Gender and Overcoming Extreme Poverty
Drawing above by François Jomini © François Jomini, ATD Fourth World.
This article was published in connection with International Women’s Day 2024. It offers a brief, non-exhaustive history of gender1and poverty within ATD Fourth World.
By the Gender and Poverty group of ATD Fourth World
ATD Fourth World and gender: the beginning
In the early 1960s the relationship between gender and poverty was publicly debated within ATD Fourth World by its founder Joseph Wresinski, early Volunteer Corps members, and allies.
In doing this, Wresinski made the connection between gender and poverty for the first time. This understanding of women of the Fourth World would go on to guide ATD Fourth World in its work.
To Wresinski, the work of Volunteer Corps members was to support women in their desire to “live with dignity”. During a training session in 1962, Wresinski urged Volunteer Corps members to consider the experiences of women living in poverty in the emergency housing camp in Noisy-le-Grand, France, where ATD Fourth World was founded. The training went on to highlight the knowledge that these unique experiences afforded.
Making the women of the Fourth World visible
In 1962, a few months before the training session, Mary Rabagliati joined ATD Fourth World as a Volunteer Corps member. During her time as a Volunteer Corps member she would go on to participate in three United Nations conferences on the status of women: one in Mexico City in 1975, another in Copenhagen in 1980, and finally one Nairobi in 1985.
Rabagliati played an essential role in denouncing the exclusion of women in extreme poverty in international agencies, and in the UN in particular. Thanks to her work with families in poverty and advocacy, Rabagliati also contributed to a better understanding of gender and poverty, as well as to its dissemination on an international scale. One UN summit passed a resolution proposed by ATD Fourth World to ensure that all development projects take into consideration the needs of women in deep poverty.
The first World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 coincided with International Women’s Year. Rabaglati was a part of ATD Fourth World’s delegation, along with Joseph Wresinski and Alwine de Vos van Steenwijk. To prepare, members of ATD Fourth World participated in meetings organized by the UN, beginning in 1974. The document “The Unrecognised Women of the Fourth World” was produced from these meetings. Initially written as a draft study of women in the Fourth World, it was ultimately presented at the Mexico City conference. During the event, de Vos van Steenwijk and Wresinski also presented the Charter of the Fourth World Women, which had been developed during several meetings between ATD Fourth World activists.
An intercontinental approach
The examples above help to conceptualize ATD Fourth World’s first approaches to gender and poverty. This work has since been expanded on in ATD Fourth World teams globally. Among a large number of initiatives, here are some more recent projects and publications:
• The Tanzanian participants of The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty research project (2016 — 2019) emphasized the need to create peer groups to support the emergence of women’s voices. Following this research, a women’s committee was formed in Africa in 2023.
• ATD Fourth World’s “Gender and Extreme Poverty” summary report was submitted to the UN in June 2011. This report suggests a link between feminism and overcoming poverty.
• ATD Fourth World published two special editions of its journal Revue Quart Monde, one in 2012, on the theme “women and men” (n°235), and another in 2021, on the theme “Domination and gender” (n°257).
• Using the Merging of Knowledge inclusive methodology, ATD Fourth World Bolivia led a project exploring violence against women in poverty. This work was then followed by a webinar in November 2023.
A new step: the gender and poverty group
During the 2021 Strategic Ambitions Conference of ATD Fourth World France, several participants and members of ATD Fourth World shared their knowledge on the relationships between gender and poverty, Several themes emerged, including: the invisibility of women in poverty in French feminism; the lack of understanding within ATD Fourth World of concepts and methods developed by feminist movements; the experiences of those who suffer discrimination linked to poverty, sexual orientation and gender; sexual and gender-based violence.
Following the conference, ATD Fourth World members met to continue this work and share further concerns related to gender and poverty. They formed a “Gender and Poverty” group in 2021.During the group’s first meeting in January 2022, discussions focused on families and people in poverty experiencing violence and gender-based discrimination. A few months later, two further meetings took place to propose the first thematic group of writing, exploring several themes in greater depth.
The summary document of these contributions sheds new light on how the gender-poverty approach plays a central role in projects seeking to eradicate extreme poverty. It brings together numerous valuable contributions from people with lived experience of poverty to better understand the links between gender and poverty. From these contributions, several priority areas emerged:
- The different roles women and men living in poverty play within their families, and how this is affected by gender;
- Domestic violence;
- Institutional mistreatment;
- The effects of sexual and gender-based aggression on people in poverty;
- Sexual harassment or violence at work;
- The difficulties in speaking out about violence;
- The link between poverty and prostitution.
The summary document also emphasizes the importance of an open approach for an in-depth understanding of the links between gender and poverty. It also highlights a multitude of forms of gender oppression which worsen for people in extreme poverty.
Finally, it emphasizes the urgency of an intersectional approach to eradicate extreme poverty.
An international understanding of the links between gender and poverty
For more than a year now, the Gender and Poverty group has been meeting regularly and gradually becoming more international. It has recently begun a new stage of knowledge gathering, exploring ways of understanding and working on the links between gender and poverty in different national and continental contexts. This understanding will help in ATD Fourth World’s advocacy work at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations.