Development
Studies
Using
examples, evaluate to which extent gender issues have been incorporated
into rural development projects. Assess the reasons why these issues
have not always been addressed successfully in theory and in practice.
By:
Khinh Sony Lee Ngo
Faculty of Social Science, South Bank University,
London. January
2000,
Contents:
1.
Introduction
2.
Understanding
Gender Relations
3
Women
invisible to agriculture policy and
Rural Development
Projects
4.
The
sexual division of labour
5.
Women
invisible to rural agriculture production
6.
Sex
stereotyping and rural development
projects - development planning and policy
7.
Extension
service
8.
Resource
Constraints
9.
Time
Constraints
10.
Control
over income and its distribution
11.
Access
to land, labour and capital
12.
Credit
schemes policy
13.
Marketing
policy
14.
Technology
and Gender
15.
Conclusion – Towards gender aware rural
development
projects – development planning and the unfinished agenda
Bibliography
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.
Introduction
Prior to the modern stage of economic development, the bulk of
economic activity in most societies is normally concentrated in
agriculture. Economists have therefore long recognised the importance of
this sector for initiating and sustaining economic growth. In addition,
it is also argued that a rise in productivity in agriculture is a
pre-condition for economic growth and structural change since only then
can agriculture generate a surplus and be in a position to fulfil its
development tasks. However, in recent years there has been an increasing
awareness that as development and the implementation of rural
development projects has proceeded, or not proceeded, in Third World
countries, the impact on men and women has been different. In fact,
there is substantial evidence that women have consistently lost out in
the process.
Some of the inequalities between men and women had
their basis in colonial rule. Although socials relations between men and
women, as between other groups, where by no means egalitarian in many
pre-colonial settings, there is no doubt that colonial capture and the
introduction of exploitative labour regimes led to market deterioration
in the social and economic status of women relative to that of men
(Pearson, 1992). The development of a world economy, and the spread of
wage labour in both agricultural production and industrial production,
assumed very different roles of women and men in the economy, sometimes
excluding women from wage employment while relying on their unpaid work
on family farms or on low-paid work within the informal sector. Even
since the Second World War, when national governments and multilateral
and bilateral aid agencies have initiated development programmes and
projects, and especially in recent decades since 1960s, many development
initiatives have been introduced in areas of the Third World in the form
of large-scale projects financed by external aid and organised by
technical experts. However, there is overwhelming evidence that such
assistance has generally bypassed women or sometimes made women worse
off. Even, after these initiatives there is considerable concern about
the lack of understanding of gender relations and the fact that
development policies and rural development projects are still in the
main gender blind if not actually biased against women.
Policies that ignore gender entirely in their design
nevertheless often have important impacts on the lives and livelihoods
of women. In addition, such policies sometimes fail to achieve their
objectives due to the neglect of the role of women in the processes that
they aim to influence (Ellis, 1992).
2.
Understanding Gender
Relations
Gender refers to the qualitative and interdependent
character of women and men’s position in society. Gender relations are
constituted in terms of the relations of power and dominance that
structure the life changes of women and men. The relations between men
and women are socially constituted and not derived from biology.
Therefore the term gender relations should distinguish such social
relations between men and women from those characteristics, which can be
derived from biological differences. In this connection sex is the
aspect of biology, which is fixed and unchangeable qualities, while
gender is the aspect of social science, which qualities are shaped
through the history of social relations and interactions (Oestgaard,
1992).
According to recent theories of development,
‘Gender’ rather than ‘sex’ is the key concept here because in
reality in all societies we are concerned with the social roles and
interactions of men and women rather than their biological
characteristics. Gender relations in the context of its societies
actually are social relations, referring the ways in which the social
categories of men and women, male and female, relate over the whole
range of social organisation, not just to interactions between
individual men and women in the sphere of personal relationships, or in
terms of biological reproduction. In all aspects of social activity,
including access to resources for production, rewards or remuneration
for work, distribution of consumption, income or goods, exercise of
authority and power, and participation in cultural and religious
activity, gender is important in establishing people’s behaviour and
the outcome of any social interaction.
As well as interactions between individual men and women, gender
relations describe the social meaning of male and female, and thus what
is considered appropriate behaviour or activity for men and women. What
is considered as male or female work, or male or female attributes,
behaviour or characteristics, varies considerably between different
societies and different historical periods. But it is important to
realise that notions of gender identity, and thus what is fitting for
men and women to do or be, have a strong ideological content. This can
be seen in rural sectors of the developing countries where both men and
women often says that women do not do any agricultural work, or that
they are just involved as family helpers, or carry out only domestic
work. In fact, many of their waking hours are spent in activities such
as weeding and harvesting, or collecting animal fodder or fuel wood,
which have a direct effect on the productivity of agriculture whether
the output is used for self-provisioning or processed and sold on the
market.
Because notions of gender roles and activities have
such a strong ideological content, policy often reflects normative or
prescriptive versions of female and male roles rather than activities
actually practiced by women and man, - Such policy often is failed to
achieve their objectives because of its failure
to understand the precise nature of what women and men actually do,
and their real contribution to production and reproduction, therefore,
it is essential to understand aspects of gender relations if development
policy is to cease being biased against women.
3.
Women invisible to agriculture policy and Rural Development Projects:
The so-called ‘gender oblivious’ has been the
impact on women of agricultural policies and rural development projects
designed to affect the socio-economic environment of farm household
production. The existence of this theme does not mean that women are
normally taken into account in the formulation and implementation of
agricultural policies and rural development projects. On the contrary,
most agricultural sector policies and rural development projects, in
most of the developing countries, are oblivious to gender, and the term
‘gender oblivious’ is used here to capture this typical state of
affairs (Ellis, 1992). In other words, women are usually invisible to
agricultural policies and rural development projects;
One well-known example of rural development project was the
attempt in the 1970s to introduce irrigated rice production in an area
in Gambia (Africa) where, traditionally, men had farmed groundnuts as a
cash crop (with contributed of family labour) and women has cultivated
rice for household consumption on un-irrigated wetlands. However, and
according to (Dey, 1982), and (Carney, 1988), the irrigation project was
unsuccessful largely because the planners failed to understand the
specific dynamics of gender relations within the local household-based
farming system. The lack of success stemmed in part from that ‘a male
dominant’, ‘domestic sharing’ model of the household which shaped
the project. An initial assumption was that the men were the rice
growers with full control over the necessary resources. Incentive
packages included cheap credits, inputs and assured markets offered to
male farmers. But it was women who traditionally grew rice for household
consumption and exchange, within a kind of complex set of rights and
obligations, etc.; The
scheme proposed to develop irrigated rice production on common lands to
which women had secured use rights. Backed by project officials, men
established exclusive right to these common lands, pushing the women out
to inferior scattered plots to continue cultivating traditional rice
varieties. All access to inputs, labour and finance was mediated through
husbands, and women became notably reluctant to participate in their
planned role as family labour. For what work the women did on the
irrigated rice field’s husbands had to paid their wives… ‘The
disappointingly low levels of improved rice production arose
substantially from these misunderstandings’ (Whitehead, 1990).
As well as assumptions about
the structure and operation of households, the planners took other
things for granted. - First, they assumed that women were ‘free’
labour, this mean that their labour would not have to be recompensed in
any way, and thus involved no resource cost. – Secondly, the assumed
that women’s labour has no existing productive use and therefore was
available for intensive application to irrigated rice production. In
fact, women were busy with their own rice land in the rainy season,
during which men did not have access to their labour and, therefore, did
not grow a further rice crop as planners has expected. Men only grew
rice in the dry season when their women were free to work for them (for
wages) and they themselves earned higher wages elsewhere. In addition,
ignoring that women were farmers in their own right, planners neither
took advantage of women’s expertise in swampland rice nor helped women
to improve their own output.
The Gambian example
illustrates two further points: - a) Women are not necessarily the
passive victims of circumstances with no possibility of resisting. By
refusing to make their labour available at low cost and to the
convenience of the male farmers involved in irrigated rice production,
the Gambian women demonstrated their determination to defend their
existing gender position as separate producers, albeit with various
obligations as well as right within the household. – b) The example
demonstrates that in households where men and women hold separate purses
with no pooling of cash income, and have responsibility for different
items of household expenditure and food production, as well as different
access to resources for production, it cannot be assumed that increasing
household production and incomes will of necessity improve the living
standards of all members.
It must be understood clearly, that the rural women in
the Third World want to increase their agricultural production. There
are real factors preventing them from doing so. So when designing
policies and planning rural development projects for women farmers, we
have to ask ourselves: ‘what is holding them back? Why it is so matter
in rural development projects and in the context of agricultural
production? – There are some general answers to these questions from
which I will be go on to discuss at the following:
4.
The sexual division of
labour
Some of the constraints on women’s production are
related to the sexual or gender division of labour – the way cultural
concepts and traditions define what ‘work’ is, under what
relationship it is performed and who does it. Other is derived from
women’s access to resources and the effects of commoditisation and
development planning on the division of labour in the farming household.
Still others are based in the dual nature of women’s economic roles
within the farm family.
5.
Women invisible to rural agriculture production
One of the recurring problems for rural women in the
Third World is that their work is invisible. It is inadequately recorded
and inadequately recognised. The definition and gender relations
characteristic is that males dominant and females subordinate or in
other words males biased against women, this can be seen that in many
rural agricultural productions in the Third World that has not escaped
the widespread problem of sex discrimination in statistics, which has
been reported all over the world, nor the effects of the inadequate
recording of women’s work (UN, 1984).
An
equally important reason behind the under-recording and economic
invisibility of women is that many areas in Third World rural production
is characterised by a high proportion of smallholder units in which
production for sale goes on side by side with production for
own—consumption, and it is argue that farm censuses are not very
consistent about what is treated as production for own-consumption and
what is not. Because women’s activities in most of the developing
countries are weighted more towards the non-market sector than men’s,
this aspect of economic measurement has important gender implications.
Women’s work, like men’s, is often the
subject of cultural valuations that obscure its character. The lack of
significance that rural culture and development planners attach to
women’s family labour is one of the main causes behind the measurement
and under-enumeration of women as members of the agricultural workforce.
Women family is often viewed as an essential part of the obligations of
the wife, mother and daughter – a continuation of the woman’s social
roles rather than ‘real work’. When men do the same tasks, it may be
labelled economic activity. Such subjective assessments condemn a high
proportion of the potential rural workforce to being overlooked by
development planners and policy-makers, a situation that can only hamper
any possible success.
6. Sex stereotyping and
rural development projects - development planning and policy
Yet sex stereotyping and cultural evaluation often
exist within development-planning and policy, where they operate over
wide social field. For example, most economists view subsistence
production as ‘non-market-production’ which revolves around the
‘family farm’ and is taken care of by ‘domestic’ relations. This
can be seen when examine the basis of the ‘invisibility’ of
women’s work which leads to the widely publicized problem of labour
bottlenecks (Whitehead and Bloom, 1992). And, according to Whitehead and
Bloom, micro-economic agricultural planning in the region such as
sub-Saharan Africa for-example, has a lamentable record of introducing
labour-demanding crop innovations which clash with the peak demands for
women’s labour. Underlying this erroneous planning is not only the
lack of visibility of women’s work, but also a lack of understanding
on the part of agricultural economists of the economic value of a wide
range of non-market produced goods and services which the farm household
cannot forego.
7. Extension
service
Another main finding in the literature is that there is
widespread discrimination against women in extension services and
agricultural innovation. This lack of attention is due to
discrimination, - it is not because women are inferior farmers.
Different studies show that women farmers can be as productive, as
efficient and as modern as their male counterparts (Staudt, 1979).
Although such problems may arise from men and women in the rural
culture, the most significant is the strong bias towards men in the
state agricultural services. The history of this neglect of women
farmers can be traced back to mission and colonial times, and in most
places in the Third World, continues in the post-colonial period
(Muntemba, 1982). The discrimination systematically blocks women’s
access to critical knowledge and inputs which could help them improve
their productivity. In so far as the education and training of extension
workers actively incorporates sex stereotyping, so it also seeks to
combat it.
8.
Resource Constraints
It also must never be
assumed that the primary reason why women do not innovate or produce
more are because of the effects of cultural or religious values about
their proper behaviour, because men will not let them or because they
are too ‘overburdened’ (Whitehead and Bloom, 1992). Rather we must
ask whether there are any resource constraints which act as a material
basis for this state of affairs. For example, a 1975 USAID review of the
position of women confidently states that women do not plough in North
Ghana because there is a ‘taboo’ which forbids them to touch cattle.
Yet research among the Kusasi group, which has the largest take-up of
ploughs in the region, suggest that even if this ‘taboo’ existed,
the real reason women do not plough has more to do with the predominant
position of men in the millet farming system and the almost exclusive
male ownership of cattle. The women have no access to beasts to pull the
ploughs (Whitehead, 1981).
In addition, it is not safe to assume that the
ownership and control of resources is always vested in the male head of
the farm household, or in the household as a joint decision-making unit.
In many rural societies in the Third World, and especially in Africa,
women have different spheres of obligation, resource control, and
decision-making from men. A failure to take into account these separate
spheres of responsibility can spell failure for policy initiatives and
irreversible damage to the economic status of women (Ellis, 1992).
Another good example of this consideration is the experience of
irrigated rice projects In Africa as described in Dey (1982) and Carney
(1988) and as I already demonstrated earlier in this essay. In several
instances irrigated rice projects were designed in complete neglect of
rice as a crop under women’s control over labour and land use, the
nature of reciprocal labour and output obligations between men and
women, and customary rights of land access between men and women.
Irrigated rice plots were allocated to men. When, in one case, an
attempt was later made to allocate them to women, they still ended up
under men’s control. Outcomes included failure of projects to achieve
output targets, failure to achieve multiple cropping, abandonment or
under-utilisation of irrigated areas, and conflict between men and women
over women’s labour time (Ellis, 1992).
9.
Time Constraints
The theme of women’s enormously heavy work burdens is
very dominant in many policy documents ((Whitehead and Bloom, 1992).
A
number of rural development projects planners and some studies have
stressed that women cannot do more productive work because they simply
do not have enough time: ‘they are overburdened by the combination of
productive work and domestic reproductive work, especially in conditions
of environmental degradation’ (Whitehead and Bloom, 1992).
Yet this viewpoint is not unanimous. The evidence of women heavy
work burdens and its implications on agricultural production need to be
interpreted very carefully. Because women carry a double workload, the
demand on their time is always greater than on men’s and they often
work longer hours. On the whole, women’s work burdens have increased
with economic change as Kitching argues that the main burden of
increasing agricultural production between 1900 and 1945 in Kenya lay on
women’s shoulders and similar process are visible elsewhere (Kitching,
1980)
10.
Control over income and its
distribution
But not enough to say that women in most of the
developing countries have resources, ownership and time constraints, but
also that male usually control them over income and its distribution,
and, it is also not safe to assume that income is under control of a
single household head, or that increasing income for the household is
synonymous with rising living standards for all members of the
household. In some cases, the care of children, their clothing and
education, is the responsibility of women from their own sources of
founds, and men do not contribute to these expenses. Policies that
inadvertently remove cash income sources from women also then have the
effect of depriving women and children of resources for consumption or
for education (Ellis, 1992).
11.
Access to land,
labour and capital
However, the most important resources to consider are
those which are critical farming, namely land, labour and capital. A
number of studies have argued that women’s ability to respond to new
economic opportunities is being constrained by their initial comparative
lack of overall resources. Stored wealth – in the form of livestock,
machinery, etc. – is more often in the hand of men. Many rural women
do not have access to land, and do not control enough cash to be able to
hire ploughs or buy seeds, fertilizer or new technology. Thus when
agricultural development projects require participants to purchase
inputs and set up enabling credit schemes, most female farmers find it
impossible to fulfil the conditions of the credit schemes. Planners have
unwittingly created a formidable barrier to women’s access to new
inputs (Whitehead and Bloom, 1992).
12. Credit
schemes policy
Usually happen in developing countries is that formal
credit schemes are typically gender-oblivious, and they are in practice
gender-biased towards men when it is the male head of the household who
is approached and registered for the provision of institutional credit.
It is becoming more widely recognised that women can make good use of
credit in their own right for activities that improve their own
livelihoods and the income security of their families (Berger, 1989).
13.
Marketing policy
The gender division of labour in the processing and
marketing of crops is an important feature determining the outcome for
women of diverse agricultural policies. Agricultural marketing in
developing countries is an example of an activity in which women often
have high levels of participation. There are many instances where
marketing has traditionally been considered more of female than a male
activity. Women can engage in marketing in several different ways,
for-example, as a private traders whose chief source of income is
trading, as a stallholders in village and town markets, as the person in
the farm household chiefly responsible for selling selected outputs or
all outputs, as the processor of farm outputs prior to their consumption
or sale in markets.
But, marketing policies typically neglect gender
despite the importance of women in marketing roles. This can be seen for
example that monopoly state marketing broads by-pass and substitute for
private forms of marketing altogether, and by doing this they may
exclude women from diverse levels of marketing activity in which they
were formerly engaged; other state-sponsored marketing agencies, such as
cooperative, tend to be dominated by male officials and bureaucrats,
even when operating in places where women have a traditional of
marketing; further more, men rather than women may be favoured
recipients of trading licenses, in cases where private marketing
activity is regulated by licensing system, etc. Women’s role in
marketing is not only affected by gender-oblivious marketing policies,
it is also likely affected by state policies towards many new processing
technology (Ellis, 1992).
14.
Technology and Gender
Technology plays a central role in the development
process and into many rural development projects. In fact, technology
and progress are often regarded as more or less synonymous. However, it
has been widely argued that technological inputs in rural development
projects in developing countries have not benefited women much, or at
least not as much as men, and have often actually harmed them (Mies and
Shiva 1993)
Historically,
the process of development, particularly of technological development,
has been strongly influences by men. This gender bias has affected the
role of women in the development process, and in many cases has led to
the introduction of technologies that are beneficial and suited to men,
but much less so to women. Sometimes technological development has had a
clear detrimental effect on the position of women.
In
recent history, and according to many studies, women appear to have been
most strongly affected by mechanised post-harvest technologies in the
threshing and milling of grain. Mechanisation of paddy threshing and
rice milling causes a substantial fall in the employment opportunities
of women from landless families in the labour abundant societies of
South and South-East Asia (IRRI, 1985).
The negative influence of technology on women’s
enterprises is often indirect. Technologies are not only consciously
brought to or adopted by women. Technological change within the wider
environment also affects them. At the macro-level, technology is
relevant to women’s enterprises in that it often represents a source
of competition. For example, new production technologies introduced in
rich countries can threaten the business of women in developing
countries. Indeed, entire sectors can lose their markets to new, better
or cheaper goods. At the micro-level, the threat to women’s
enterprises can arise when efficiency-improving technology is less
accessible to women than to men working in comparable sectors. One of
the sources of this gender-based differential access to improved
technologies can be traced to gender bias in development assistance. In
many development programmes involving technology transfer or providing
enterprise support, technologies have often been introduced in such way
that they have benefited male entrepreneurs at the expense of competing
women’s business, as the following example cited by Ahmed (1985)
demonstrated:
[In the past] all long coastal India women could be seen
marketing head loads of fresh fish. Preservation techniques like salting
and drying, which increased the shelf-life of fish, were also mainly in
the hand of rural women. However, the Integrated Fisheries Development
Project in Kerala India, uses trawlers to catch prawns, which are frozen
and exported. Factories have been built to process and freeze the prawns
and fish, and men have taken over the marketing and transportation of
fish using trucks and bicycles. Rural women’s jobs and livelihoods
from fish trading and processing have been lost, and there are no
alternative sources of income or employment. (Ahmed, 1985).
15.
Conclusion
– Towards gender aware rural development projects – development
planning and the unfinished agenda
Despite decades of
international assistance, poverty is on the rise in developing countries
and especially in Africa. The United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) estimates that Africa’s share of the world’s poor will rise
from 30 per cent to 40 per cent, and that more than haft the
continent’s population will live below the poverty line by the end of
the year 2000. Increasingly, poor women outnumber poor men in Africa. In
addition, African women fare wore than African men in important areas.
The Human Development Index for women for women is only haft that of men
in Kenya, the only African country for which data are available (UNDP,
1991)
Agricultural sector programmes and policies, extension services,
as well as designers of agricultural tools and equipment, have generally
ignored women farmers’ need and concerns and their important
contribution to agricultural production and rural economy. Yet according
to IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development, in many
Third World countries, especially in Africa, women provide 90 per cent
of the hoeing and weeding field work; 70 per cent of agricultural work;
80 per cent of food storage and transport from farm to village, and they
do 100 per cent of the processing for basic foodstuffs. Hence, women use
agriculture tools and equipment in their daily life and are therefore
important clients for the agricultural engineering sector, and their
needs should be more carefully considered and incorporated in project
planning (FAO 1990, 1997)
More often than not, development projects sponsored and
implemented by Western organisations reflect ethnocentric bias about the
sexual division of labour and the family-sharing of income and
resources, whether in cash or in kind. The Western middle-class family
pattern can be read between the lines: - a household composed of a
married man and women and their children, with a male breadwinner as
head of the household taking responsibility for supporting the family,
and a wife keeping the house, taking care of the children and eventually
having a supplementary income from work outside the home. Numerous
projects in recipient countries have failed or not fulfilled their goals
because planners have ignored the social and family structures in which
development is to take place, and these differ very definitely from the
Western model (Oestergaard, 1992).
Sad evidence today also testifies to the fact that development
strategies based solely on macro-economic theories, like structural
adjustment programmes have failed to solve the problems of poverty in
Third World countries. Moreover, they have had the unforeseen
side-effect of making the poor and underprivileged even poorer. In Third
World countries the ‘poorest of the poor’ are those rural household
headed by women. In addition to grappling with all the other
difficulties faced by the destitute, female-headed households have to
struggle against the barriers that exclude women from earning a
livelihood. These people live below the limit where basic human needs
and satisfied – with out access to sufficient nutrition, safe drinking
water, simple shelter, basic education or primary healthcare.
Development planning whether national or international, usually
have traditionally been gender neutral or even gender blind. As a result
there was a tendency to marginalize women: - development planners have
often seen them only as passive beneficiaries of social and health
services. Women’s active and productive roles in their society were
not recognised and not included explicitly in development planning.
Even today the target groups
for development projects are often identified as genderless categories,
such as ‘small farmers’ or ‘the rural poor’. In the minds of
planners these groups are men. In reality many of them are women
(Oestegaard, 1992). It is an implicit assumption that the effects of
development projects are potentially beneficial to both men and women.
In reality quite often the advantages of development go to the men in
the form of increased earnings or labour-saving techniques and the
disadvantages go to the women in the form of an increased and
unremunerated workload. Should this be recognised, the proposed solution
is often the initiation of special ‘women’s projects, which tend
only to marginalize women further as a ‘special group’ within
society. Planners must realize that the development goals will only be
reached by securing the active involvement of women as well as men, and
by bringing women into mainstream of economic development so that each
gender plays its own important role to the process. Specific project
components for women – such as credit schemes or training programmes
– used as integrated parts of the total plan may be useful, however,
as a first step.
Gender awareness should be
stressed by all cooperating parties of planning: that is means in all
administrative sectors of the donor administration as well as n the
state and local administration of the recipient country. Similarly,
gender awareness should be stressed during all phases of the project
cycles. It is important to focus on gender issues at a very early phase
of the project planning, preferably already in the stage of project
identification. Plans of operation should give adequate priority to
gender aspects with respects to budget, the recruitment of appropriate
staff and the necessity for the organisation and training of local
women. Not least, attempts should be made to find out from local women
what they want and need.
In both donor and recipient countries development project staff
are usually male and by training oriented to the technical and
administrative aspects of the work. This is also true of both expatriate
and local personnel in the cooperation countries as well as the
appraisal and evaluation teams. A more balanced distribution of female
and male project staff and a supplementing of technical and
administrative know-how with social, psychological and anthropological
expertise would greatly improve an agency’s ability to incorporate
gender issues appropriately in development planning.
The training of staff is
necessary in order to ensure a genuine and appropriate integration of
women into development project. Social scientists require training in
how to use their skills effectively and how to work with technical and
administrative personnel. The later need learn why, how and where it is
useful to apply resources from the social sciences.
In planning project
activities, account must be taken not only of the difference between men
and women’s situations, but also of differences among women. It is
unrealistic to address ‘women’ in general since age, position in the
household, caste and class affect women’s ability to participate in
development activities. Women’s social situation is more strongly
determined by family structure than men’s. This means that a careful
appreciation of variations in family situations is crucial in examining
a project’s potential and actual impact on women. Women are never
simply women; they are daughters, widows, married mothers of small
children, unwed mothers, wives of migrant labourers, mothers-in-law
(Oestegaard, 1992). The authority, autonomy, responsibility, obligations
and workload they have in the family vary accordingly. And so does their
ability to participate in a project and the way they are affected by it.
Thus we cannot simply ask how a project has affected women’s role in
the family; we must also ask how family roles affect their potential
participation in the project.
In particular, development
activities which increase women’s workload without any proportionate
improvement in their situations should be avoided. Any activity that
relies heavily on women’s labour should include women planning and
managing capacities, wages should be paid for this work where possible
and appropriate. Activities that alleviate women’s burden of work
should be encouraged. Technology that saves labour in unpaid domestic
activities, such as food processing and preparation, should be given
high priority, through gender-aware planning, administrators have the
chance to mobilize an enormous development potential (Whyte et al, 1987)
One possible strategy to counter the differential
access of male and female entrepreneurs to technical options could be to
address the main factors that determine access to technology:
information and the availability of credit. Development initiatives
aiming to improve technology transfer could, for example, provide credit
programmes for women, gender training or bank personnel, or technology
source books.
In the case where the threat of competition is
generated by development initiatives themselves, one answer is to
increase gender awareness among development workers. This strategy,
known as ‘mainstreaming’, involves integrating and awareness of
gender relations, and of the needs of women arising from those gender
relations, into ‘mainstream’ of development work. This mean that
development projects designers become more aware of the consequences to
women of all initiatives that involve technological change, even if
women are not specifically targeted.
Gender relations, – the social, economic,
political, and legal roles of men and women within a society – vary
greatly from culture to culture. These roles have a marked effect on how
individuals behave and react to new ideas. However, it is believe that
in the development process, and in each development effort should be
preceded and accompanied by a gender awareness, which takes into account
the needs and roles of males and females in the area where each
development project will operate. Development programmes and projects
which, are planned and administered with little insight into gender
relations, usually fail to have their intended effect.
The reason for taking the role and status of women
seriously in the formulation of agricultural policies, are not just one
of moral indignation concerning the subordinate status of women or the
erosion of their dignity in the development process, though many would
argue these were ground enough. The neglect of gender sometimes results
in policy outcomes that fall short of their intentions, and may even be
negative in the sense that policy reduces rather than increases the
living standards of those it is designed to assist (Kandiyoti, 1990).
Therefore, policies approaches should characterised
across a spectrum ranging from welfare, to equity, to
poverty-orientated, to efficiency, and to empowerment.. The ultimate aim
should be to increase women’s productivity and self-reliance, which
mean moving towards the efficiency and empowerment end of the policy
spectrum (Moser, 1989).
The
integration of women into the concerns of mainstream policy formulation
and integration does not mean that women lose their social and economic
identity. On contrary, the whole point is to identify women’s needs
that differ from those of men, so that policies are devised to take into
account the different circumstances of women and men. This policy
process has been called ‘gender planning’ (Moser, 1989).
Agricultural policies vary in the degree to which they are susceptible
to this idea of gender planning, but the main point is that impacts on
women should have high status across the range of policies, and should
be accorded special emphasis with respect to policies that can have a
direct impact on living standards, dignity, and self-reliance of farm
women in Third World (Ellis, 1992).
As we are now have approaching the new millennium and
in entering into the 21st century, and the hope for the
better of the world development, that is development in the Right way,
and sustainable development. However, in the last two decades or so have
presented enormous challenges to all those who are concerned with
development and rural development planning projects. In fact, all
development issues require analysis from the perspective of gender
relations if they are to be successful and serve the need of women as
well as men. There is some evidence that the World Bank is drawing back
from its previous years policy agenda, and prioritising areas of social
investment which are crucial to women’s survival. But other keys
issues such as environmental conservation, political stabilisation and
democracy all need to be subjected to a similar scrutiny. Efforts to
halt soil degradation will not succeed if they rely on unlimited and
un-rewarded applications of women’s scarce time and energy resources.
Democracy will be meaningless unless women are represented and have full
access to land, resources, political office and power. The whole of the
development agenda will need to be reformulated if the message that
gender matters is to be taken seriously./.
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