(Yemen Observer)- - With between a half and two-thirds of the world's working women and men outside the formal economy, breaking out of it is the single biggest challenge for labor market governance worldwide. However, reducing the number of people working in the informal economy requires a comprehensive approach in tune with the unique characteristics of each country.

This is particularly important in Yemen, as cultural barriers have created additional challenges for women who try to work in order to break out of poverty. A successful businesswoman in Yemen, Amina al-Amrani, is in her 50s and an owner of a flourishing trade in fruit and vegetables. She has a chain of market stalls spread across Sana?a employing 25 people.

With her remarkable business sense, Amina has earned the respect of all traders in the souqs, who call her ?Malika al-Bourtukal??Queen of the Oranges. Amina is now working towards expanding her business and exporting fruit and vegetables to other countries in the region. Until recently, this illiterate woman from the northern Yemeni highlands had no written documentation regarding her business. However, now that her daughters have grown they are able to help her with the accounts? thus enabling her business to better mitigate the vulnerabilities associated with employment in the informal economy.

Amina has come a long way. Shortly after she was married, her husband left his village in order to work in Saudi Arabia. Lacking a secure income for her children and herself, Amina?s only choice was to work and defy customs in a tribal society that considers it shameful to be a workingwoman. ?Until today, my family had refused to talk to me and never accepted the fact that I was working,? she said. ?In my early days, I used to travel to the main souq in Sana?a to buy jewelry which I sold in my village.?

Following a series of small income-generating activities including the selling of clothes, Amina learnt the tricks of trade in a vital and vibrant sector in Yemen almost exclusively run by men. She borrowed money from owners of small businesses and gradually started to expand. According to Maha Abdullah, Director-General of the Directorate General of Working Women (DGWW) in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, Amina is quite an exception, and not only because of the size of her business. Over 90 percent of enterprises in Yemen are micro-enterprises employing one to four people.

While small enterprises with five to nine workers provide another 4 percent, businesses like Amina?s with 10 to 40 employees represent only 2.4 per cent of total employment. ?According to recent estimates, the size of the informal economy ranges from between 60 and 80 percent. As in other developing countries, the informal economy in Yemen is a refuge for the unemployed and laid-off women and men in the labor force. More than 60 percent of women in Yemen do unpaid work, mostly in agriculture, and opportunities for women are limited due to a lack of skills, restricted labor mobility, discrimination at the workplace and social and cultural barriers,? she added.

Women are concentrated in sectors that traditionally associated with their gender roles, such as clerical work, customer service, teaching, nursing and domestic work, while men dominate the better-paid sector jobs in business and finance. Credit markets tend to exclude women who are less likely than men to own land and other resources serving as collateral. What?s more, women face cultural restrictions, which reduce their chances to find employment.

Few women are allowed to travel alone whether abroad or within Yemen, especially for training purposes. Some families require that the father must accompany his daughters, or a husband must join his wife. For many private sector companies, these are considerable additional costs they do not want to bear. ?The challenge of women?s employment in Yemen has been taken up by ?Strengthening the National Machinery for Advancing Women?s Employment?, an International Labor Organization (ILO) project funded by the Dutch Government, which aims to promote women?s employment in Yemen by building the capacity of the Directorate General of Working Women (DGWW) in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor,? Abdullah explained.

?Despite improvements over the past few years, with the participation of women in the Yemeni labor force reaching 21.8 percent, they still represent 37.5 percent of workers in the informal economy but only 9.2 percent in the formal public sector.? Under the project, the first phase of a training program on decent work and gender equality led by the Yemeni trade unions, has recently trained 100 trainers (and developed training materials through a participatory process involving the social partners. In its second phase, the training program will reach 40,000 female and male workers from around the country.

?Women have dreams and ambitions, but numerous problems still exist in Yemen and other parts of the Arab world. Despite the double challenge they face, breaking out of informality and overcoming traditional gender roles, a number of women have managed to succeed,? said Simel Esim, ILO gender specialist in the Regional Office for the Arab States in Beirut.

?We need to build on these positive role models by promoting women workers? rights and changing negative perceptions on working women in the region. Reducing informality and promoting female employment requires a comprehensive approach across several policy dimensions.?