Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

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QUESTIONS OF POWER • ARNFED
ter how much the development discourse itself is trying to neglect the
basic situation of unequal power, by talking about ‘development dialogue’,
‘partnership’ etc. No real solidarity between partners can emerge
when mutual dependence is not acknowledged. The important thing is for
feminists in the North to realize that we too, if we want to change the male
bias of the market system, need the support of feminists and women’s
movements in the South.
What WID and GAD discourses further achieve, according to Angela
Miles, is to obscure the fact that transformative feminist trends do exist
in the North. Not all feminists have been engulfed in ‘state’ or ‘development’
feminism, or withdrawn to apolitical theorising. As a matter of fact
new feminist movements are emerging in the Scandinavian countries –
but so far they remain unrelated to feminist movements of the South.
“The unequal discourse of development that shapes and contains WID and
GAD relationships means that they cannot provide an adequate frame for
the development of political sisterhood/solidarity. On the contrary, if they
are understood by ‘third world’ women to reflect the whole of Western
feminisms, these WID and GAD relationships can mask the existence of
transformative feminisms in the ‘first world’ and impede the development
of global solidarity/sisterhood. When this occurs the necessary and difficult
process of building political relations among ‘first world’ and ‘third
world’ movement counterparts is supplanted by suspiciously well-funded relations
between women in the development industry in North and South, and between these
women and some activists in the South” (Miles 1998, p. 169, emphasis added,
SA). This point echoes the observations made by Ifi Amadiume and
Nighat Khan, quoted above, regarding ‘discourse as controlled by paid
UN and other donor advisers, consultants and workers’ and ‘the professionalization
and NGO’isation of the women’s movement’.
A further problem in this context is the split, created by national governments
and development institutions, between elite and grass root
women of the South. As argued by Amina Mama “post-colonial women’s
organisations tend to be hierarchical in structure, dominated by elite
women and dedicated to quiet and comparatively genteel politics of pursuing
legal and policy reforms” (quoted in DAWN 2000, p. 151). Such
women’s organisations tend to “be co-opted or absorbed by the state, resulting
in their ineffectiveness as vehicles for women’s struggles. Furthermore
they rarely retain their linkage with grass-root organisations and
women whose interests they claim to represent” (ibid.).
Seen from the point of view of the WID/GAD development establishment
– including many South women’s organisations – a lack of correspondence
between local women’s concerns and the GAD development