Gender and Economics in Mediterranean: Looking for New Opportunities for North African Women

Since the 1950s and the 1960s, the MENA region has made important progress toward the improvement of women’s rights. The rates of maternal mortality and fertility have decreased dramatically, meeting the objectives set by the UN Millennium Goals with regard to improving maternal health and reducing child mortality.1 Women’s education, access to the labor market and political and social participation have improved as well. Although these positive trends slowed down at the end of the1980s, socio-economic indicators concerning women’s empowerment have continued to improve, and the rate of female schooling has been rising very fast. In the 2000s, the MENA region succeeded in bringing the ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary education up to 0.96, and in significantly increasing the ratio of young women attending university. Nonetheless, women still constitute the least educated segment of the population in several of the region’s countries. According to the World Bank collection of development indicators, in Morocco, for instance, 35% of women above 15 years of age are still illiterate, with the majority of them concentrated in the country’s rural areas.