For the past 30 years feminist theorists and practitionners of development have struggled to bring feminist analysis to bear on development debates and policies. Nowhere has this been more vigorously pursued than on the African continent
Over this period gender and development analysis and practice has evolved while struggling to be recognised in the arena of international development. In the early 1970s the Women in Development (WID) movement advocated critical consideration of women in development. Its approach was conceptually flawed: positing an essentialized ‘universal woman’, failing to address structural constraints on women and assuming that women must be brought into development processes.
By the 1980s a more nuanced Women and Development (WAD) approach acknowledged women to be important actors in development. Thus the emphasis was on improving women’s skills, access to resources, agency, recognition and rewards without addressing seriously links between patriarchy, modes of production and women’s subordination. By the late 1980’s, proponents of a Gender and Development approach(GAD) started to use gender, and relationships between men and women as a way of understanding dynamics of socio-economic change. They rejected universalizing meta discourses, and deconstructed key social institutions (e.g. household and family). By 2000 these approaches were increasingly acknowledged in most major agencies and NGOs, as GAD experts were hired. It seemed the time to call for ‘mainstreaming gender into all development activities’
Now is the time to take stock. This panel addresses important questions. Does institutionalising ‘gender’ in agencies transform ‘a gendered approach’ from a political project to one of poverty reduction? Do ‘feminism’ and the language of transformation disappear when feminist critiques become co-opted and depoliticised?. Have the various women/gender and development approaches contributed anything to the lives of African women? What have the been the successes, failures and challenges of these struggles to challenge gender blindness and gender inequality in African development? Is ‘mainstreaming gender’ co-optation or success?
This paper reviews the adoption of gender perspectives in Africa’s transport sector, utilising case study material from Ghana. While some positive trends are identified, it emphasises the tendency for lip service to prevail over real action: much remains to be done before adequate integration of gender analysis can be achieved.
African women have been the subject of some of the most powerful narratives to come out of Gender and Development debates. Represented on the one hand as the subjugated victims of male oppression and of the failures of governments, colonial or contemporary, to recognise their needs or rights, and on the other as feisty heroines whose success in juggling work and children, and whose own-account enterprises and ability to surmount the most overwhelming barriers to wellbeing lends them legendary status. Both do an injustice to African women, and work to shore up myths of development that fail to speak to the realities of African women's lives, in all their diversity.
This paper examines some of the foundational gender myths used in Gender and Development debates on Africa and explores their implications
One of the more unexpected consequences of the recent proliferation of armed conflicts in Africa has been its impact on development thinking. Development agencies and theorists have been obliged to acknowledge the unstable and inherently transient nature of the conditions in which development’ occurs (or fails to occur). For some, this has raised some basic questions about what constitutes development. With regard to gender and development, attempts to link armed conflict with gender identity and gender relations have brought to the fore issues about men and about violence which gender specialists have in the past tended to deprioritise.
Much of the debate about men, women, violence and war can be related to earlier and wider struggles within feminism about the nature of patriarchy, and in particular those between essentialist and social relations positions. Are men inherently territorial and protective, and women inherently nurturing and peaceable? Or are their roles in war explainable entirely in relation to the social and cultural context? Do we have to choose between these positions, or can we accept both as containing elements of truth?
The paper examines these questions in relation to women’s peace-building activism, where women’s response to violence is widely believed to be a major mobilising factor, both in local peace-making initiatives and in cross-cultural and international solidarity movements. To what extent are women’s peace activities based on their universal nature as women, and to what extent on particular local configurations of social relations? The issues raised have relevance not only for feminist understandings and strategies but also for the elusive concept of ‘sustainable peace’.