AMMAN — On Monday, a non-profit organization, SADAQA, held a workshop to launch a national framework for public transportation from a gender perspective.
اضافة اعلان
The workshop received support from UN Women, the Ministry of Transportation, the European Union, and SADAQA, a non-profit organization that was established in 2011 to promote a friendlier work environment for women in Jordan.
The framework aims to elevate public transportation strategies that take into consideration women’s needs by decreasing time and costs of transportation and increasing the security and quality of these services. The framework contextualizes access to public transportation as an important tool to elevate women’s political and economic participation. Safe and accessible public transportation may allow more women to travel to work.
The main pillars of the framework include adopting the International Labor’s Convention #190 on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, applying a gender perspective to major infrastructure and urban transport projects and intelligent transport systems, and increasing the number of women working in the sector, particularly in decision-making positions.
“Providing women with decent transportation helps to secure their economic income, and therefore, improve the entire country’s economy,” said Secretary General of the Ministry of Transportation Wesam Al-Tahtamouni.
“We also need to incorporate women in the process of making decisions, because they are the only part familiar with the shortcomings of this sector,” she added.
Studies conducted by SADAQA, in cooperation with the Ministry of Transportation, show that women’s economic status is directly linked to the availability or lack of public transport. Ineffective public transport systems obstruct women’s access to economic opportunities and jobs.
The vast majority (80.5 percent) of women surveyed in the study believe that public transport is an integral part of women’s economic participation.
Around half (47 percent) of women indicated that they had to turn job offers down because of the current state of public transportation services.
Respondents on average spent JD57 monthly on public transportation, which is a huge share of their monthly income.
“Public buses are always very crowded. Females are always asked to sit in each other’s laps, but men are never asked to do that!” said Mays Nakhleh, a medical student at JU. “We’re also in a pandemic, I’m not going to sit in another woman’s lap for one whole hour and risk getting COVID-19 for men to sit comfortably. I complained to the bus driver who told me to leave the bus if I’m that upset, and so I did.”
The EU and UN Women have signed a contract worth 7 million euro to be implemented in the next three years to develop the self-reliance of women in Jordan.
“Women of Jordan have proved that they have the capacity and the skill to be active members in the labor market. As the European Union, we encourage that very much,” said Corinne Andre, head of cooperation at the European Union.
“This framework is ambitious but it’s totally applicable. Perhaps one of the major obstacles that this framework faces is the financial constraints and insufficient budgets provided by the government to the Ministry of Transportation,” said engineer Sharehan Abu Hasweh, chief of transportation studies and research section at MOT.
According to SADAQA, public transportation is one of the major structural obstacles to women’s involvement in the labor market, in addition to the lack of nurseries and unequal wages.
“There are many small but helpful steps that can be done to improve women’s experience in public transportation, like adding lights on every bus stop, installing security cameras in public buses, and increasing the number of female police officers,” said Sahar Aloul, co-founder of SADAQA.
The initiative is advocating for Passenger Transport Activation Act 19, to activate the Transport Line Support and the Incentive Fund to integrate individual operators with companies and allow for buses to travel with greater frequencies on regular schedules.
Chief of the bus owners’ association, Abdelrazzak Khashman, said that there is a huge network of buses around the Kingdom, consisting of almost 5,000 buses. However, the buses, which are often overloaded, do not follow clear schedules.
Haneen Al-Gadman, who regularly uses public transportation in Amman, said: “Not only is public transportation in Jordan really time-consuming but also highly uncomfortable. As females, we get harassed all the time, and no one seems to really care. Frankly, I got used to it.”
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