Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

84
QUESTIONS OF POWER • ARNFED
large extend was based on connections between the living and the dead,
between body and soul, and between the individual and the community
– many of these connections in this place (a rural matrilineal community)
being handled and taken care of particularly by women – as spirit
mediums and female ‘chiefs’, as healers/diviners and as grandmothers
/family elders. In contexts of ‘development’ however, such connections
tend to disappear from sight. What is seen and considered are the living,
the bodies and the individuals, while the links to the dead, the souls and
the community are discarded. In this reduction much of women’s lives
and local importance is erased.
Thus the blessings of the global market tend to be limited from
women’s points of view. Only few women are integrated in market relations
as wage labourers, more often than not on lousy terms. e.g. in Free
Trade Zones which are “characterised by women working for cheap
wages, on a piece-rate basis, in substandard working conditions with a
high degree of job-insecurity. The jobs are repetitive and monotonous and
require concentration and nimble fingers – considered as ‘assets’ of female
workers, who are never valued as ‘skilled’” (DAWN 2000, p. 62). In actual
fact most poor women operate outside the formal markets, in subsistence
production and/or in the so-called ‘informal sector’. As however the market
proper only responds to needs expressed in cash, “the emerging
state/market relationships perpetuate the exclusion of poor women from
mainstream economic and social activities” (Taylor 1999). While just a
tiny minority of middle class women are likely to experience the advantages
of development, the majority of women are being excluded – in a
world where transformation to market conditions is increasingly taking
place.
Section 3: Challenges for the Women’s Movements
Reversals of learning
Mainstream development aid is implicitly based on a model saying: They
(the development aid receivers) have the problem, we (the donors) have
the solution. This line of thinking produces the overall conception of economic
poverty as the dominant problem, matching economic growth, in
the shape of marketisation, as the universal solution. In the field of gender
their problem is women’s oppression and subordination, our solution
is equal rights and market relations. But does it work? Maybe time has
come for North/South reversals of learning.
Reversals of learning is an idea adapted from Robert Chambers (1983,