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The News in Brief

Wednesday, May 20
ENPARD communications team plans to support the Strong Women in Villages project

The ENPARD communication group plans to support the OXFAM project “Strong Women in Villages”.

According to ENPARD, (European Neighborhood Program for Agriculture and Rural Development)Georgia holds the 81st place in terms of gender inequality in the region; this is the last position on the list. The research was conducted by Forbes magazine in February of 2015.

The same research ranks Azerbaijan at 54th, Ukraine at 57th and Armenia at 59th. Yet more proof of the belittled role of women in the Georgian society is the UN survey that was conducted last year. It shows that some 88% of the population assigns a role of breadwinner/leader in the family to men and only a mere 1% assigns this role to women.

These figures, however, have been affected by stereotyped reasoning and in reality, women are breadwinners in 34% of households, women and men equally share this role in 12% of households, and men are breadwinners in 52% of households, according to official statistics of Georgia.

Against this backdrop, ENPARD places special emphasis on empowering women and using their potential in rural areas where discrimination against women is more obvious than in urban areas. According to the Georgian National Statistics Office, only 30% of farms in rural areas are run by women and the majority of these women are over 60 years old. This means that in most cases they assumed the function of farm managers because their husbands passed away.

Reducing the role of women in the management of agriculture is viewed as something logical by some experts, as according to official statistics, farms managed by men bring 25 % higher revenues than those run by women. This is not the correct argument. The same official statistics show that such farms occupy 80% of the entire agricultural land area, in other words, farms led by women are four times smaller than those led by men and accordingly, the income of the former is lower than that of latter.

In reality, women lead agribusiness more effectively and this is supported by yet another piece of official data which shows on average that the income per employee in farms run by women is higher by 1.5 GEL that that in farms run by men.

Despite the high gender inequality and discriminative approach in this society, women manage to lead in agriculture more effectively than men. Using this potential to a greater extent will clearly result in the increase in all agribusiness production. This, however, will not happen by itself and requires efforts, first and foremost, from those who have already gained independence and have authority in rural places.

ENPARD communications team intends to support Oxfam’s project “Empowered Rural Women” in that it will publish contact information of leader women revealed within the framework of this project on the ENPARD website and Facebook page. This will become an Internet association of agri-active women enabling all rural women who wish to join farmers’ clubs and become agri-activists themselves, to assume the role of leader, to develop agricultural production and thus make their contribution to the advancement of the country. (IPN)



Tariff for Water will not be Increased in Tbilisi

The Georgian National Energy and Water Regulatory Commission (GNERC) has refused the Georgian Water & Power company regarding the change in the water tariff.

The Commission has made the decision to at today’s sitting. The decision will be in force through December 31 of 2016. After this period the company has the right to request a review of the tariff again.

According GNERC Chairperson Irona Milorava, the tariff will remain almost unchanged. (Frontnews)



Tbilisi-Rustavi highway workers go on strike

Georgian workers employed on construction works of Rustavi-Tbilisi highway are still on strike. They demand the raise of salary from Chinese company “Sinhidro” and say that their current salary is too low.

The workers also are protesting against those conditions of work. The company is going to make decision about the increase of salary these days.

The members of Rustavi city assembly from United National Movement have met the workers and discussed the problems of people employed on the construction of the highway.

The construction process in stopped at the moment. The workers do not exclude that the building of road will stop at all in the case of refusal from the company. (Rustavi2)