Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2002)
ISSN: 1530-5686
QUESTIONS OF AGENCY: DEVELOPMENT, DONORS, AND WOMEN OF THE SOUTH
|
Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2002) ISSN: 1530-5686 QUESTIONS OF AGENCY: DEVELOPMENT, DONORS, AND WOMEN OF THE SOUTH |
|
Nkiru Nzegwu
Asked what development means to her, a peasant woman in rural Kenya had this to say:
During the anticolonial campaigns we were told that development would mean better living conditions. Several years have gone by, and all we see are people coming from the capital to write about us. For me, the hoe and the water pot which served my grandmother still remain my source of livelihood. When I work on the land and fetch water from the river, I know I can eat. But this development which you talk about has yet to be seen in this village.
Reported by Achola O. Pala 1981, 214.
The term “partnership” has frequently been used by international donor agencies to describe relations with southern women and southern NGOs. 1 In “The Challenge of Partnership,” Beth Woroniuk, Patricia Keays, and Jancie Brown observed that the word “partnership” was inappropriately used by international aid agencies and NGOs to describe relations with recipient organizations that are anything but partnerships. 2 They pointed out that “[m]any organizations use the term ‘partners’ interchangeably with ‘groups we fund,’” without seriously examining the underlying power structure governing the relationship. In a similar but related context, Honor Ford-Smith, a Jamaican activist, explained that the use of “[t]his egalitarian label does not change the reality” on the ground. 3 She described how the development goals of southern women’s groups were sometimes thwarted by the kind of demands donor agencies make on groups whose proposals conflict with their notion of what economically poor women should be doing (1998). On numerous occasions, the Jamaican drama troupe known as Sistren Collective was pressured into taking on standard income-generating projects because donors who operated with Women-in-Development (WID) and Women-and-Development (WAD) frameworks could not grasp the idea of the power of consciousness raising and the income-generating potential of theatrical work. Evidently, as these interventions increased, they subsequently set the Collective on the path to implosion.
Examples abound about donors’ overbearing attitude. In one East African case in the 1990s, a donor set as a condition for release of funds the commitment of a portion of the project money to seeking out lesbians in the community. In this case, little heed was paid to the fact that this was not part of the proposal requirement or the award. It also ignored that a funding relationship demands a modicum of honesty and respect. Gloria Scott, an advisor to the World Bank, contends that such imperious attitudes cause development projects to become part of the problem, rather than part of a solution. 4 In addition, many projects were not thought through. She provides an example of such behavior when, in a government housing scheme in Peru in the 1970s, women were deemed irrelevant in the design process. Consequently, the assembled experts lacked critical information about families’ space utilization, average family size in the neighborhood, physical orientation of buildings, and families’ practice of supplementing their income by renting out rooms to other families who needed affordable shelter. Had this information been available at the planning stage, larger homes could have been designed, thus solving two economic problems at once. But because they dismissed the value of local input, they left intact a principle of home design that did not meet the peculiar needs of families in that locale.
In this essay, I undertake a systematic examination of the issue of agency in development aid process. Because partnership is touted as the basis of development relationship, I examine the meaning of this concept in the development aid industry and the sort of ties it prescribes. The focus is on what it means for donors and recipients to be partners in development. If organizations use ‘partners’ interchangeably with ‘groups we fund,’ what kind of demands are they making? What is the underlying nature of power governing this relationship and what does it say about the agency of women in the South?
The term “partner” defines a relationship in which two or more groups of people, who may occupy different sociocultural classes, have chosen to work collaboratively, in a communal effort, to attain a common goal. Central to this idea and relationship is the presumption of equality. Even though their tasks and responsibilities may differ, partners choose to come together for either short- or long-term objectives. Being partners, they cooperatively work toward that common goal. Participants in such ventures or alliances must have mutual respect for each other. Although they may not agree on everything, they must value what each other has to offer. Without reciprocity in the relationship, without considering and factoring into one’s reference scheme the other’s opinion, there can be no partnership. The solidarity between disparate groups in any coalition grows as they respond imaginatively to change in purposive ways. Once each is acknowledged as an agent, it is assumed that partners will respect each other and relinquish ideas of control, even when a partner has the economic power to do so. Thus, in a definite sense, partnership mandates that we impose limits on ourselves. We demonstrate this acceptance of the limits of our power by accepting that the other group can, and has the right to, define their social ideals and propose solutions to their existential problems.
The history of NGOs in the South shows that donors do not readily accept that economically disadvantaged peoples and groups can be equals. They are not seen as having agency. They are treated as if they lack intelligence, and their opinions are often ignored. The conflicts the Sistren Collective experienced with donors were sharply drawn along power lines in which recipients’ self-worth and knowledge were disparaged, even as they were referred to as partners. As Ford-Smith argued, donors’ patronizing attitudes were a contributory factor in the disintegration of groups and the failure of projects. The donors created stress for members through their incessant and sometimes unreasonable demands. Not only do such conflicting demands militate against the establishment of a true partnership, but they also create obstacles that hinder the success of projects.
The MATCH partnership model differs substantially from the prevailing top/down, technocratic, macroeconomic model preferred by multilateral agencies. In the early 1970s to mid 1980s, according to Suzanne Hurlich, a former project officer for OXFAM Canada (1988), many project designs did not consider women’s family and community needs. 5 Even though in most communities women managed the communities’ water resources, “women’s role in relation to water supply has low priority [in] most development projects as well as in studies about water supply.” She states that “before 1972, the main emphasis in water programmes by...agencies, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund...was on the technical problems of water supply.” The views of women were never solicited (Hurlich 88). One result of the approach was that donor agencies never paid attention to the human beings on the other end of the technical problem. It never even occurred to project designers that women were the primary users and managers of community water resources, and that they should be trained (Ibid., 88). As Achola Pala succinctly put it, rural women would be “asking for better health facilities and lower infant-mortality rates and they would be presented with questionnaires on family planning” (1986, 211). In case after case, the prevailing agenda was the donors’, which might range from conservative ideological positions to the latest liberal fad. Donors dictated to southern women what their problems were and what the solutions ought to be. In fact, the classic problem of the development aid philosophy, which we find today at the heart of the United States development aid policy, is the crude attempt to disguise authoritarianism as charity and to treat recipients as inept minors.
In the mid-1970s, when the idea of MATCH International Centre, Canada, was conceptualized, founders Suzanne Johnson and Norma Walmsley articulated a partnership vision of development that was truly revolutionary. Extensive discussions with southern women at the 1975 women’s conference at Mexico City had convinced these two Canadian women that empowerment was not simply the provision of facilities or technological tools. Still flush from victory of independence, southern women confidently stated their development goals. For them, empowerment was the complete process of taking charge and engaging in pragmatic decision-making, situational evaluation, policy planning, and access to resources. Their clear articulation of the limitations of authoritarianism as a development philosophy forced Johnson and Walmsley to see the error of adopting imperious attitudes in the task of social transformation. They were fully convinced, as Walmsley put it, that women can “mobilize the resources of women themselves, their decision-making power, their intellectual and mental resources, financial and physical resourcesÂ…and be involved in the development.” 6
Walmsley and Johnson came away from the conference with the conviction that, to be effective, development must involve recipients and be respectful of them. The idea that the capabilities of southern women should be valued and incorporated into thinking about development and defining what it is was a radical concept at the time. In accepting it, they diverged sharply from the normative ideal of the times in which the agency of southern women was routinely erased. For Johnson and Walmsley, if partnership in development was to be truly practiced, they would have to work collaboratively as equal partners with southern women to achieve their development goals. For this reason, their model recognized the agency of women in the South and treated them as equal participants in the development process. This positive valuation of the skills of southern women underlies MATCH’s specification that proposals submitted for funding must be designed by local women, must benefit a group of women, must have a growth forecast, and should utilize local resources. While the emphasis on use of local resources was designed to ensure the integration of the project into the community, the entire process of project conceptualization guaranteed the critical involvement of women on the ground. The women are free to call upon the services of local experts, but the idea must be theirs.
Such a pragmatic notion of partnership had major theoretical significance, as Hurlich demonstrated to participants in a workshop on human settlements. 7 According to her, when “authentic development” involves partnership, people are empowered, since they have control over their information and resources, and are able to shape their histories in vital ways. Recipients are aware of their present condition and would participate with the aim of socially resolving their problems. Her example of an Oxfam water project in Inhambane province north of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, graphically illustrates their point. In the attempt to provide pipe-borne water to a community, planners ignored the community and neglected to consider what the social spin-offs of projects would be. In a post-construction evaluation review, women of one of the communities were asked about what they thought about the water supply schemes and irrigation project. They evaluated them in terms of what they would do with the extra time gained if they did not have to trek so far to fetch water for family consumption. Some desired to attend adult literary programs, and some planned to organize a small sewing cooperative. A better community project could have been designed by creating a multi-level scheme that would address these meta-level needs, had women’s input been sought.
Hurlich’s point is well taken. A development vision that factors in the goals and aspirations of people facilitates their empowerment through enabling them to shape their community. She also makes the related point that, to be successful, development must be a process of deliberation between planners and recipients. Otherwise, projects may fail because donors lack the relevant local information to make judicious decisions.
Nonetheless, Hurlich’s conception of recipients is still a passive one in that locals are not directly involved in the design of the project. Unlike the Oxfam model she discussed, MATCH’s model is based on local women participating at the first-order level of needs articulation and solution formulation, continuing right through to the second order level of implementation. They must be agents, not passive recipients. This dynamic vision of partnership would have eliminated the problems encountered in the Oxfam’s model, because it would have anticipated some of Hurlich’s issues at the onset. Even today, a significant difference between MATCH’s partnership model and the prevailing one in the field is that proponents of the latter model seem unable to think imaginatively outside conventional parameters of what constitutes development projects, methodologies, and strategies. Officials of northern aid agencies sometimes have a difficult time accepting that southern women’s groups can articulate the right prescriptions to their ailments, or that they can be agents of change. There is a deep-seated reluctance to accept the idea that the South has its own systems of life that are coherent, logical, and endowed with adaptive creative resources, and that some locals can astutely analyze the logic of these systems of life.
Reviewing MATCH files, one is struck by how, in listening to the needs of southern women as articulated by them in their project proposals, the organization devised exemplary strategies to help projects officers desist from imposing solutions that may conform more to northern sociological expectations than southern needs. Although program officials were required to ask clarification questions to ensure that all the facets of a project were well thought out, they appreciated that there might be specific sociocultural factors they did not quite understand. For the purposes of this argument, what this established was how an organization interacts with recipients and truly lives its claims about partnership. Rosemary Brown, former executive director of MATCH, recognized this qualitative point when she insisted that development partnership must be one that accorded women a measure of autonomy. Seeing everyone as mature social agents was crucial to treating them as equals and recognizing their various skills. Both donors and recipients would then see that the benefits of development are not unidirectional, flowing only from North to South. Underscoring the centrality of this principle of reflexivity and mutual benefit to the concept of partnership, Brown did what few northern women had done. She admitted that northern aid agencies and northern women’s movements have learned a lot and benefited from the social experiences of southern women. 8 Speaking directly to Canadian women in 1987, Brown drew attention to the case of “the midwifery struggle in the province of British Columbia” in which the legitimacy of the struggle came from the experience and encouragement of southern immigrant women in Canada. These women, Brown contended, were “from cultures where childbirth is perceived as a state of health rather than an illness, and where people trained in assisting birth treat this as a normal part of women’s lives, rather than as a health issue to be dealt with by doctors who are trained to prevent death.” 9 She went on to state that refugee, immigrant, and southern women:
who have participated in racial struggles and other liberation struggles have a lot to teach us [Canadians] about strategies and tactics, and courage and perseverance. Many...who are members of a culture which encouraged and permitted them economic independence brought with them a sense of self-esteem and confidence, which inspired us, encouraged us and filled us with hope. They confronted our timidity and our fears, and taught us that the revolution would be stronger if we dealt with our own liberation first. 10
In MATCH’s ideological framework, the principle of reflexivity between donors and recipients is accommodated. Recipients can learn from donors, but donors also can learn from recipients. It is not often that women in the North accept that there is anything of value to learn from the experiences and social values of the societies in the South. But in taking seriously the concept of partnership and in valuing the principle of mutual respect and reciprocity, MATCH’s model of development sought to remedy prejudices by instilling in its members the idea that learning and giving is a two-way street, and that the commodity of exchange is not always monetary. Strategies and tactics, and courage and perseverance, are important commodities, even though they may not have monetary value; and no nation has a monopoly on that. To this end, MATCH sponsored trips for some of its southern partners to meet with, and share life experiences with, Canadian women. The Canadian women, during workshops, are prodded into learning valuable life skills from the experiences of southern women. This practice underscores MATCH’s philosophy that true partnership implies seeing the other as an equal, learning from the other, and acknowledging that fact. The point of emphasis here is that no one has a monopoly on all the answers of life.
In the field of development studies, explanatory models typically embody hierarchical relations between the North and South. Formulated with a northern perspective, these conventional models systematically undervalued the dynamic capacities, life experiences, and contributions of southern women, even as these were appropriated without credit. Malsiri Dias of the Center for Women’s Research (CENWOR) in Sri Lanka made this charge as she recounted the endless trips of northern scholars and development planners to Southeast Asia, seeking data and interpretations for their hypotheses. These consultants and scholars appropriated ideas and theories without giving credit to the originators of the ideas and perspective. According to Dias, there was a reluctance to acknowledge the range of models that had been developed in the South as effective solutions to an array of life problems. It was to put an end to years of such intellectual exploitation that CENWOR was established (Interview 1995).
As one recognizes this systemic erasure of southern women’s intellectual and practical efforts in development, it is crucial to recover and integrate the history and activities of women in the South into this analysis. This recovery, as we shall soon see, radically complicates the standard unilinear reading of the history of women in development.
The prevailing wisdom in the current literature in international development is that women first became a development issue in the early 1970s. Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970), the book of the Danish economist Ester Boserup, is taken to mark the inception of the movement of women in development. 11 In text after text, Boserup has been credited for directing attention of the development community to the centrality of female labor in African farming systems. The claim was that prior to this, African women had been considered only tangentially in development theories. Recognition was given only when reference was made to southern women’s reproductive and domestic capabilities.
There is no question that Boserup’s work remains an important contribution in explaining the misfit between the development wisdom of the period and local labor, in redirecting the focus of planners, and in contributing to the initiation of the women-in-development approach. However, using Boserup as a starting point for any concern about women deflects attention from the history of development initiatives of southern women. Without intending to do so, those who use Boserup as a starting point condescendingly suggest that before Boserup’s identification of the negative impact of the processes of development on women in southern countries, no one (not even southern women) had recognized the problem, nor had anything been said or done about it. 12
Although ignorance of southern reality exists in the North, and may have been the case for development experts, the situation was radically different for southern women who lived these realities. Unlike their counterparts in the North who were removed from the immediate arena of the policies and implementation of modernization schemes, women in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Central and South America lived the politics of economic development and the rhetoric of cultural improvement. They bore the brunt of deeply entrenched sexist and imperialist biases underpinning the economic growth assumptions of modernization and industrialization. Historians and anthropologists have chronicled the protests against erasure of Ghanaian, Nigerian, and South African women in the first half of the twentieth century. 13 Familiarity with these local and regional resistances reveal that they emerged after extended analyses of the iniquities of development programs first instituted under colonial rule, and continued later under the post-independent nation states. Read correctly, these protests highlight African women’s recognition of the structural flaws of modernization policies and programs long before Boserup came on the scene.
If we define economic development as the improving of economic opportunities and working conditions, and if we begin with the basic premise that southern women are agents and social actors, we cannot credit Boserup for having raised the first questions about women and development. Prior to Boserup’s book, women in diverse regions of the South were living these issues. They were complaining about the negative aspects of development policies and were organizing against the policies of their governments and donor agencies that made life intolerable. Under parliamentary rule and process, before military dictators assumed power, they offered solutions through their political parties. It is unlikely that Dominga de Velasquez of La Paz, Bolivia, had heard of Boserup or the theories of northern women scholars, when she boldly interrogated government officials on behalf of the women of the Amas de Casa. She queried:
And we the housewives, ask ourselves: what have we done to incur this foreign debt? Is it possible that our children have eaten too much? Is it possible that our children have studied in the best colleges? Or do they wear the best clothes? Have we improved our standard of living? Have our wages become so great? Together we say: No, no, we have not eaten too much. No, we have not dressed any better. We do not have better medical assistance. Then to whom have the benefits gone? Why are we the ones who have to pay this debt? (Cited in Jeanne Vickers 1991, 9).
What comes through in Velasquez’s public interrogation of the government’s national economic policies is the sort of deliberative spirit and deliberative rationality that underlies women’s activism in the South. This spirit points to their agency and the linkage of their demands to a social vision. If southern women’s challenges and interrogations do not produce the desired result, or if their voices are not reflected in theorization, it is not because the demands were frivolous, non-revolutionary, or unexpressed. On the contrary, criticism and demands were made but they were not recorded. In fact, the very revolutionary nature of some of their demands attracted severe reprisals from brutal regimes that were propped up by the United States (Philippines, Chile, Peru, San Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Indonesia), by Britain (Rhodesia, South Africa), by France (Zaire, Central Africa Republic), and by Portugal (Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau).
Writing about Nepal’s subsistence economy in 1995, twenty years after the first women’s conference in Mexico City, Prativa Subedi, president of Women’s Awareness Center Nepal (WACN), conveys an impression that this reality was as powerful in the 1970s as it is today. Regarding her own part of the world, she asserts that “it is the women who work the hardest for the survival of their families, though their access to productive resources such as land, financial assets, education, health, training, leadership, and decision-making are hindered or restricted.” 14 In the Himalayan region, seventy percent of all agricultural work is done by women with hardly any mechanized tools. Thus, to assume that Nepali women were not aware of this disparity in workload of the sexes, whatever explanation they may have given it, or that they did not desire a much easier life for themselves, is to patronize and rob them of intellectual faculty. In short, it is to deny them their humanity.
Given people’s awareness of their specific location (particularly their phenomenological experiences of life’s hardships and of discrimination), one can legitimately surmise that Nepali women must, at least, have been aware that they were losing out on the benefits and advantages of development. It is useful to recall the comments of Pala’s old Kenyan woman: “But this development which you talk about has yet to be seen in this village.” It is true that personal experiences alone would not give anyone a comprehensive understanding of how to deal with structural conditions. However, we cannot conclude from this that lack of a sense of the magnitude of the problem and lack of an appropriate methodology imply lack of awareness of one’s existential condition. Though southern women did not theorize in writing, we must recognize the oral and action-oriented modes in which they normally theorized. If we ignored the oral modes of theorizing, we would be unable to account for women’s critical spirit in diverse regions of the South. We run the risk of erroneously dismissing their resistant activities at both local and family levels as unreasoned actions. This would be akin to suppressing the sermons, workshops, and teach-ins on the illegality of segregation, and then representing the Civil Rights Movement marches and sit-ins as unreasoned actions, as if only books or written scholarship could interpret history.
In most southern economies of the early 1960s where development is presented as westernization, and westernization as the process for achieving a higher quality of life, many women desired modernization and progress as the panacea for better life. Sidelined by the in-built gender bias of the development culture, they had to deal with the fact that after independence and under modernization, men were unfairly privileged in the distribution of resources. Southern women at the first Women’s Conference in Mexico articulated many of the grievances of the sort expressed by Velasquez. It was their shrewd analyses of their social and political problems that convinced Walmsley and Johnson that the development planners had it all wrong.
It is incontestable that the 1970s model of modernization was socially divisive in entrenching patriarchal relations, pitting women against men, and exacerbating the economic disparity between the sexes. One can legitimately assume, at the very least, that Nepali women, like many others in the South, were all too aware of the discrimination underlying the conditions of their lives. Because these women workers understood their existential needs, they were usually aware of the ways they had been shortchanged by development planners, and knew that development, like some of their local religious and cultural traditions, had been instituted by local and national governments in ways that hindered women’s access to resources. Their familiarity with the very real ways development reinforced hierarchical structures and class inequalities meant that they did not need a Danish economist (Boserup) to inform them; they had lived the reality.
The problem with most of the prevailing account of the history of women in development, particularly the history of development in the South, is that it is written from a northern non-partnership perspective by feminist or non-feminist scholars and activists who assume a hierarchial relationship to women in the South. Because such a relationship is the product of minimal interaction with southern women peers, it breeds superiority and condescension. The accounts that flow from it do not reflect the realities of southern women, who are therein characterized as uniformly poor, uniformly passive, uniformly rural, and uniformly illiterate. They are also portrayed as victims of retrograde traditions, hopelessly exploited and oppressed. 15 The unfortunate effect of this characterization is that the self-reliant ideology and work ethics of southern women are either ignored or devalued. This leads to an erroneous depiction of them as lacking knowledge and initiative, and in dire need of guidance from articulate, intelligent planners from the North. Yet, as Valente Vargas noted in the case of Peru, tradition is not always backward or oppressive; it also offers women “a sense of creative community,” as occurs in neighborhoods that offer rich experiences of socialist struggle in solidarity with brothers, fathers, and husbands. 16 Various scholars have noted as well that the activism of southern women, including the emancipatory type, is neither a recent nor a western phenomenon. 17
By contrast, working with a true partnership model means valuing the orally analyzed actions and events of southern women. It also means appreciating their self-reliant ideology and recognizing that they too had proposed solutions to some of their development problems. A true partnership model revises the history of international development. It calls for a sorely needed balanced account that compels researchers, theorists, and writers to integrate the histories, realities, and roles of southern women into their accounts of development. Clearly, the utilization of a partnership model demonstrates a critical awareness of the economic discrimination, the in-built effects of the development process, and the way development has been used to reinforce internal colonizing and class division. In fact, the value of the model is that it takes the lived experiences and realities of southern women as the starting point of discussions and programming development so that meaningful, workable strategies may be developed. Activists are aware that development initiatives fail where the proposed solutions do not fit the cultural expectations of life, and of women’s place within it (Rogers 1980). This is because development is conceptualized in ways that do not reflect the historical experiences and social values of people.
Once we accept that southern women are sociopolitical agents, we have to face the fact that they have their own ideas about womanhood and community. In fact, a close review of development speeches and writings by women activists in the South reveals an operative conception of woman that differs markedly from that of northern feminists, theorists, and development planners. 18 Despite claims to the contrary, northern women more narrowly limit their understanding of women to biological or sex differences, 19 and conceive of development issues in terms of women’s liberation and personal needs. 20 For southern women activists, in contrast, the word “woman” evokes a range of community issues, of which the central feature is the mother, situated in the nexus of the family. Mothers’ concern for the well being of children, husbands, sisters, mothers, fathers, and brothers, as well as for the economic prosperity of their villages, defines a relational framework within which southern women are to be understood. They chose this framework because of regional histories of wars, repression, and political insecurity, as well as local economic histories of labor exploitation in which their lands were either expropriated or their men were forced to eke out a living as miners. To its credit, MATCH tried to capture this relational definition of woman as mother in its model, acknowledging that southern women did not define development as “just for women and women’s objectives” (1987). They did not see themselves as separated from their families and society. As Suzanne Johnson puts it, “[they] were notÂ…classic feminists. They were women who were concerned with the well-being of their children, their husbands and the economics of their villages. They saw themselves as being part of a totally integrated world” (1987).
Obbo’s study of African women reveals that, regardless of the desired path to empowerment, these women also want power, wealth, and status (1980, 5). For them, development means the availability of resources and advantages such as those enjoyed by influential individuals with the status and wealth to secure them. It means the development of one’s capacities and the learning of skills to solve problems and provide for basic needs. Also, it implies access to education, credit facilities, good working conditions, affordable living conditions, health care, and child care that the male-centered technocratic vision of development ignored by focusing on such impersonal matters as growth rates, GNP, and other statistical indices and variables.
An example of this southern, all-purpose model of development is evident in the kind of issues for which southern women’s organizations fight. The Federation of Women’s Associations of Honduras (FAFH) is an umbrella organization that in 1982 represented about twenty thousand women and forty-eight member associations located throughout Honduras. Because the Association noted the relationship between legal rights and home ownership, it sought to strengthen women’s legal rights. Utilizing a relational framework, it construed development as having a home and legal title to that home, and having the peace of mind to enjoy it, irrespective of one’s marital status. 21 In accordance with this belief, FAFH emphasized that low-income mothers and single women have a right to homes and a decent quality of life. An FAFH lawyer group in El Progreso worked with twenty-five women in the city’s slum settlement of El Castano to help them obtain titles to their plots of land. Operating on the premise that development involves improved living conditions for women and is a prerequisite for socioeconomic improvement, the lawyers actively educated low-income, single mothers, who were among the most vulnerable in their society, about their rights. This empowerment program, which assists women to obtain legal title to lands where they were formerly squatters, is the kind of progressive view of development that southern women uphold.
In a pertinent way, the action-oriented struggles of southern women against social and economic biases, and gender-loaded statistical indices and projects, are articulate responses to the discriminatory biases of conventional modernization models that exclusively promote the economic integration of the South into the global economy. These action-oriented strategies are a mode of theorizing in contexts of practices that see development as impossible without meaningful community participation. More importantly, the community’s comments are drawn upon to interrogate the basis of the integration of the local economy into the global one. Generally, action-oriented challenges proceed after a critical evaluation of the situation, 22 followed by the framing of cogent responses to development biases. Thus, it is important that the local or national activism of women in the South be understood as incisive critiques of both conventional models of development and of the techno-economic vision of life, misleadingly represented as humanistic.
Needless to say, northern aid authorities who rely on the research analyses of scholars, who in turn employ Euro-/North-American-centered categories and concepts, miss the point of local resistance and end up approving projects that are inappropriate for southern reality and for women in the South. Beneria and Sen (1981) have argued that such concepts have been articulated on the basis of historical and contemporary studies of women in the North. Examples of such concepts are the concepts of labor, productivity, and household, which embody a monetarist, cash-based ideology, a public/private dichotomy assuming that a woman’s place is in the home, and which imagines that work is not what women do. Southern reality is mis-analyzed when socially loaded etic concepts are put to work. For example, following the studies of Mueller (1982) and Alauddin (1980), Mayra Buvinic argues in an essay on women’s issues in Third World poverty that it is “the need for more income that makes it necessary for poor women to work in the marketplace, and there is no surplus income with which to purchase child care or other household services” (1983, 20). Buvinic’s assumption that poor women work only out of economic necessity is proof that she has missed the self-reliance ethics of southern cultures, where working is perceived as a normal part of both women’s and men’s lives.
The problem in Buvinic’s position is its reliance on northern middle class values and monetary factors to explain family aspirations in different cultural realities. Consequently, the solution she envisages excludes other kinds of child-care arrangements that occur in the South, but not in the North, and which do not necessarily depend on cash exchange (for example, the use of at-home neighbors as child minders), and which may positively reinforce family relationships (grandparents as child minders). In addition, her theoretical position assumes that there is a clear-cut dichotomy between public work (trading in the market or working in a company) and private work (home-related tasks such as child-rearing). Apart from the fact that it is normal in cultures where the private/public dichotomy does not exist, women traders may take their babies to market. In the 1980s, some major companies, banks, and firms in Nigeria took their cue from this and created crèches within the office building for nursing mothers. Because Buvinic’s conceptual tools tacitly privilege the corporate culture of the northern workplace, she could not advocate child-care facilities in the workplace. Thus, regardless of her genuine intentions to speak for women of the South, her cultural framework problematized both the southern reality and the presence of infants in the workplace.
By undervaluing the South’s child-centered culture, Buvinic missed the opportunity to critique the northern workspace and donor agencies for failing to consider other alternatives. She failed to rise to Brown’s epistemic vantage point and grasp the lesson being taught by southern child-care arrangements and the underlying valuation of children and women. She was unable to see that giving priority to children undermines the anti-family corporate culture and compels the corporate culture to work towards becoming child friendly. That she did not see this option meant that she could not come to the aid of working northern women caught in the child-care crunch. The upshot is not that the underlying cultural assumptions of the interpretive scheme of northern scholars and development planners prevail, but rather that, in hastening to problematize the South, they fail to see the important lesson of being a child-centered society that it offers.
Fundamentally, the problem with proposing development solutions from the northern-centric model of reality and gender expectations is the substitution of the problematic technoeconomic yardstick that upheld men’s needs for the equally problematic northern feminist view of reality. This substitution is problematic not just because it erases the specific conditions of southern life and value-systems, but also because it upholds a unilinear evolutionary model that eliminates difference by transforming the South into the North. Living under militarization and in economically depressed, oppressive societies, most women in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America desire a workable model of development that realistically takes cognizance of the positive aspects of their cultural mores and norms, and that offers viable corrective solutions to the gender inequities of development programmes.
Ideally, southern women seek an equitable redistribution of resources amongst all segments of the population—women, children, and men—not just between men and women. Sidney Mintz critically reads the trading patterns and practices of West African and Afro-Caribbean women to highlight the historical existence of a measure of male and female autonomy in these societies (1981, 530). As other scholars have argued, the presence of such autonomy explains men’s acceptance of women’s independence in certain contexts without being threatened by it. 23 But all this is changing as economies stagnate in countries where such autonomies once existed, and there is a vicious scramble for scarce resources.
In view of the vast cultural differences in the South, generic models of development are unworkable, as there needs to be a closer level of attention to desires, aspirations, and demands of women in the developing world. Recognizing the existence of female autonomy forces planners to construct new development projects that reflect this information and goad nations into equitable partnerships between the sexes. For a large group of professional women (food producers, food distributors, traders, and workers, for example) in many regions of the South, their analyses of the economic problems of the 1960s and 1970s assure them that it is not their men per se but the leadership who are to blame for the immediate problems. Some of these problems are supra national, since they are already in-built into the way macro-economic measures, development projects, and modernization programmes have been conceptualized, introduced, and implemented in the South. Paying heed to this information also means knowing not to portray women in the Caribbean and Africa as so subordinated that gender equity is unattainable.
One of the most important features of a true partnership model is that it validates the struggles, strengths, and activist spirit of southern women in compelling ways that force a recovery of their activities into the human history of development. Contrary to the view projected in the dominant literature on international development, development is not something that moves from North to South. It is a process of bringing nations’ and people’s capacities to fuller flourishing. By the 1970s, southern women were aware that the process of industrialization severely impacts on women’s economic options, livelihood, and well-being, progressively pushing them into poverty. First, there was the stark realization that the cynical rhetoric of a “gender blind” development erased women as valuable players, while men were trained to fit into the economy. Secondly, some of the administering structures of development such as labor laws, land policies, banking regulations, and government policies that were left in place by colonialism (and that are still in place today), discriminated against women and contributed to their economic marginalization. Thirdly, there was a secondary awareness that the politics of development had cast many countries (and women) in the South as underdeveloped, traditional, and backward. (In seeking solutions to problems, we noticed how financial obstacles limited women’s options. They had to feed their families, yet were forced to accept impossible working conditions in exploitative industries. The psychological effect of their former colonized condition led many southern women to believe naively in the inherent superiority of European and North American models. As their economies faltered, they were therefore reluctant to seek alternatives from other nations in the South). Lastly, in many southern nations agricultural development schemes introduced a cash-crop economy that was reserved exclusively for men, but depended heavily on the labor of invisible women.
By the 1970s, as the economies of the developing nations shifted from subsistence to cash-crop agriculture, women lost traditionally valued jobs that had maintained social and gender balance in pre-industrialized, pre-cash economies. Following the institution of development programs and labor-free zones, the daily experiences of low-income factory workers and rural women in the increasingly militarized societies of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America taught them that the sexist biases of the programs and the dictatorial habits of the ruling military juntas were part of the reason for their disadvantaged status. Drawing on their view of “motherhood as a social role” and the notion of “women as social mothers,” women activists and politicians frequently raised the issue of women’s exclusion from national development in the emergent nation states. In Guinea, Jeanne Martin Cissé, minister in the first government of Guinea in 1957 and later ambassador of Guinea to Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela, indicated that under pressure from women members, the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), founded in 1947, “appointed women as village chiefs for the first time...[and]...[w]hen committee offices opened in neighbourhoods, villages or urban centres, one seat had to be held by a woman...[who]...was included in the decision-making process for the community.” 24 The import is that the idea of women and development, and the emergence of “women” as an interpretive category for development benefits, have far deeper roots in local histories of resistance than has otherwise been acknowledged.
In the liberation struggle of Mozambique, for instance, the Mozambique Liberation Front, Frelimo, formed a Women’s Detachment (Destacamento Feminino) of the army in 1966, with women voting to participate as equals in combat and defense. Justifying this decision in 1975, Samora Machel, the leader of Mozambique, stated, “If half of the exploited, oppressed people [in Mozambique] are women how can they be left at the margins of the struggle? ...How can we assure the new revolutionary generations of continuadores if the mother, the first educator, is left outside the revolutionary process?” 25 In Guinea Bissau, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) explicitly made equality between men and women an integral part of the political mobilization for the war of liberation (Urdang 1981, 120). 26 Indeed the active involvement of women in military affairs in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Guinea Bissau, and in the political arena in other African countries, paved the way for them to hold senior government and party positions. In these prominent roles, they served as role models and staunch advocates for women in the fields of education, agriculture, and business enterprise.
A true partnership model provides a corrective to the reluctance of the North to accept, and give credit to, the resilient spirit of women of the South. It cannot be overemphasized that when the conventional history of women and international development is written from a northern, non-partnership perspective, the vastly different existential conditions of life that women live in the South are generally distorted. This occurs precisely because the global conditions of women are presented from the perspective and conceptual framework of European and North American women. Rather than look to local interpretation, all salient points of life in the South are pathologized by the reports of foreign experts, who in most instances lack an adequate grasp of the prevailing cultural framework and the conditions of women’s life (unemployment, labor exploitation, poverty, hunger) in their specific localities. 27 The reason for this is partly that received ideas about modernization and the interrelationship between development and the structures of power are not interrogated; and partly that development work is a hierarchical arena. Any divergent interpretation and data from the South and by southern theorists are patronizingly eliminated, or reinterpreted along negative lines. As Charlton eventually acknowledges, “it is difficult for Westerners...to envisage something called development if it does not resemble both Western values and Western historical experiences” (1984, 22).
Looking for reflections of the North in the South means that the South will always fail to measure up to the North, because of its different system of life. This misguided expectation underpins the production of a body of literature in which African women are represented as ignorant, Asian women as passive, and Central and South American women as submissive. Invariably, only European and North American women are the ones endowed with the requisite attributes of leadership to articulate strategies for women in international development. Part of the problem, as past Women’s Conferences have shown, and as Parpart has acknowledged (1988), is that northern feminists do not quite grasp the pressing real-life basic concerns of poverty, unemployment, sex exploitation, and hunger. Consequently, the majority of women in the South are stereotyped as inept. The other part is that they are still unable to appreciate, as Sidney Mintz did, that any society in the South could have achieved a measure of equality that far outstrips what exists in the North (1981, 531). Delia Aguilar’s point on the need for a critical examination of the framework in which feminism is inscribed is relevant, given the divergent priority of the two groups of women (Aguilar 1989). The greatest preoccupations of women in the South in the 1970s were unemployment, education, dictatorial rule, unstable government, poverty, wars of liberation, lack of affordable health care, and violence against women, a consequence of the global economic order. Conversely, their counterparts in the North were embedded in the individualism of a neoclassical economic culture and were more concerned about of issues of individual rights, sexuality, and sexual choice. These choices are a consequence of the affluence of that accrues to them from a global economic structure that is exploitative of southern labor.
The reason for the divergence is thrown into relief, once we factor in the history of European imperialism, colonial rule, Cold War politics, propping up of brutal dictators, gross mismanagement of national resources by these henchmen of the West, and the activities of transnational corporations. The different sociological terrain that emerges enables us to see that the polarization of the world into regions—North and South, Western and traditional, modern and underdeveloped—forces women in the South to live a somewhat traumatic reality that is radically different from that of the North and to interpret that reality somewhat differently. It was this realization that guided the founders of MATCH, Walmsley and Johnson, to avoid the classic mistake of undervaluing the knowledge and experiences of women from the South. Johnson and Walmsley realized early on in their interaction with the women, that as part of their nationalist and modernization debates, southern women had confronted the question of the nature and type of development they envisioned for their countries, their role in the process, and their solutions to perceived limitations. Armed with this knowledge, Walmsley and Johnson sought to capture the agency of southern women in tailoring the role of MATCH to that of fund-solicitor for initiatives developed by women in the South.
Consequently, the adoption of a mutually respectful partnership model that accords equality to donors and recipients avoids the disempowering language of discourse that represents southern women as socially incapacitated. Not only does the model promote greater appreciation of southern women’s histories, and an understanding of what they did to achieve their objectives, but it also recognizes them as social actors. An appreciation of their action-oriented history fosters a relationship of collaboration and invites researcher and planners of northern donor agencies to search with them rather than for them, for transformative strategies and solutions.
In Africa, a continent that is considered to be inherently poor and backward, one finds that the anticolonial battles spearheaded by political parties provided a fertile forum for debates on empowerment. In countries such as Ghana and Nigeria, women received the vote long before women in many industrialized nations. Activists in the women’s wings of political parties such as the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in Ghana, the PDG in Guinea, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), and Frelimo in Mozambique constantly raised the question of women’s role in national and economic development. In pre-1957 Ghana, Susan Al-Hassan, a member of the Ghanaian parliament in 1960, Deputy Minister of Education in 1962, and Minister of Social Welfare and Community Development in 1965, states that “women joined men to form Party cells and branches and constantly attended rallies and demonstrations.” 28 With the attainment of independence, development was conceived of as education, and education was construed as a means of empowerment. Thus greater emphasis was placed on Ghanaian women’s education in a wide range of disciplines: teaching, medicine, law, midwifery, engineering, and business administration (1994 13). 29 This broad educational policy equipped Ghanaian women to participate in all sectors of the economy (12-13). Additionally, it enabled them to carry on their economic activities as food producers and food distributors “at levels of efficiency yet to be matched by State agencies” (10).
The value of these political activities for development analyses is that they reveal the diverse and unique ways women in different parts of the South made their relevance felt and insisted on their participation in the policy-making side of national development. Moreover, since the activities in these fora involve a process of reflection on the role of women in the new socio-political and economic order, they constitute proof of southern women’s awareness of the politics of development, the role of women in it, their efforts to negotiate women’s needs and concerns, and their commitment to transform women’s reality.
Regarding Africa, where women have systematically been stereotyped as being the most oppressed and ignorant, it is important to stress that the development initiatives undertaken by them did not occur just at the national level. Obbo’s study of low-income urban and rural women noted that economic autonomy was of utmost importance to Lagos female traders for whom this begins with separate savings (1980, 4). Questions about women’s place in economic development and national affairs were also taken up at the continental level by such organizations as Union des Femmes de l’Ouest Africaine (UFDOA), founded in 1959, and the continent-wide Pan-African Organization of Women, founded in 1962 (Cisse 1994, 29) 30 For many of the women activists in these organizations, “development” meant more than just economic programs. It meant empowerment through education, health care, child care, and the removal of cultural and social obstacles in the path of economic progress. Nationally, women activists in West Africa especially, sought to level the playing field for women in the financial, professional, political, and agricultural arenas. They demanded access to credit facilities, so women too could expand their trading and commercial businesses; they asked for machinery, so women too could process agricultural produce and open manufacturing industries; they expressed interest in income-generating schemes for women; they fought for and won pay equity in the government and secured three months maternity leave with pay; in Guinea, they challenged men’s sole right to collect family allowances. In short, they presented an image of African women and of development that was diametrically opposed to what the economists and planners of bilateral and multilateral agencies had constructed for Africa in particular and the South in general.
The case of Jamaica is, however, vastly different from the histories of women in Ghana and Guinea. This is another indication of the differences in the realities of women in the South. Beverly Anderson-Manley, a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Women and an advisor to the Jamaican government as Minister for Women’s Affairs, cautions against attributing feminist consciousness to female government officials simply because they are women. According to her, Jamaican women participated in the political process as members of either one of the two parties: the People’s National Party (PNP) or the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) (1991, 10). Since the late 1930s, when the modern political period began, Anderson-Manley notes that their loyalty to the parties have remained high, even though their interests have been shortchanged. Part of the problem, she argues, is the subordinate nature of women’s participation in the political parties that implies a commitment to a partisan political process that undermines the specific interests of women. The other part of the problem, Anderson-Manley contends, is the inflexible nature of the state system that is staffed by bureaucrats trained in the British Westminster system (11). In her view, because people are concerned with the maintenance of status and protocol, feminist consciousness is absent, and change has been slow, even though half of the bureaucrats at the top of the civil service are women. The slow pace of change is reflected in the fact that the Jamaican Bureau of Women’s Affairs, the national machinery for women, “was mandated by the United Nations to be added to the state apparatus” in the early 1970s; and it also wasn’t until the 1970s that women’s groups came together to lobby for “maternity leave with pay” (12). The upshot of Anderson-Manley’s account is that working for gender equality in existing male-defined structures is misdirected and even dangerous; and that we cannot assume that women in government would represent and champion women’s interests.
Still, even as Anderson-Manley highlights the passivity and subordinate status of Jamaican elite women within the dominant political parties and the bureaucratic structure in the 1970s, the Sistren Collective offers a widely divergent picture of lower class women, one that radically critiques the notion that change is achieved only through politics and economics. Founded in 1977 as a part-time amateur theatre group, the Sistren Collective provides a counterpoint in analyzing the role of women in Jamaican society and empowering women through participatory theatre. Sistren has used drama and the local tradition of storytelling, songs, and ritual imagery to struggle against colonial and gender-based oppression. Personal testimonies were utilized to create plays that explored the lives of working class and poor women, and drew attention to the problems they suffered as women. The plays discussed “the experiences of go-go dancers and prostitutes, of domestic workers, of rural children, of migrant men and women, of higglers (street vendors and informal commercial importers), housewives and secretaries.” 31 Since 1987, the Sistren Collective has administered a professional theatre group (a popular education project that uses drama as its main tool for radical change), a research project, a screen-printing project, and a quarterly magazine. Indeed, the contradictions and complexity of social life in Jamaica, in particular, and the South in general, ought to be a warning to researchers in development study not to overgeneralize, but to be more circumspect in their analysis.
The relevance of this warning becomes particularly evident in the Philippines, where events played out in a different register in the early 1960s. The emergence of Trinidad Herrera as the popular president of ZOTO-Ugnayan helped disprove the idea of southern women’s inactivity in organizing and transforming their fate in the face of overwhelming odds. Formed in the late 1960s, ZOTO-Ugnayan became a formidable political federation of 103 organizations, representing the interests of low-income urban dwellers against the forced evictions and relocation policy of the then governor of Metro Manila. In mid 1970s, Trinidad Herrera, as the president of ZOTO-Ugnayan, protested the government’s efforts to eject the residents of Tondo and to demolish their neighborhood. In the face of repression and torture by the Marcos government, ZOTO-Ugnayan insisted that people had no other place to go to be near their jobs. At a “People’s Conference” that was called to air grievances about the government’s demolition of people’s homes, seven thousand residents were arrested. Women, both young and old, were arrested and tortured. A frail woman in her forties told a human rights investigating mission of having to endure “nine straight hours of interrogation and forced ‘Russian roulette’ after her arrest.” 32 . The president, Trinidad Herrera, who led the fight for residents’ rights to affordable housing, was subjected to weeks of imprisonment without trial, electric shock torture, and sexual indignities (Ibid.).
In Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines, Walden Bello, David Kinley, and Elaine Elison provided a penetrating critique of the state of the Philippine economy and the sorts of World Bank-assisted development initiatives that led to the brutal repression of low-income residents of Metro Manila by the Marcos government. After the presidential elections of 1969, in which Ferdinand Marcos was re-elected as the president, violent political turbulence marred the economic climate. A huge trade deficit and mounting external debt compelled Marcos to turn to the World Bank and the IMF for assistance. In 1970, austerity measures were imposed by the two agencies, and the Philippines was forced to devalue its peso as a way of opening up the economy to foreign investments and imports. Sharp domestic inflation depressed the growth rate. With capital flight and rapid divestment by foreign investors, the stagnant Philippine economy could not absorb the half a million young men and women entering the labor force each year. Waves of families, displaced from the countryside by such modernization schemes as the Mindoro Integrated Area Development and the Pantabangan Dam projects, as well as the growing communist insurgency, streamed into Manila, further expanding the underclass. All these factors culminated in massive demonstrations, strikes, and marches in 1972. The creation of an expendable surplus pool of laborers or guest workers revealed the shortcomings of a modernization model that had touted import substitution as a path to sustained industrialization (16-21).
For low-income women like Trinidad Herrera in Tondo, in the Philippines, the impact of economic instability was exceptionally severe, owing to the patriarchal structures of the Filipino society. Disrupted by the physical, psychological, and social problems of displacement and poverty, life in the squatter communities of Metro Manila was particularly difficult for women. Living under the threat of evictions and government reprisals, women still had to find employment in a depressed economy where jobs were few and wages were low. With very limited resources, women often faced minimal pay, poor working conditions, and long working hours. Discriminatory gender practices in the workplace fell heavier on women, who were also subjected to sexual harassment and exploitation.
A 1981 event involving Peru-Mujer, a women’s NGO, best demonstrates the political savvy of Peruvian women regarding the global exploitation of women by some multinational companies. Following the advertising blitz that promoted infant formula products and stigmatized breastfeeding as unprogressive and backward, many developing countries witnessed a decline in breastfeeding. Peru-Mujer noticed a worrisome pattern in the accompanying increase in infant mortality and gastro-intestinal illnesses among babies. It instituted highly publicized campaigns and boycotts to raise public awareness and pressure the government and the industry to control the marketing and use of infant formula. The organization effectively lobbied the Peruvian government and the delegates of the World Health Organization to establish guidelines governing the marketing of breast-milk substitutes in southern nations. It successfully pressured the country to adopt a Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes after the World Health Organization urged its members to do so. The Peruvian Code, which has been described as a faithful replica of the one advocated by the World Health Organization, was drafted by representatives of the government, the women’s movement, and companies marketing infant formula. Not only was Peru-Mujer the only women’s NGO to help develop the Code, but also as part of its family-oriented activist work it established a subcommittee called the Comite Peruano Pro-Lactancia Materna, to promote the Code throughout Peru.
Women activists in the South have been at the forefront of struggles in their respective societies. For many years, they have been analyzing and warning against the marginalization of women who were the traditional backbone of labor in agriculture, trade, and commerce. Locally, their analyses were ignored in the frenetic dash toward modernization and development, while in the aid industry, development experts dismissed women as ignorant and inept.
Al-Hassan, Susan “The Role of Women in Politics in Ghana,” Feminist Perspectives (Ottawa: MATCH International Centre, 1994), 9-18.
Awe, Bolanle (ed.) Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective. (Lagos: Sankore/Bookcraft, 1992).
Bello Walden, David Kinley and Elaine Elinson, Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Studies, 1982).
Bhasin, Kamla and Nighat Said Khan. Some Questions on Feminism and its Relevance in South Asia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986).
Bryceson, Deborah Fahy. “Wishful Thinking: Theory and Practice of Western Donor Efforts to Raise Women’s Status in Rural Africa.” In Women Wielding the Hoe, ed. Deborah Fahy Bryceson (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), 201-222.
Buvinic, Mayra. “Projects for Women in the Third World: Explaining their Misbehavior,” World Development, vol. 14, 5 (1986): 653-664.
-------------. “Women’s Issues in Third World Poverty: A Policy Analysis.” In Women and Poverty in the Third World, ed. Mayra Buvinic, Margaret Lycette, and William Paul McGreeny (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983), 14-33.
Charlton, Sue Ellen. Women in Third World Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984).
Cisse, Jeanne Martin. “Contribution of Guinean Women to the National Independence Movement: Their Role After Independence and in Traditional Society.” In Feminist Perspectives, Vol. II. (Ottawa: MATCH International Centre, 1994), 19-33.
Ekejiuba, Felicia. “Down to Fundamentals: Women-centred Heathholds in Rural West Africa.” In Women Wielding the Hoe, ed. Deborah Fahy Bryceson (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), 47-61.
------------. “Contemporary Households and Major Socio-Economic Transitions in Eastern Nigeria. In Workshop on Conceptualizing the Household, eds. J. Guyer and P. Peters (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Feminist Perspectives, Vol. I Six Women from the South Discuss Gender in the Development Process (Ottawa: MATCH International Centre, September 1993).
Feminist Perspectives, Vol. II. Voices of Wisdom, (Ottawa: MATCH International Centre, 1994).
Ford-Smith, Honor. Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: A Case Study of Funding and Organizational Democracy in Sistren, 1977-1988 (Toronto: Women’s Program, International Council for Adult Education, 1989).
Gender and the State: The Jamaican Experience, “Alliances and Coalitions,” A Conference on Gender and Development, 21 September 1991.
Genderly Speaking, Eighth Ed., 20.
Hurlich, Susan. “Overview of Issues in Human Settlement Policy and Planning: The Quest for the Empowerment of Women.” Women in Human Settlements: Management for Change (Ottawa: MATCH International Centre, 1985), 81-101.
Jayawardena, Kumari Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986).
Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Women and Rural Development Policies: The Changing Agenda,” Development and Change, 21 (1990): 5-22.
MATCH News (December 1983), (Summer 1987), (1987), (Fall 1987), (1989,), (Fall 1997), .
Bryceson 1995, 4-8;
Mba, Nina Emma. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activities in Southern Nigeria, 1900-1965 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1982).
Mintz, Sydney M. “Economic Role and Cultural Tradition.” In The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge, Mass: Schenkman Publishers Co, 1981), 515-534.
Moser, Caroline. Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
-----------------.”Gender Planning in the Third World: Meeting Practical and Strategic Gender Needs.” In Changing Perceptions, eds. Tina Wallace and Canadian March (Oxford: Oxfam, 1991), 158-171.
Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Recovering Igbo Traditions: A Case for Indigenous Women’s Organization in Development.” In Women, Culture and Development, Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 444-465.
Obbo, Christine. “East African Women, Work, and the Articulation of Dominance.” In Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development, ed. Irene Tinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 210-222.
-------------. African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence (London: Zed Press, 1980).
O’Laughlin, Bridget.” Myth of the African Family in the World of Development.” In Women Wielding the Hoe: Lessons from Rural Africa for Feminist Theory and Development Practice, ed. Deborah Fahy Bryceson (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), 63-91.
Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Discourses on Gender (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Press, 1997).
Parpart, Jane L. “Who is the ‘Other’?: A Postmodern Feminist Critique of Women and Development Theory and Practice.” Development and Change, vol. 24 (1993): 438-464.
Skjonsberg, Else. “Documenting Women’s Views Through Participatory Research: Diaries of Daily Activities in Rural Zambia.” In Women Wielding the Hoe, ed. Deborah Fahy Bryceson, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), 225-236.
Steady, Filomina Chioma (ed.). “African Women at the End of the Decade.” African Report March-April (1985): 4-8.
--------------------------.”The Black Woman Cross-culturally: An Overview.” In The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge, Mass: Schenkman Publishers Co, 1981), 49-63.
Sudarkasa, Niara. “Female Employment and Family Organization in West Africa.” In The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge, Mass: Schenkman Publishers Co, 1981), 49-63.
Urdang, Stephanie. “The Role of Women in the Revolution in Guinea Bissau.” In The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge, Mass: Schenkman Publishers Co, 1981), 119-139.
Wieringa, Saskia. “Women’s Interests and Empowerment: Gender Planning Reconsidered.” Development and Change, 25 (1994), 829-848.
Woroniuk, Betty Patricia Keays, and Jancie Brown, “The Challenge of Partnership,” First Issue. Genderly Speaking.
Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Nzegwu, Nkiru (2002). QUESTIONS OF AGENCY: DEVELOPMENT, DONORS, AND WOMEN OF THE SOUTH. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 2, 1.