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ANNENE EJIKEM, LET THE WOMEN SPEAK! AND LISTEN.

ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF AFRICAN WOMEN. No. 1 ? January. Vol. 7
(January-April 2008). AfricaFiles
http://www.africafiles.org/atissueezine.asp#art1

In 1929 women in southeast Nigeria mounted a war against the forces of
British colonial rule. The women targeted all the symbols of the new
political order ? the offices and homes of colonial officialdom, as
well as its representatives. The "disturbances" and the demands made
by the women at the Commission of Inquiry set up by the colonial
government to investigate surprised the British. The women who
testified before the Commission consistently demanded that women be
represented in the new institutions which had been set up by the
colonial government. More than 50 women lost their lives, but colonial
authorities failed to appreciate the extent to which women felt
aggrieved by colonial policies which rendered them invisible.
Although the women organized and carried out this rebellion, it did
not stop colonial authorities and missionaries from continuing to
insist that African women were "no better than cattle and sheep" and
completely lacking in agency. Almost eighty years later, the
assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the
prevailing view about them. This impression is so often at variance
with what I see, for example, when I am at home in Nigeria where,
every day, I meet women who struggle to feed their families and to
send their children to school, daily making decisions that help
sustain their families.


The role of "Tradition"


Researchers and development workers appear eager always to point to
"Tradition" as the reason for African women?s lack of agency. Take,
for example, the statement issued by a recent international summit
convened to address the economic crisis in Africa.

"In Africa, the gender gap is even wider and the situation is more
complex due to the cultural and traditional context which is anchored
in beliefs, norms and practices which breed discrimination and
feminised poverty. There is growing evidence that the number of women
in Africa living in poverty has increased disproportionately to that
of men."

This was the conclusion of the 8th Meeting of the African Partnership
Forum (APF) in Germany in May 2007. The APF was founded in 2003 as a
forum designed "to facilitate Africa?s economic growth." The members
of the APF are Western donor countries which give more than $100
million in aid, multilateral institutions such as the UN, World Bank,
IMF, WTO, African regional institutions such as ECOWAS, SADC, ADB, as
well as the pan-African NEPAD and AU.

There is no doubt that there are many traditions in Africa that hamper
women?s ability to lead economically prosperous lives, but to point to
"Tradition" as the root cause of African women?s poverty obscures
reality more than it clarifies it. First of all, there is no single
"Tradition" which exists all over Africa. Secondly, what is considered
"traditional" in African communities is often of relatively recent
vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African
men are too eager to point to "Tradition" when excluding women from
development projects. For example, in Kenya, local men ? and
"development officers" ? are often quick to insist that it is
"untraditional" for women to own land. The truth is, of course, that
individual land ownership is not "traditional" for anyone in Kenya;
individual land ownership was usefully introduced by British colonial
authorities keen to claim the most fertile lands for Europeans.1


The idea conveyed when "Tradition" is blamed for African women?s
economic predicament is that African beliefs and practices constitute
part of an ancient, unchanging way of life, not easily amenable to
change. The reality too often is that aid and development workers
assume that the existence of "Tradition" makes African women incapable
of acting as authors of their own lives. Numerous studies now exist
which point to the unwillingness or incapacity of development workers
to engage African women in dialogue as a fundamental obstacle to the
success of many so-called aid programs.2


Fundamental to any task of understanding Africa is the acknowledgment
of the continent?s diversity. Not even within a single country do
sweeping generalizations hold. An absolute priority to ending poverty
in Africa is to listen to the experiences and wisdom of poor African
women.
As we acknowledge that "Tradition" cannot be the beginning and the end
of any analysis of African women?s economic realities, we must also
acknowledge that the facts of African women?s lives do not make for
happy reading. The statistics, while they do not capture the reality
of women?s lives in all the different contexts in which they live,
give an overall picture.


Of all the continents, Africa has the largest percentage of people
living in poverty, with signs that ever larger numbers will be
threatened by poverty in the future. HIV/AIDS, for example, is
leaving millions of African children as AIDS orphans. The HIV/AIDS
epidemic, which is recognized to be of significant consequence for
development, affects women in notably higher numbers than men in some
African countries. In Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and Malawi, this has
resulted in a lower life expectancy for women than men, a reversal of
what typically obtains.3 Although African women work longer hours,
they own disproportionately less than African men. African women
receive only 1 percent of credit facilities extended to agricultural
producers. Yet, at least 70 percent of African women are involved in
agriculture. A disproportionate percentage of African babies are of
low birth weight, a factor closely related to maternal poverty.


Ending Poverty?


How to end poverty in Africa? This question has become a staple of
discussion for commentators from pop stars to world-renowned
economists. For decades, the image of Africa in the world has been as
the poor neighbor, always receiving charity yet remaining forever
destitute and helpless. Despite numerous pop concerts, organizations
with a plethora of acronyms, roundtables, meetings and conferences,
poverty in Africa remains.


The most ambitious poverty-eradication effort to date is the
Millennium Development Project, which was ratified by all the UN
member nations as well as major donor and aid institutions in
September 2000. Its goal is to eradicate poverty all over the world,
especially in Africa. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG)
explicitly recognize the centrality of women?s economic empowerment to
any serious poverty reduction program: the third of the eight goals
is "to promote gender equality and empower women."


While it is clear that Africa will not meet any of Millennium
Development Goals by the 2015 deadline,4 it is important that the MDG
acknowledge that development cannot take place in a vacuum. In 2005,
five years after the MDG were passed and ten years before their due
date, the UN issued a major report assessing achievements so far and
delineating what needs to be done. According to the UN 2005 MDG
Report, in 1990 44.6 percent of Africans were living on less than a
dollar a day; by 2001 the percentage of Africans living on less than a
dollar a day had actually increased to 46.4 percent, a goal even
further removed from the Millennium Development Goal of about 25
percent by 2015 (MDG 2005 Report). Since 1990, millions more people
are chronically hungry in sub-Saharan Africa, where half the children
under the age of five are malnourished. (MDG Report 2005)


Despite these disheartening statistics, aid is certainly not the
panacea. In the first place, "aid assistance" and "development
programs" have typically discriminated against women. In the second
place, attempts to incorporate women into development programs may be
tempted to "bring women up to men?s standards." The economic situation
of African men is no model! But the strongest argument against aid
is the fact that 30 years of ODA have produced little beyond huge
amounts of crushing debt. In 2000, African external debt accounted for
over 51 percent of GDP; by 2003 it had fallen to 49 percent of GDP.
Such global figures obscure the particularly harsh reality for
individual countries: for Malawi external debt was almost 200
percent of its GDP in 2006; for Sao Tome & Principe it was 350 percent!5


Fortunately, in 2006 debt was about 25 percent of GDP for Africa as a
whole. There are other signs for cautious optimism. For example,
several African countries have reported economic growth rate of 5
percent or more for the last two years.6


A stronger economy is the only path poor countries have to get out of
poverty. In 1980 Africa contributed 5 percent to global trade. By
1995 the figure was 2.2 percent. In the 1990s Africa was attracting 3
percent FDI. Compare this with 20 percent for Latin America and 50
percent for East Asia.7 On practically every indicator used to measure
poverty, and in contrast to Africa?s continued weak position, Latin
America and East Asia have made positive gains, and this is no doubt a
direct result of the positive gains in their position in the global
marketplace.


Rather than idealistic slogans about making poverty history, we need
to attend more closely to practical ways to increase Africa?s share of
the world market. Here, the role of African governments is paramount.
Clearly, investors will invest only in places where profit seems
likely and stability can be guaranteed. For too long, African regimes
have failed to provide a climate attractive to investors.


Related to economic development must be the question of arms sales.
Africa is awash in arms, from small ones to massive missiles. Armed
conflict makes agriculture impossible and does not allow for the kind
of stability that investors want. The number of Africans affected by
armed conflicts is staggering. Between 1994 and 2003 more than 9
million Africans, mostly women and children, perished as a result of
armed conflict. That?s the entire population of Sweden. Much more than
the population of Switzerland. No region in the world comes close to
such statistics. In Southern Asia, the region next in terms of
casualties from armed conflict, the figure was under 2 million. War
produces not only casualties in terms of deaths, but also refugees and
other displaced peoples. It will come as no surprise that Africa far
exceeds any other region in the world in its refugee and displaced
populations. People cannot farm or run factories if they are dodging
bullets or coerced to fight wars. Governments cannot invest in
infrastructure if they use their country?s wealth to buy military
equipment.


It is almost impossible to imagine a world in which the arms producing
nations of the world agreed not to sell to impoverished countries.
Impossible to imagine, but what a world of difference it would make!


Women and Economic Development


For Africans, women and men, to become economically more prosperous,
African economies have to be radically restructured. Most of the
economies in Africa remain monocultures. There can be no prosperity
for the majority of its citizens if a country relies on the
exportation of low-value raw materials that are sent to other
countries where they are processed and then returned to the world
market with a much increased price-tag. Exporting copper or coffee
will only make a few individuals or a multinational rich; copper and
coffee alone will not a country enrich.


Greater diversification of African economies has to incorporate a more
inclusive and empowered role for women. Today, individual experts and
agencies all claim to acknowledge that African countries can move
significant proportions of their populations out of poverty only if
women are able to improve their economic lot. "Women in Development",
from its start in Western feminist circles, is now a staple concept in
all multilateral agencies. Yet the success of Women in Development
programs has not been much better than that of development tout court.
This is because too often a paternalistic approach persists and
projects are designed without any consultation with the target women
who are seen only as recipients.


It is critically important not to make assumptions or to behave as if
categories from Western societies can be uncritically used to analyze
African ones. We have to be vigilant not to be careless in our
thinking: too often, for example, education is treated by experts as
a fetish. Because people are poor or "uneducated" does not mean they
are stupid. The success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh provides one
example that poor, uneducated women know what they want and will
successfully implement it if they have the opportunity (via credit,
for example). In my own research on Onitsha, Nigeria, an important
center of trade where women controlled the marketplace in the
nineteenth century, I found that lack of literacy was no bar to the
ability of women to accumulate enormous wealth. Students of West
African history are very familiar with self-help microfinance groups
organized by women; such groups have a deep history, long predating
the current "discovery" of microfinance in the West, due in large part
to the award of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed Yunus, founder
of the Grameen Bank.


The kind of aid with which we are most familiar, involving "experts"
going from the global north to tell people in the global south what to
do, especially in the form of government to government monetary
packages, cannot bring poor people permanently out of poverty. On the
other hand, assistance which is conceived as a partnership and
actually involves the "recipients" in the planning as well as
implementation, can succeed. And there are examples of such
successes. The Canadian organization, Match International, was founded
on just such principles. According to the organization?s mission
statement, "Match supports initiatives identified by women in the
global South, led and implemented by the women, and innovative in
their context. This approach is based on Match?s belief that women?s
development must be considered within their own context, and for
strategies to succeed, women?s views and agendas must be taken into
consideration." In Nigeria, the organization Baobab for Women?s Human
Rights, has achieved notable successes. It is worth noting that, in
one campaign, Baobab was forced to expend much energy and resources in
asking women?s groups in the global north to scale back their
activities as these were negating their own local initiatives,
threatening to derail the goal on which all were agreed. Baobab?s
activities have focused in the primarily Muslim parts of Nigeria, and
under the rubric of "women?s human rights" the organization has been
able to address a wide range of issues, including women?s economic
empowerment.


A work that remains - unfortunately ? very relevant is Barbara
Brown?s book 'The Domestication of Women' which shows just how
expensive can be well-intentioned but ill-conceived projects devised
by men and women who "go to help" without ever bothering to listen or
even consult with those whose lives are supposed to be impacted by
their projects. Her book is a catalogue of failures spearheaded by
various branches of the United Nations and other multilateral
organizations. One tragicomic scenario involving the building of wells
comes readily to mind: exasperated, "aid" workers abandon the building
of wells because, despite all their efforts, local men do not maintain
the wells as instructed. The fact that it is women who fetch water had
never been taken into consideration by the "aid" workers. The poverty
eradication programs which have been shown to produce significant and
lasting results tend to be smaller in scale and always involve the
active participation of the so-called "target women". The point is not
that large organizations are doomed to failure but that they must
learn to listen as well as to acknowledge that poor people are not
only students but also can be teachers. Women at the so-called
grassroots level must be heard because only they have the intimate
knowledge of their lives and needs.


Conclusion


Who should speak for African women? Too often it is either African
men or Western women. We need to hear more from the African women
themselves whose lives we all claim we wish to improve. Also, we must
incorporate the important critiques by African women scholars of the
flawed categories that continue to be used to describe African women?s
lives and African societies. Scholars such as Felicia Ekejiuba,
Achola Pala, Nkiru Nzegwu and Oyeronke Oyewumi have written about how
the categories used to describe African women?s lives often are
derived from very different realities in other parts of the world and
end up doing more violence to the women whose lives the
activists/scholars claim they seek to ameliorate.


In the context of the discussion here, it is important to note that
the UN Commission on the Status of Women has declared its theme for
2008 as "Financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women".
In February 2007 the Commission convened an informal expert panel to
discuss how to move forward on this agenda. It is disheartening ?
but, unfortunately, not surprising ? that no African women were
amongst the list of panelists; indeed the only African ? the Minister
of Finance for Zambia ? was also the only man.


References and links:

1. On the gendered nature and consequences of the codification of
"customary law" see Martin Chanock, "Making Customary Law: Men, Women
and the Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia," in African Women and
the Law: Historical Perspectives, eds. Margaret Jean Hay and Marcia
Wright (1982): 53-67.


2. Nkiru Nzegwu?s account of a development program based on real
partnership with poor women is an excellent place to begin.
"Questions of Agency: Development, Donors and Women of the South,"
Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies 2, 1 (2002);
available at http://www.jendajournal.com/vol2.1/nzegwu.html. Although
published almost thirty years ago, Barbara Brown?s The Domestication
of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies (New York: St.
Martin?s Press, 1980) remains an important source for the range of
discrimination faced by women from so-called aid workers and agencies.


3. Economic Commission for Africa/AU, Economic Report on Africa 2007.
Available at http://www.uneca.org/era2007/.


4. UN, "Africa and the Millennium Development Goals: 2007 Update."
(United Nations Department of Public Information, June 2007).
Available at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/docs/MDGafrica07.pdf.


5. African Development Bank (ADB) Pocketbook 2007.


6. ADB Selected Statistics on African Countries Volume XXVI 2007.


7. Carol Thompson, "Economic Policy Toward Africa," FPIF, January
1997. Available at http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol2/v2n23eaf.html.
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