No abstract

As Africa’s urban systems change and transform with more women becoming educated and getting work outside the home and more men are confronting unemployment and retrenchment, an emerging phenomenon has surfaced challenging common gender identities and roles in the context of families. Current livelihood realities reconstruct and renegotiate how household needs are met and who meets these needs, consequently questioning traditional patriarchal dictates. Increasing numbers of women in Africa’s urban centres play breadwinning roles and become lifelines for their families. Unfortunately, research and literature say little about the experiences of these women as they navigate unusual social spaces. This article investigates the challenges that breadwinning women face and how they cope with these challenges in a Nigerian megacity. Data were gathered through In-depth Interviews (IDIs) with 20 female breadwinning families and the theoretical framework adopted is a triangulation of modernisation and patriarchy theories. Data analysis was done through content analysis and presented as ethnographic narratives and summaries. Important findings were made and presented in this article.

Abstract

Background: Echocardiography is a non-invasive, relatively cheap and useful imaging technique for the evaluation of cardiac diseases. The procedure has reliable levels of accuracy.

The title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into ‘don't sell me a dummy’. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the ‘counter‐revolution’ in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor ‘policy merchandising’ of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of ‘donor’ countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as ‘a silent revolution in development’, embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of ‘working with the grain of African politics’, the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra‐territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the ‘donor’ countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.