In its oficial report on Millenium Goals, venezuelan government has said that Venezuela have accomplished six of eight goals before 2008, as one can read in the report “Venezuela fulfills Millenium Goals” (avaliable in Spanish in the Ministry of Communication website). Between those six, gender equality is assumed as completely fulfilled, as the quoted report says in its 39th page: "four of the five supreme powers are ruled by women", and "feminine representation in the National Assembly reached a 16,5%, when before it was barely of 10%". Also, the report intends that "women presence is even more noticeable, as they occupy 60% of participation in the Community Councils and Missions". This goal appears in the MDG Monitor as "on track".
However, what that report doesn't say is that still, 35,5% of venezuelan families classified as poor, and 41,9% of extremely poor homes, are under the direction of a woman alone, and that 31,9% of occupied women, are in domestic services, wich is a highly unstable and unprotected kind of work.
Governmental programs as those quoted by the report, such as "Madres del Barrio" (which, loosely translated, would mean something like mothers of the slums), emblematic program of the venezuelan government against poverty, are designed to adress directly women in extreme poverty, "with an important burden of dispair and isolation" (as said in its official website), who fulfill the following requisites:
- Being a housewive.
- Having people who depends economically on them.
- That the family group lacks incomes or that those incomes are below the cost of the basic food basket.
In that terms, this programme may potentially reach 13% of venezuelan population. If it's true that this programme develops one of the fundamental guidelines of Venezuelan 1999's Constitution, wich is the recognition of housework as productive work, it is also true that for this reason, it doesn't lose its condition of governmental aid in cases of extreme need.
What is good about it: it has reached a significant group of poor women, head of families, and it is now in the stage of "socioproductive inclusion", through the assignation of projects and microcredits to some beneficiary groups
What is wrong about it: The so-called "recognition of housework" has been camouflaged in a "social aid" with characteristics and appearance of grant. What is even worst, in some strata, the creation of this Mission has been seen as a demagogic royalty, as if it's been created to give a grant to the leisure of feminine population.
One of the reasons why this has happened, is that in gender equality, programmes of "positive action" can't be separated of the integration of a gender vision in the whole public policies of a Nation. We are aware of the existance of the constitucional guideline that says that housework is productive work, but its non-existent impact in the everyday routine of women makes harder to take it seriously.
On the other hand, it is necessary to recognize the application of certain policies, as the creation of the Bank for Women's Development, oriented to microcredits and similar actions of financial content. However, it is impossible to left aside that the application of such policies, remain into the frame of "positive action",  splitting the problem of the feminization of poverty, and women discrimination, from the structural integral situation of the Venezuelan population.