3.2. Development: Changing definition in historical perspective
3.2.1 Women and development programmes
Concisely, development is best described in the following words of Mahbub ul Haq, a UN Human Development Director:
The basic purpose of development is to enlarge people’s choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and can change over time. People often value achievements that do not show up at all or not immediately, in income or growth figures; greater access to knowledge, better nutrition and health services; more secure livelihoods, security against crime and physical violence, satisfying leisure hours, political and cultural freedoms and a sense of participation in community activities. The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives (Human Development Report 2002:6).
In the middle of this century, the concept of women’s development was largely quiescent both in the public consciousness and especially among developing nations. Although this era witnessed tremendous changes for women in the western hemisphere, women’s issues remained mute in the South. Indeed, the history of women’s location in the development process in the developing countries has not justified the ideas of development as a process of enhancing people’s well-being. According to Haleh Afshar (1991), in ‘Women, Development & Survival in the Third World ’, the process of “development in the developing countries has, by and large, marginalised women and deprived them of the control over resources and authority within the household, without lightening the heavy burden of their ‘traditional duties” (1991:15). This view becomes very obvious when we recall Ester Boserup’s well- known 1970 study, which states that with the introduction of mechanised agriculture by the colonial administration, indigenous African men were taught to produce cash crops for export to European and North American markets but women were relegated to domestic or food crops. Even in recent times Christa Wichterich pointed out that “women do not feature much in cash crops production, and very few have so far been moved up into the sacred precinct of capital” (2000: vii, viii). Some researchers have attributed this gender gap to policy-makers being reluctant to be seen to be intervening directly in intra-household, societal, or cultural norms and relations.
Similarly, Rowan-Campbell, a Black-American feminist journalist, further noted, “while development strategies have sought to bolster women’s development index since the
1980s they have long addressed the question in a unique way”. The answer, she noted, has often been conceived in the form of welfare, aid5 and sometimes in income generation (1999:19). Rowan-Campbell’s argument carefully bring out the gender- blindness of the development apparatus as it exists even today in spite of the rhetoric of gender equity. Perhaps that explains the rationale for the welfare approach in developing countries, given that the welfare approach is often a process of ‘tokenism’ or ‘handout’ and does not meddle with societal norms and customs. According to Rowan-Campbell, development organisations have to become adept at dealing with women in development and gender issues. ‘Male hegemony’, wrote Rowan-Campbell (1999:12) ‘corrupts development initiatives which are designed to make a positive difference in women’s lives and, by extension, the lives of their families and their men’. As Kabeer (1999b:33) pointed out, attention to women’s needs has not always been a priority or even a consideration. Kabeer maintains that early efforts tended to be formulated for broad generic categories of people: the community, the poor and the landless. Thus, the possibility that women—and children—within these categories might not benefit equally with men from these efforts was rarely considered.
With 854 million illiterate adults6 in developing countries, 534 million of them women, and 325 million children out of school at primary and secondary levels and 183 million of them being girls (UN: 2001), it is difficult to think of development as about the expanding of people’s choices. As Wichterich pointed out, the effects of development or even globalisation are not gender-neutral: women are not caught up in it in the same way as men (2000:2). She acknowledged that women are integrated into the economy and the world market, but at the same time are immediately remarginalised.
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Flows of international aid from the West to developing nations were part of the policy responses of the modernisation theory in relation to development in the post-war era and were later increased with the introduction of SAP. These resources are usually transferred from one government to another directly (bilateral aid), or from one government through a multilateral agency or an NGO to governments or groups in economically disadvantaged countries. With the economic hardship associated with SAP, there was an increase in the level of national and foreign assistance in terms of aid in Nigeria. Many of these resources were channelled to women’s development. The rationale behind these aids varies. But one major reason is the notion that the route to greater economic growth and therefore greater levels of wellbeing for families, was through reducing state intervention and encouraging efficient utilisation of women’s labour. A neo-liberal approach, which argues that this would ensure the most efficient allocation of resources so optimizing growth, rates with concomitant social benefits. However, at the peak of SAP’s application, the international community imposed an economic sanction5 on Nigeria. This drastically reduced the flow of international aid. As discussed below, local funding was sourced through what the State tagged the “Petroleum Trust Fund”. Such funds were spent on Family planning programmes, cooperatives, credit facilities, child-welfare, road rehabilitations etc, under the auspices of the Women Commission. Whether these funds or programmes achieved their objectives is a different study entirely.
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According to Wichterich, it is a process which depends on the “feminisation of employment; rather than liberating women into the workplace, development (especially in the context of globalisation) has bred a new underclass of low paid or unpaid women workers” (p.2). In relation to the above, Sen and Grown in the book,
Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions (1987, cited in Canadian Council for
International Co-operation-CCIC 1991:20-21) maintain that a “development process that shrinks and poisons the pie available to poor people, and then leaves women scrambling for a larger relative share, is not in women’s interests”. They went on further to stress that they reject the “belief that it is possible to obtain sustainable improvements in women’s economic and social position under conditions of growing relative inequality, if not absolute poverty”. According to Sen and Grown (1987), equality for women is therefore impossible within the existing economic, political and cultural processes that “reserve resources, power and control for only small sections of people. But neither is development possible without greater participation and equity for women (p.87)”.
In recent times, emphases have been placed on alternative development programmes/policies which are initiated under different names or camouflaged to tackle gender issues. An important question raised by Pieterse, a development anthropologist, is whether “alternative development really presents an alternative way of achieving development or whether it broadly shares the same goals as that of the mainstream but uses different means that are participatory and people-centred” (1998:345). In theory, alternative development does not redefine development but instead questions its modalities, agency and procedures
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This is evident from the unevenness of the development process both over time and between (and within) countries, not to mention the distorted development in terms of the coexistence of economic development and social phenomenon of deprivation. It is therefore important to move beyond the myriad projects that involve women to consider the factors that contribute to the relatively poor impact of such projects: an outcome which often results from a failure to understand the underlying gendered power relations and the dynamics of social change. The magnitude of problems facing women in the developing countries sets the course for the second part of this chapter, which is concerned with examining women’s development approaches, especially in relation to the Nigerian situation.3.3. Gender Theories in Development Programmes and Their Applications in