When Anhar Rashad’s soldier husband was killed two years into Yemen’s war, she quickly realised she needed to get a job so she and her then three-year-old son could survive.
But like most women in Yemen, a country that after nearly eight years of war is one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, the now 39-year-old had never planned to work outside the home.
With two years of business management studies but no work experience, Rashad’s 2017 job search wasn’t easy. Eventually she was hired as a tax collector in the southern city of Aden for the internationally recognised government, which alongside an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has been fighting Houthi rebels since 2015.
The job pays 30,000 Yemeni rials (about $27) a month. Even combined with her husband’s monthly death benefit of 50,000 rials ($45), Rashad struggles to make ends meet.
Over the past few years, inflation has risen dramatically and food costs more, especially in the south of the country where Rashad lives. She has cut back to bare essentials, sometimes relying on neighbours for food and money. When she found herself choosing between buying food and paying rent, she moved back to her parents’ home.
“The last couple of years have been the worst, because of the continuous increase in the prices of food and medicine,” she said late last year. “At the end of the day, if we go to sleep with a full stomach, I say to myself: ‘Good, we survived another day.’”
As the war drags on — a six-month ceasefire expired last October — the economic collapse that has become a key element in Yemen’s crisis has touched almost everyone. But as low levels of international aid funding force cuts in programmes like food rations, analysts and experts say they are particularly concerned about a growing and often overlooked demographic that includes Rashad and her son: women-led households.
Women account for 49 percent of 13.4 million people in “acute need” in Yemen. While it’s unclear just how many of the 21.6 million people the UN says need aid this year are part of homes headed by women, the number is on the rise, according to reports and aid workers. Over time, husbands and fathers have been killed or detained, and families have been forced apart for economic reasons or because of geographic splits imposed by the warring parties. An uptick in gender-based violence may also be prompting women to take their children and run.
Nezar Aboodi, spokesperson for the Aden-based Yemeni NGO Field Medical Foundation, said that while he doesn’t have hard numbers he has noticed more and more households that have women as the sole income-earner. Some women resort to dangerous coping mechanisms, he told The New Humanitarian: “Price rises are forcing these women to reduce their meals to one a day, and many have resorted to begging.”
Families headed by women are particularly vulnerable to hardships that result from the ongoing conflict, shortages in aid funding, and economic shocks, said Abdulwasea Mohammed, policy and advocacy manager at Oxfam Yemen. “The armed conflict in Yemen has exacerbated discrimination and inequalities,” he said by email. “Women are, in general, struggling from unequal access to services and resources, and decision-making is often made by men in their communities.”
As of 2021, the latest year for which data is available, Yemen’s “labour force participation rate” was 6 percent for women and 67.6 percent for men. Social and cultural norms tend to keep women out of the workforce. When Rashad and other women want — or are forced — to get a job, they have almost no chance of earning a decent income, Mohammed said.
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