United Nations Radio

Women in Asia make up the majority of low-skilled and temporary workers.

Woman in Cambodia

Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, is concerned about their fate in light of the on-going global financial crisis. She told UN Radio's Gerry Adams how social protection could help them:

Heyzer: Asia has a development model that is in a sense made in Asia, consumed in America. It is very much export-oriented, driven by the manufacturing sector. And you find Asia very much linked in, in terms of a production chain across many countries. What this means is that the manufacturing sector, the service sector is extremely well-integrated with the global markets. And now that the financial crisis has converted itself into an economic crisis and increasingly to what I call a human tragedy, the first channel of transmission of this crisis happens to be trade and therefore job losses in the manufacturing sector, including the informal sector.
And if you look at a profile of women's work in the Asia-Pacific, most of the women are located in the manufacturing sector, in the service sector, the tourism sector. And all these sectors have been very badly hit. So Asia is going to loose something like twenty-three million jobs. And so most of these unfortunately would be women.

Adams: You mentioned that there was a cost for not investing in social protection. What is the cost of not investing in it?

Heyzer: When Asia was hit by the 1997 crisis, there unfortunately was no investment in social protection. And despite the fact that Asia-Pacific is seen as the continent with economic powerhouses - you have China, India, Japan - it is a region of great disparities with growing areas of inequalities. And in fact, 600 million of the population in Asia-Pacific remains poor and hungry. And social protection, if you look at pension systems for the elderly, only 30 percent of our elders are covered by a pension. And 20 percent of the Asian population is covered with healthcare assistance. This is the region with the highest level of out-of-pocket expenditure for health care.
And what this means is that there is income insecurity. And there is also high savings because people begin to save in order to make sure that there is some amount of security. And this is also extremely difficult for them when the income levels, especially in the informal sector, in the low-scale sectors of the job, still remain extremely low. So one of the things I've been asking for is to ensure that this recovery in fact would build up the social foundation for more sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
What I mean is the fact that it is not just a way of addressing the issue of vulnerability, but it is actually smart economics. It is smart because it means that you are investing in people who will be able to spend almost immediately because there is some form of social protection and therefore they are able to then increase domestic demand and re-stimulate the market. Precisely because we can't trade ourselves out of this crisis depending on the external markets, there is a lot of emphasis now in building up domestic markets as well as intra-regional markets.

Adams: Did you say sometimes people may have to sell their children to get money?

Heyzer: Well, because unfortunately, because of the coping strategies, if there are no systems of social protection, unfortunately, the coping strategies are very painful. People cut down on food because food prices still remain high. And unfortunately, even though the prices have fallen, it hasn't fallen enough compared to the loss of jobs as well as the falling income. So you have a situation where food security is still a problem. You have currently the pandemic (which) is spreading. The health care systems are extremely expensive and therefore people pull their children out of school as well as the increase in people smuggling and trafficking as a way of coping. This is something we should be very aware of. In fact in many countries in Asia, there is also the rise in criminality of petty thefts and the target happens to be women. So I am very concerned.
And therefore it time this time 'round to really look at how do we build the economies of the future and also societies of the future that are more resilient so that it is able to deal with crises as well as risks and the kind of vulnerabilities that we are seeing today.

Narrator: Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Secretary of ESCAP speaking to Gerry Adams of UN Radio.

(duration; 3'18")