Safety Walk

After the 2010 election in Myanmar, the country has opened up to the outside world. Even though Myanmar is developing a lot these years and moving towards democracy there is still some negative sides to the story.

This Tuesday we were invited to do a safety-walk in the rural areas of Yangon together with

Action Aid’s women rights team. A safety walk is a walk in a specific area with the purpose of mapping the safe and unsafe streets for women. We went to Hlaing Tha Yar Township which is one out of seven areas where Action Aid conduct these safety-walks. In this area there is a lot of big factories employing mostly women migrant workers who come to Yangon in the hope of a better life. But the reality for these women are tougher than one would believe.

One of the biggest problems for the women in the area is transportation from the factory to home. When they get off from work it is usually dark outside and because of the lack of streetlights it is unsafe for them to walk on the streets. Besides fast moving traffic, no sidewalk and holes in the road, the possibility of harassment or in worst cases rape is very high and part of everyday life. A new factory law in Myanmar have implemented that the minimum wage should be 3600 kyat, the same as 3 $ a day. This means that instead giving all the workers more money, the factories have fired a lot of workers and thereby the remaining workers got a much bigger workload. This means that the women have to work around two hours of overtime every day, getting home even later in the evening and therefore facing bigger risks.

The factory law also states that the factories have to provide transportation for the women, but the truck only picks up the women going home from work once a day. Meaning that the women working overtime don’t have the possibility to go with a truck and have to walk or take a bus and again facing an even bigger risk than they already do.

If the women are one of the lucky who gets a seat in truck, it is very crowded and trucks usually drive insane. But that’s not all. There has been cases where the last woman have been raped by the truck driver.

When they get home to their bungalows or hostels they still don’t feel safe. The bungalows are easy accessible and intruders are not fare away. So where are the women safe?

This is the story of the negative side of democracy and opening a country up to the outside world, to big international companies who do not take the necessary responsibility of their workers.

The safety-walk made a big impression on all of us and made us think about how the companies take advantage of the marginalized and vulnerable women who don’t have any other possibilities. Therefore it is important to take action and help the women in this extreme tough and unfair situation, as Action Aid does with the Safety-Walks as a part of their new Safe City Campaign.