Venezuela’s ongoing humanitarian crisis coupled with the pandemic have exacerbated female poverty in the country.
“Women are essential to our society. Simply put, it wouldn’t exist without them. We know that women have major tasks in life: carrying, giving birth to and raising children”. As Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro sees it, these are the primary responsibilities of Venezuelan women. He has even gone so far as to order them to “have six children” for “the good of the country”. But being a woman in the Caribbean nation comes at a very high cost that has only increased since 2015 due to Venezuela’s complex humanitarian emergency and the Covid-19 crisis.
In 2014, a year after the country entered into economic recession, some Venezuelan women who had previously been inactive in the labour market were forced to take on precarious jobs to put bread on the table. According to the National Survey of Living Conditions (ENCOVI) compiled by Venezuelan researchers at the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), overall poverty in Venezuela, which stood at around 50 per cent that year, had climbed to just over 94 per cent by 2021.
When the Covid lockdown began in 2020, 7.6 per cent of women in Venezuela (1.6 million) were unable to find work or had to leave the labour force to look after their children and support them through distance learning. Similar dynamics unfolded across South America.
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