higher level - 83 %) and enhancement of low education is essential. Thus, the gender assessment for Morocco concentrates on these and related problems, unlike assessments for other countries, though I can well imagine that HIV/AIDS, domestic violence and trafficking are not dilemmas unheard of there.
Now let me briefly analyze what conclusions did USAID team made after conducting the research. In fact, the conclusions were directed to two targets, one of them USAID Mission itself, and another – “Implementing Partners”.
For USAID Mission, the principal importance lies in requiring from all partners to supply the Mission with gender disaggregated data, which ought to be “current, readily accessible, and highlighted by the implementers in external and internal quarterly and published annual reports”. Meeting frequently with NGOs, train them and facilitate their further understanding of gender mainstreaming issues by providing gender program analysis as well as specially designed manuals.
For the Implementing Partners (different International Organizations functioning in Georgia, along with Georgian NGOs), quite a few tasks were delineated, including but not limited to gathering gender disaggregated data, analyzing differences between female and male business-owners, promoting gender equality in decision-making, lobbying for improved legislature, developing a media campaign, increasing legal aid and public awareness (especially in rural areas) about trafficking and domestic violence, training staff about the related issues, elaborating on consumer surveys and questionnaires, identifying and training of leading women in political parties, and conducting civil education campaigns.
Overall, the assessment demonstrated that “USAID/Caucasus is aware of gender mainstreaming and the relationship between improving the unequal status of women and the economic, political, and social growth of the country”. This is very essential for such a tremendous donor organization, as USAID is for Georgia, giving the state a good opportunity to profit from USAID’s significant experience, findings, and recommendations.
Lela Purtskhvanidze
Department of Gender Studies
References and Further Reading:
Fourth World Conference on Women, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf
Gender Assessment and Plan of Action for USAID/Romania, February 2002, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at
Gender Assessment for USAID/Guyana, May 2003, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at
Gender Assessment for USAID/Morocco, May 2003, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at http://www.dec.org/pdf_docs/PNACU055.pdf
Homepage of USAID, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov
Report from Anti-Project Trafficking in Georgia, 2003.
Squires, Judith. Gender in Political Theory (Liubliana: Polity Press, 2000)
Table of Signatures and Ratifications of Key International Agreements, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at ttp://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan008803.pdf
UN Gender Policy, last accessed 9 December 2003, available online at ,
Varloo, Mieke. Another Velvet Revolution? Gender Mainstreaming and the politics of implementation. IWM Working Paper No.5/2001, (Vienna: IWM, 2001)
Overview of the country information from USAID can be helpful before proceeding further: Despite a period of limited development progress following the political and social turbulence of the 1990s, Georgia continues to be plagued by a centralized, executive-dominated authority, rampant corruption, and unresolved territorial conflicts, which obstruct attempts to improve the country’s overall development. A weak government unable or unwilling to implement laws and regulations throughout the country inhibits the ability of the state to govern and undermines serious political reform efforts. The arbitrary application of taxes and a large shadow economy hamper economic development by depriving the government of much-needed tax revenue. Overview, available online at
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/europe_eurasia/countries/ge/, last accessed 9 December 2003
About USAID, available online at , last accessed 9 December 2003
For more information about the topic see Fourth World Conference on Women, available online at , last accessed 9 December 2003.
UN Gender Policy, available online at , last accessed 9 December 2003
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
According to the Assessment, they were Ann Graham, Ph.D., Team Leader, and Susanne Jalbert, Ph.D.
According to the Assessment, more than 150 persons were overall interviewed.
The titles were introduced according to the USAID’s programs’ topics in Georgia. For more information see Program Summary, available online at , last accessed 9 December 2003
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/ cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
I recall when some 3-4 years ago, after graduating from the University, my brother passed the exams and became tax inspector in one tax office in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Being completely pure hearted and well aware of people’s too negative attitude towards the inspector’s job, he aimed to improve the situation, by showing to public his faithfulness and purity. Unfortunately, being alone among numerous colleagues, whose sole intention to serve in the tax department was to make “dirty money”, he felt continuous pressure and hostility. He resisted for few months but finally was compelled to leave his position and change the job field.
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
Fortunately, this last tends to improve in the last few years, though most probably more in the central than in the rural areas.
It is especially noteworthy that Georgia has ratified almost all International Covenants and Declarations, protecting women from different discrimination occurring against them in societal and political levels. Though this protection still remains only on the sheet of paper. For further knowledge see for example the Table of Signatures and Ratifications of Key International Agreements, available online at ttp://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan008803.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
See, for example, Judith Squires, Gender in Political Theory (Liubliana: Polity Press, 2000)
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/ our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
Tier 2 countries do not yet fully comply with minimum standards, but are “making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with the standards”. I thoroughly agree with the questioned NGOs when they doubt that Georgia makes “significant efforts” to correspond to (any) international standards.
Report from Anti-Project Trafficking in Georgia, 2003. Quoted in Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
I was fortunate to spend 2 months in Europe in the last year. I visited several states and was surprised to run into so many Georgian refugees while travelling from one place to another, and these were unintentional meetings with them. I wonder how many people could I trace if I had been interested to do so. My experiences were recently published as an article in a Georgian newspaper “MOTHERLAND” in US, named “European Odyssey of Georgian Refugees”. Moreover, my aunt is herself a victim of trafficking, if we consider notion of trafficking broader enough to encompass all in need who went abroad to serve as a cheap labor and are still satisfied, being able to send money to their families back in Georgia. From my aunt’s mails I’ve learnt about a huge Georgian community in that small city in Greece, where she has been living since last spring. So what about other places around the globe? Search for a job took Georgian poor/middle class people everywhere, as near as Turkey and as far as New Zealand and Australia.
Gender Assessment and Plan of Action for USAID/Romania, February 2002, available online at , last accessed 9 December 2003
Gender Assessment for USAID/Guyana, May 2003, available online at , last accessed 9 December 2003
Gender Assessment for USAID/Morocco, May 2003, full report available online at http://www.dec.org/pdf_docs/PNACU055.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003
Gender Assessment for USAID/Caucasus, June 2003, available online at http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/pubs/ga_caucasus_fullreport.pdf, last accessed 9 December 2003