Women in development: A critical analysis

Abstract

In the early 1970s a general disenchantment with development efforts in Third World countries led to a search for alternative development strategies and a growing awareness that women, like the poor, were peripheral to the development efforts of major aid donors. In 1972 the United Nations designated 1975 as International Women' s Year, highlighting the need to involve women in issues of economic development. During the past 20 years the`women in development' approach, which seeks to recognise and integrate women in aid policies and programmes, has been incorporated into the aid practice of most development agencies. This paper traces the efforts of large aid agencies over the past two decades to integrate women into their aid programmes and discusses the main limitations and weaknesses of the W ID approach.Many studies of Third World women in the 1990s indicate that their impoverishment is growing, their work burdens expanding and their status relative to men declining. 1 Given the optimism of development agencies in the 1970s that a focus on women in their aid programmes would automatically improve their lives, it is pertinent to ask why so little has been achieved. It is recognised that such a question encompasses a broad and complex set of factors that cannot be addressed adequately in a single piece of work. This paper, therefore, narrows the search for possible explanations by examining some of the major aid agencies' efforts to incorporate women into their aid programmes over the past 20 years. These efforts to integrate women into their development plans are generally known as part of the`women in development' (WID) approach.The paper begins with a brief overview of the emergence of WID in the 1970s and then considers some of the main problems with this approach. It is argued that WID' s attempt to integrate women is based on certain assumptions and arguments that have limited its scope and success. Third World women have been presented in a particular way, with their problems and needs identi® ed by W ID`experts' , and their control over the development process ® rmly restricted. While WID may offer a different approach to`doing' and`viewing' development, it is not an alternative approach to mainstream development, as its concepts, strategies and perspectives on development remain welded to the existing Western-dominated development framework.

Constructing Social Capital: Self‐Help Groups and Rural Women's Development in India

“…The study is based on District Rural Development Authority (DRDA) data, local official statistics, published census materials, interviews with government officials responsible for implementing the scheme and, above all, with those rural women who are the putative beneficiaries of the scheme. Our previous experience with local groups in this region using participatory action research methods (see Lahiri‐Dutt and Samanta, 2002) informed this work, as did some recent critiques of the static and reductionist uses of the GAD approach critiquing the persisting dualism of the donor‐recipient binary (see Baden and Goetz, 1998; Koczberski, 1998; McIlwaine and Datta, 2003 for a general overview of WID to GAD policies).…”

“…The control of women's involvement in the public sphere is often strongest at the family level: husbands prevent women from going out of the home; they use domestic quarrels, violence and other forms of intimidating behaviour, and try to spend women's savings so that their payments in group formation becomes irregular. Commenting on a similar situation, Koczberski (1998, 403) noted that such generalisations should not substitute for a contextual analysis. The specific social and cultural contexts of women's lives need to be taken into consideration.…”

Trends in Global Gender Inequality

“…Modernization theory (what Forsythe, Korzeniewicz and Durrant, 2000, refer to as the “Modernization-Neoclassical Approach”) has long argued that economic development will improve social conditions and lead to broad improvements in human welfare. At its peak, modernization theory led to the articulation of the Women in Development and the Gender and Development movements (see Koczberski 1998 for a review). Both movements emphasize the positive role of economic development in improving women’s position around the world.…”

Social development strategies of a non‐governmental grassroots women’s organisation in Nigeria

“…Contributions by women to personal and family subsistence and to community development have often been devalued and overlooked. Grassroots social development movements challenge stereotypical images of Third World women as being powerless, ignorant and trapped in inferior roles defined by ethnic and traditional cultural practices (Koczberski, 1998;Mohanty, 1991;Johnson-Odim, 1991), and highlight their ability to transform oppressive conditions. Recent development projects (note Koczberski, 1998;Federic, 1993), continue to limit the involvement of rural women by engaging management structures that are externally operated and controlled.…”