GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT

Spring, A. (1988) "Putting Women in the Development Agenda: Agriculture Development in Malawi, in David Brokenshaw and Peter Little (eds.) Anthropology of Development in East Africa, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 13-37.

• Rural men are increasingly becoming part-time or absentee farmers on their own farms because of salaried employment in urban areas or on agricultural estates. This is reflected in the fact that sex ratios in all rural areas show more women than men in the population of working age. As a result, women have taken even more of the labor and management of family farms and the number of women who have become full-time farmers has increased. 22
• Women spend as much time on farm work as men do, and as much time on domestic activities as on their farm work. Agricultural development projects increase the amount of agricultural work (hours per days and days per year) for both men and women. 22
• Farmers who owned cattle and used the manure on their fields were in the better environment. 31
• …women have more direct access when planners explicitly recognize the prevailing sexual division of labor (and build on women's work in order to enable women to control their earnings) as well as when the project fit prevailing cultural norms and recognizes cultural and legal limitations to women's direct access to project goods and services. 37

Koczberski, G. (1998) "Women in Development: A Critical Analysis", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 395-409.

• While WID may offer a different approach to 'doing' and 'viewing' development, is not an alternative approach to mainstream development, as it concepts, strategies and perspectives on development remain welded to the existing Western-dominated development framework. 395
• The idea of integrating Third World women into aid practice first emerged in the USA in the early 1970s when (mainly female) development practitioners and researchers began pushing for greater representation of women in aid agencies, and demanding that more effort be made by aid organizations to recognize Third World women in their aid programs. 396
• advocates pointed to the accumulating evidence that Third World women were not only ignored in development plans, but that their economic situation had barely improved over the years. Their pressure on US policy makers resulted in the 1973 Percy Amendment to the US Foreign Assistance Act , which required that USAID's aid programs 'give particular attention to those programs, projects and activities which tend to integrate women into the national economies of foreign countries'. 396
• While it is recognized that aid practice was (and remains) male-biased, this papers argues that, by adopting this narrow approach to the problems experienced by women in developing countries, aid agencies and many WID advocates ignored the historical context of development. Also, they ignored some of the inherent problems with the framework of development itself, and failed to acknowledge the specific social and cultural contexts of women's lives. 397
• Women, as the main food producers and nurturers, and in some areas the main generators of wealth, felt much of the brunt of colonialism. Land degradation, enforced relocation, commercialization of agriculture, labour migration and weakened pre-colonial trading links all put tremendous pressures on women's ability to meet their expected responsibilities. Colonialists (and missionaries) caused, inter alia, a redefinition of indigenous ideologies regarding identity, status, kinship, marriage, residential patterns and gender relations, all of which have had varying and unexpected consequences for women's (and men's) contemporary situations. 397
• male outmigration from rural areas in many Third World countries was initiated during the colonial period, and has continued into the postcolonial period, adding to the work burdens of women. 398
• [There was] a belief among many that the more 'European' indigenous societies became, the better would be the situation for women. 398
• While not underestimating the effect of male-bias on women, a singular emphasis on male-bias by early WID proponents oversimplified the situation of Third World women by ignoring the economic, political and social manifestations of historical factors and processes. WID proponents also failed to see the male-bias and the invisibility of women were not separate from general Eurocentric development practice. 398
• When the goal of integration first emerged in the 1970s, it was based on the view that through integration with national economies, Third World women would begin to participate in the development process. However, integration by development agencies assumed that women were not already participating in development, thereby concealing and devaluing women's existing roles in informal economic and political activities and household production. Women's work in subsistence production, informal markets and community and household work was therefore considered outside the doman of 'development'. 399
• underpinning many of the integration efforts by development agencies was the belief that by increasing Third World women's participation in formal economic and political structures, their status and position in the household and society generally would be enhanced. … While a change in intra-household income patterns may lead to a change in gender relations within a household, it cannot be concluded that this will result in the improved status of women. Indeed, a growing body of literature now questions the simplistic correlation between labor force participation and women's status. … Not only is such an equation between income and status predicated upon a dominantly Western view, it also fails to recognize that the factors determining women's status may be culturally specific and multidimensional rather than unidimensional. 399
• Associated with the view that women's status will improve if they move into 'productive employment' is the implicit assumption that women must move from the 'traditional' sector to the 'modern' sector to achieve self-advancement. Such a view is predicated on two main assumptions: the modern sector is socially progressive and a necessary precursor to self-advancement, and 'traditional' work roles are inhibiting to self-development. That these assumptions also underpin modern theory reveals that WID, rather than offering an alternative approach, remains wedded to existing mainstream development frameworks. 399
• Thus it was accepted that, with the right inputs and incentives, the 'traditional' Third World woman could be transformed into a 'modern' woman, based largely on the image of the Western woman. 400
• Modernization theorists measure development by GDP, which only records formal sector activities. Since women were not seen to be contributing to the formal economy, then they were seen as not contributing to 'development'. In this way, Third World women were unproductive, underutilized and, as the World Bank put it, in a sense wasted. 400
• When the spotlight of aid institutions shifted to women, a category was created that standardized and homogenized Third World women. Under this label 'Third World women' all have the same needs and interests, and all are seen as equally disadvantaged. Moreover, Third World women are generally portrayed as universally unproductive, economically inactive, house-bound, tradition-bound, lacking skills and perceived to be relegated to lower-status tasks than men. 400
• While women's workloads vary greatly, accumulating evidence from many parts of the Third World suggests heavy workloads constrain women's ability to provide adequate food and childcare and limit their opportunity to participate in extra-village activities. Such misconceptions regarding women's work burdens may partly explain the problem observed in some developing countries, where 'development' has simply meant further additions to women's already heavy work burdens, and may help explain the failure of many special women's projects which aimed to encourage women to take on additional tasks such as skills training, poultry projects or other income generating activities. 401
• Project planning techniques to integrate women into development projects continue to restrict women's involvement as projects largely remain externally operated and controlled. Rarely is project design, decision-making and management devolved to local women. 401
• Western stereotypes of Third World women have fostered an approach where women are given little control over how, or whether, they desire to be integrated into development projects. 401
• Categorizing Third World women as an undifferentiated group fosters a view that they all have the same needs and are equally disadvantaged. Such assumptions ignore the diversity of women's lives and overlook differences in wealth, power and status between women attributable to structural factors like class, caste, clan and marital status. In some situations it may well be that intra-gender differences in work patterns and resource control are just as important, if not more so, that inter-gender differences. 401
• It is possible that the reason why WID practice has all but ignored inequalities between women stems in part in its emphasis on integrating women, and its priority on gender inequalities over other inequalities. 402
• by ignoring inequalities between women, WID attempts at encouraging participatory development projects based on the notion of common needs and goals are fraught with problems. 402
• By recognizing diversity among women and women's groups a more equitable allocation of WID resources may be possible. 402
• WID activities can discriminate against poorer women if differential status and needs among women in society are not recognized. With continuing reports of increasing poverty and wealth inequalities in the Third World countries, the targeting of disadvantaged groups of women appears to be of crucial importance. 403
• Women generally do carry heavier workloads than men and they do comprise most of the poor. But the generalizations cannot be assumed to apply in a similar way everywhere. More importantly, they should not serve to restrict further analysis at the micro-level. 403
• a common requirement is to collect gender-specific data on the division of labor, access to and control of resources and cultural restrictions on women's activities, and incorporate these data into all stages of the project cycle. 404
• By compartmentalizing women, the framework renders irrelevant the linkages between women's various work roles, kinship relationships and the social, cultural and political systems of which they are a part. Women's work activities, their access to resources and their needs are not isolated fragments, rather they are intricately embedded within the communities in which they live. To ignore these linkages predisposes simplistic and unrealistic analyses and constructs images far removed from reality. 404
• The problems found in mainstream development practice, such as misrepresentation and over-generalization, the use of rigid project frameworks, and the limits placed on Third World people to define and control their own lives, remain in the WID/GAD approach. 406