I MET Abbi* (not her real name) during my summer internship this June. It was Bulan Kebajikan at Member of Parliament for Kelana Jaya Wong Chen’s office, and I was conducting social welfare interviews among Subang Jaya’s urban poor to evaluate who qualified for financial assistance.

After Abbi’s husband decided to leave her and her four children, the role of breadwinner suddenly fell on her shoulders. Given her lack of education and work experience – prior to being a single mom, she had stayed at home to take care of her young children – the only jobs she could find were informal cleaning jobs that didn’t pay a steady income.

Abbi had to pay for the household’s food, water, electricity, and transportation for her four kids to go to school – her low wages didn’t allow for any savings. Her daughter, Kamina, would have to sometimes skip school to stay at home and take care of Abbi’s 3 year-old when the neighbour wasn’t free to babysit.

Abbi had diabetes and her feet would swell up from working long hours, but she couldn’t afford medicine on her monthly income.

This was when I observed first-hand how gender issues and poverty overlap. Abbi’s case is not one that is isolated; there are women like her all over Malaysia (and the world), not just in Subang Jaya.

I noticed that the most vulnerable candidates were women – women who had multiple children to feed, women who were abandoned by their spouses, widows who were solely dependent on their late husbands and young girls who weren’t able to go to school because they had to stay at home and take care of their parents.

Furthermore, the men usually made more from being truck drivers or security guards, whereas the women would make much less doing cleaning or housekeeping jobs, thus increasing their vulnerability. Of course, this is not to disregard the experience of urban poor men, but the fact is that they generally make more than their female counterparts and were thus less susceptible to vulnerable conditions.

What we see here is the intersectionality of inequality – power imbalances exist not only within the realm of class, but also gender and ethnicity.

Even in developed states, young women from low-income families get pregnant at a higher rate than those from higher-income families, which then makes it very difficult for them to escape the cycle of poverty

Perhaps what is most concerning about poverty is that it is multidimensional; it does not only deprive one of material necessities, such as income, but also correlates and often causes a lack of education, health, and political rights, amongst other things.

It robs people of opportunity, which is what makes it systemic – a person with a stable family income going to school can focus and do well on his/her studies, but a person like Kamina, who can’t afford to go to school every day, will miss important sections of the curriculum, leaving the chances of her succeeding in school much slimmer.

Essentially, poverty blocks access to many of the institutions and rights that enable people to escape poverty, which is why change has to start with education.

To combat multidimensional poverty, we need to incorporate a multidimensional strategy as well, and sex education is a vital component of that strategy if we want to provide equal opportunities to both men and women.

Recent recommendations to incorporate a sex education programme by the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry reflect a pressing need to educate our young people due to the increasing cases of child sexual abuse. But beyond this, we should also see sex education as a lever to reduce chronic poverty among the vulnerable groups.

Sex education shouldn’t only focus on the biology of sex and prevention (“this is your vagina, this is your penis, and this is how married couples have sex”), but it should also teach adolescents the full range of reproductive health rights that they are entitled to, as well as provide information about access to contraception, healthy intimate relationships, childbirth, and sexually transmitted infections.

It is important that young people understand the full breadth of healthcare options that are available to them, that they may be empowered to make proper decisions that could affect their whole lives.

A more comprehensive sex education would teach both girls and boys from a young age the importance of staying in school to gain financial independence, and to steer clear of falling into social ‘traps’ such as unwanted or underaged pregnancies and marriages, abuse, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) or financial dependency.

More importantly, it would teach children how to respect their bodies and others, to help them understand their sexual growth so as to prevent risky sexual behaviour, and would help prevent occurrences of gender-based and/or intimate-partner violence such as domestic abuse or sexual harassment.

A comprehensive review on the effects of sex education programmes that focused on gender, power, and intimate relationships found that those programmes enjoyed significantly higher success rates of decreasing pregnancies, gender violence and STIs compared to sex education programmes that didn’t.

There is also substantial proof of the positive effects of comprehensive sex education programmes on reducing pregnancy rates, increasing age of first-time-sex, decline in STIs, and unprotected sex – all of which are significant contributors to perpetuating poverty.

Sex education therefore needs to be seen as a form of social protection, particularly for the youth trapped in poverty. For them, empowerment and education can help put an end to the poverty cycle and lead them towards a better life. – November 26, 2017.

* Having just recently completed her B.A. (Social Science) degree from Monash University Malaysia, Leann is now interning at the Penang Institute in Kuala Lumpur. When she isn’t busy at work, she’s either playing futsal or dismantling the patriarchal class system. While she realizes her time at PI is fleeting, she hopes she will be able to leave a meaningful mark with her work.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.