Women and Development in Africa

Gordon and Gordon Chapter 10

Women in Africa

• Gender relations/inequality in Africa today reflect indigenous/pre-colonial, & European influences.

• In pre-colonial Africa women in many societies were influential political actors in informal ways.

• Power was exercised independently & informally as sisters, mothers, & wives within extended family system – this was closely associated with women's economic power.

• Polygyny added to labor force & helped ease burden on co-wives.

Women in Africa • With European intrusion, new economic &

educational opportunities made available primarily to men: • growing cash crops • engaging in wage labor • schooling

• Customary sources of female power were often ignored and/or undermined.

• Europeans imposed their own prejudices about proper authority of men over women by dealing with only male leaders.

Women in Africa

• Tradition has been re-interpreted in ways that favored men's control over women – allowing them to gain at women's expense.

• In the post-independence era, male dominance was enhanced • Africa's newly westernized elites modeled their own

gender roles on those of their western tutors.

• Rather than promoting equal political & economic rights & opportunities, women were encouraged instead to pursue domesticity & economic subordination to a male "head of the family."

Women in Africa

• Projects and development assistance that favor men are justified by resistance of Africans and their cultures of providing equity for women.

• Regardless of the assumptions made, the net results usually same – women lost access to resources necessary to improve their lives & lives of their children.

Women in The African Economy

• 66% of Africans are employed in agriculture. • Women average 46% of agricultural workforce. • Women produce 70% of the food staples. • “Official" statistics underestimate amount of work most women

perform • Virtually all domestic work • Production of food crops.

• In past, most investment in rural development opportunities has gone to men • Cash crops • Mechanization • Agricultural extension services.

• Women were often ineligible for loans, since they are available only to farmers with legal title to their land.

Women in the African Economy

• Until recently, educational & employment opportunities in towns were available mainly to men.

• Many women have found work in informal (non-wage) sector – selling food, alcohol, or sexual services as prostitutes.

• Women in Development (WID) initiatives that began in 1970s are aimed at redressing gender imbalance.

Women in Africa

• Education, health, training, and access to productive resources.

• By 1989, more than 1/3 of new projects included actions specifically directed at improving women's welfare.

• Women’s associations were formed to provide economic assistance and mutual aid.

• Some reflect pre-colonial groups when women worked together, providing mutual assistance within the kinship network.

• Others reflect more recent colonial influences, modeled on western "ladies associations," typically dominated by middle class & elite women.

Women in Africa

• Until 1990s, most national women's organizations were controlled by educated middle class women who accepted the “western housewife view” of “a woman's place” hence presenting no challenge to existing gender roles.

• African women often lack fundamental legal rights.

• Male control of women continuously reinforced by discriminatory laws of African states.

• Some changes in countries such as Ivory Coast, Kenya, Ethiopia, where women now have right to inherit and own property (land).

Women in Africa

• Prospects for African Women • Vast majority limited by economic under-development

and sex discrimination. • Raising agricultural production in Africa will require

helping women farmers – giving title to land, providing training and extension services, credit, technology, etc.

• In urban areas, informal sector could be fertile ground for expansion of indigenous African entrepreneurial activity and economic growth.

• Governments need to remove legal barriers to women entrepreneurs and obstacles to their acquiring credit and technology.

Ladies First: Rwanda and attempts to achieve gender equity.

• Ten years after the bloody genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people in just 100 days, Rwanda’s women are leading their country’s healing process and taking their society forward into a different future.

• They are playing a remarkable role in politics & also emerging as prominent figures in the business sector.

• In spring 2004 — as Rwanda commemorated the 10th anniversary of the genocide — WIDE ANGLE traveled to this fractured nation to make a film that looks forward instead of back.

• Profiling women on the forefront of change, “Ladies First” reveals the challenges facing them and their country as Rwanda struggles to build a sustainable peace between majority Hutus & minority Tutsis — a peace that has eluded the country for almost half a century.

Women in Africa

• Challenges for Women in the African Economy

• Informal/shadow economies.

• Barriers to participation in formal sector: culture, education, lack of property rights.

• Microloans/microfinance.

• Backlash: economic success opens up possibility of more domestic violence.

Profile of an Entrepreneur

• African Women's Entrepreneurship Program

• Lorna Rutto of Ecopost

• Unreasonable Climax 2012: Lorna Rutto - EcoPost

African Female Heads of State

• President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of the Republic of Liberia (right)

• President Joyce Banda of the Republic of Malawi (left).

• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – we have a story to tell.