Gendered politics in rural roads: gender mainstreaming in Tanzania's transport sector

Abstract

This paper explores the impacts of gender mainstreaming initiatives in Tanzania's transport sector on the everyday reality of rural women's lives, including those facing multiple forms of discrimination. Using qualitative methods, including co-investigation with community members, data were triangulated from diverse sources: vulnerable women and other residents in two Tanzanian districts, road contractors, professionals engaged in supporting the country's transport programmes and staff in donor agencies. The results indicate that progress in mainstreaming has been slow. Despite government directives, few women have benefitted from employment in road construction except through two national programmes: the Village Travel and Transport Programme and the Tanzania Social Action Fund. However, most women, particularly those disadvantaged, derive benefit from road improvement, even if only as pedestrians or wheelchair users taking advantage of a smoother surface, or better travel security when vegetation is cut back. For women with the funds and independence to access the expanded transport services that tend to follow road improvements, there can be significant benefits – faster travel, improved access to farms and markets and sometimes lower transport costs. Nevertheless, women's constrained resources and prevailing cultural mores continue to militate against them directly operating transport, whether for personal or business use.

Rural Transportation Infrastructure in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Review of Impacts, Implications, and Interventions

“…Increased transportation infrastructure also adds to the amount of traffic and cash that flows through particular areas, to which violence and harassment have been attributed as unforeseen byproducts [148]. Clearly, underlying sociocultural norms play a role, and emphasize the importance of rural transportation interventions and systems that take gender-aware approaches to specifically and distinctly address women's safety and security concerns [144,147,148,157,[161][162][163].…”

“…Despite the significant amount of evidence and encouraging progress contributed to the rural transportation sector concerning gender from groups such as ReCAP, future research should expand to directly incorporate gender into policies and practices, and acquire genderdisaggregated data to support and enforce policy decisions [28,147,157,[161][162][163][164]. Gender mainstreaming has been termed an obligation and responsibility of the transport sector, warranting radical change [136].…”

“…Gender mainstreaming has been termed an obligation and responsibility of the transport sector, warranting radical change [136]. In this way, women's perspectives should be included more closely and genuinely [137], in order to break down the "invisibility" that women routinely experience in conversations of policy, planning, and management [146,147,151,163]. Gender-specific monitoring and evaluation of projects and policies will be a crucial step in developing both equity and accountability [152,163].…”

Transportation and Change through an Anthropological Lens

“…Women with more resources and independence benefited most from the expanded road services. (Mulongo et. al.…”

Meeting Young People’s Mobility and Transport Needs: Review and Prospect

“…Subsequently, there has been a slow turn towards promoting young people's voices in the transport sector in LMICs through the adoption of participatory approaches, including Simpson and Collard 2019 [17]. However, the constraints which tend to minimise poorer women's voices (not least supposed lack of competence to contribute to what is perceived as the domain of middle-class male engineer experts) continue to play an even stronger role globally in the case of children and young people [14,18,19].…”