10:14 AM May 29, 1996
CONFERENCE ON HUMAN SETTLEMENTS, OR HABITAT II.
"The main reason for homelessness among women and their dependent children is poverty," N'Dow said. "Women are doubly disadvantaged by their need to earn a living while providing care for family members and running households." Speaking before the Jun. 3-14 Habitat II summit in Istanbul, N'Dow added that some 600 million people live in inadequate shelters that threaten their health, and 50,000 people -- mostly women and children -- die each day from poor shelter, polluted water, or poor sanitation. In India, one of the few countries that has tried to count all its homeless, an estimated 2.3 million people live without a home. Homeless advocates in the United States say that as many as three million people in this country may in fact be homeless, while homelessness in Western Europe is estimated to affect between 2.5 and five million people. Some 70 million women and children live in homes where their health is endangered simply from smoke from cooking fires, N'Dow noted. He said that some 45 to 50 percent of households in many African and Latin American countries are headed by women, compared to a third of all households that are run by women worldwide. Nevertheless, women continue to have few property rights in most countries. Although women are more than 50 percent of the population, they own only one percent of the world's wealth, one U.N. study argues. About 75 percent of all women cannot get formal bank loans, either because of laws that classify them as ineligible to make legal transactions or because they lack permanent employment or deeds to property. "One of Habitat II's main goals will be to search for ways to improve the living conditions of the hundreds of millions of poor women and their dependent children in the world," N'Dow said. Part of that effort will be to encourage practises in several nations that have helped to improve women's access to credit and to housing. In Cuba, for example, laws have given women the same rights as men over property, contract signing and grantees of tenure. Ukraine has also adopted legislation that makes no difference between women and men over land and property ownership. Other countries have made ambitious efforts to place a priority on women in credit schemes. Namibia is encouraging women to form savings and credit groups, and is also designing gender-sensitive housing programmes. The Colombian government has created a special credit scheme for housing improvement loans which focuses on women-headed households.