Country Context
In 2005, only 21 percent of the population in rural areas was covered by medical insurance. Lack of coverage leads many to avoid the health care system, which makes monitoring and control of diseases and ongoing health needs a challenge.
There are 200 million migrant workers—60 percent of which are female—who have limited access to care and tend to be less educated on general and reproductive health matters.
Unmet Health Needs of Female Factory Workers in China
- Hepatitis B
- Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID)
- Breast cancer and cancer of the cervix
- Family planning and reproductive health education
- Lack of awareness of HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention
- Poor nutrition
Perspective
Pei Bin, Senior Program Officer, China, The Asia Foundation
At the BSR Annual Conference in October 2007, Pei Bin shared her concerns about women’s health in China.
Context: Large Migrant Worker Populations Present Unique Health Challenges
China has a huge migrant population (200 million, 30 million in Guangdong alone), and more than 60 percent of these are women workers. A few have high school education, but most have only junior middle school education.
The migrant population typically lacks full awareness of HIV/AIDS and general health. Being migrant workers, they are not eligible for local health provisions.
There are reports that pressure from work and home has contributed to suicides and attempted suicides amongst migrant women workers. Another threat to them is chemical hazards.
Addressing Women’s Health in the Chinese Context
Programs to develop migrant women’s health education can help to address these challenges. My organization, The Asia Foundation, has begun such programs.
When we first started in 1999, we began by improving working conditions which affect health – such as ventilation, reproductive health and hygiene, and we supported the pilot factories to establish occupational health and safety mechanism inside factories.
Moving forward from that, we began HIV/AIDS peer health education, which is an incredible tool for workers empowerment. Peer worker educators are trained to inform the other workers as a lasting contribution and to create an information dissemination system that empowers workers.
Peer education programs provide an excellent entry point for broader education programs on more controversial issues, such as labor rights education, providing a lot of opportunities to grow and expand programs.
Empowering Workers Rather than NGOs
A specific context for China is the weakness and small size of the NGO sector; you cannot rely on these to achieve scale and impact. Giving the power to the workers to educate themselves and create networks between factories makes them feel like they are making the changes themselves.
Also, through partnering with local labor unions, we are able to access factories with terrible conditions which would never open up to NGOs normally. Partnership with multi-stakeholders such as local women’s federations, labor unions, grassroots NGOs, local universities, local factories and workers has enabled us to reach more than 850,000 migrant workers in more than 1000 factories in the Pearl River Delta and over 50 factories in the Lower Yangtze River Valley.