CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 4
4.3 Gender and development in the third world
4.3.5 Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
Delegates from the third world attending the final meeting of the United Nations Decade for the Advancement of Women in Nairobi in 1985 gathered separately at a pre-conference meeting in India. While there had been much critical debate at a theoretical level on “global
sisterhood”, this pre-conference meeting was the first practical expression by third world development practitioners of their need to take control of the development agenda . This meeting was an attempt to forge south-south linkages through a formal forum. As a result of this gathering an international organisation, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), was formed (Sen and Grown 1987).
Significantly, DAWN became a space that third world women had created for themselves in which they could give voice and articulate their own development concerns. Through the birth of this forum, the gender and development terrain shifted significantly. The
development agenda of western, northern-based women no longer remained the yardstick by which gender efforts were measured. This particular shift of power from one group of
women to another is of crucial significance in South Africa where race and class issues define relationships between women. My work in Vulindlela is an attempt to explore power
relations between myself and the women who live there as well as the consequent
implications for the role of the activist-intellectual in working with poor women. The voice of DAWN is therefore important to the broad parameters of this study.
DAWN practitioners were concerned that any analysis that needed to be carried out should be from the vantage point of poor women (Sen and Grown 1987). They argued from a socialist perspective that poor women’s contributions, as workers and managers of human welfare, were central to the crisis and struggle for survival in the developing world (Sen and Grown 1987). It appears that DAWN practitioners were keen to strengthen the WAD approach by not simply taking into account international relations of capital, but by also focusing on the social relations of gender. In so doing, they called for a perspective that was rooted in the concrete realities, experiences, and wisdom of third world women and their indigenous grassroots movements (Sen and Grown 1987).
Building on this experience members of the DAWN group outlined what they understood as alternative visions, strategies, and methods to development (Sen and Grown 1987:78-96).
Their visions are rooted in feminism as a political movement and as defined by women from the third world (Sen and Grown 1987:79-80). This feminism cannot be monolithic but must represent concerns and interests of women from different regions, classes, nationalities, and
ethnic backgrounds (Kabeer 1994:80; Sen and Grown 1987:79). One of the goals of this feminist movement must be the alleviation of poverty which is the result of “unequal access to resources, control over production, trade, finance, and money, and across nations, genders, regions, and classes” (Sen and Grown 1987:80). The DAWN vision statement boldly
proclaims a commitment to a world where peace and justice prevail:
We want a world where inequality based on class, gender, and race is absent from every country, and from the relationships among countries. We want a world where basic needs become basic rights and where poverty and all forms of violence are eliminated. Each person will have the opportunity to develop her or his full potential and creativity, and women’s values of nurturance and solidarity will characterize human relationships (Sen and Grown 1987:80).
Recognising that to make this vision a reality, strategies of intervention are required, DAWN asserted the need for both long and short term strategies. Long term strategies that effect structural change and short term ameliorative goals are both necessary to the task of assisting women in gaining economic control of over their lives (Sen and Grown 1987:82). DAWN’s approach unequivocally argues for the participation of women from grassroots organisations in the process of strategic planning (Sen and Grown 1987:82).
...[S]trategies... must be debated, first of all, within the women’s movement and among grassroots women’s organizations. Such discussions can help to genuinely incorporate the experiences and concerns of poor women, to discern and identify regional and local variations, and to articulate a consolidated body of analysis and programmes to ourselves, as well as to national governments and international agencies (Sen and Grown 1987:82).
Key to this task, is the strengthening of existing women’s organisations. DAWN argued that in the networking of these organisation knowledge could be shared and methods of
empowering women developed which would facilitate the realisation of the vision of a just and peaceful society (Sen and Grown 1987:89). Much of DAWN’s work has continued to be in this area of developing institutional capacity in order to equip women to take economic
control over their lives. To this end they have analysed existing organisations and their potential for change (Moser 1993:198-203; Sen and Grown 1987:89-96).
As I have already suggested, the birth of DAWN significantly shifted the gender and development terrain into the hands of development practitioners from the south. However, some have argued (Hirshman 1995; Parpart 1995) that theoretically the DAWN group, despite claiming to provide an “alternative” theory to the WID approach, have remained trapped in the modernisation paradigm.
Hirshman (1995:52-53) argues that while the WID paradigm ignores cultural and historical specificity in its efforts to push “modernization” and “capitalism”, the DAWN paradigm erases the complexities and concreteness of ethnic, class, and racial barriers amongst third world women themselves in order to bring about “progressive” social change through a broad-based women’s movement. Hirshman (1995) is correct in asserting that this erasure of the complexities between third world women themselves is a serious theoretical flaw in DAWN’s discussion on organising for structural change. I will argue in this study that the women of Vulindlela are not a monolithic group, but have their own competing and conflicting interests as a result of differing access to resources through educational level, status in the community and so forth. The fractured nature of “Vulindlela women” is, I will also argue, one of the major reasons why organising for collective resistance against
oppression does not occur frequently or easily.
Both Hirshman (1995) and Parpart (1995) also indicate that the DAWN group, like WID theorists, continue to portray third world women as vulnerable, helpless, trapped victims who need to be saved from poverty and backwardness. So while Sen and Grown (1987)
foreground the important role that women’s organisations have played in development efforts, they nonetheless construct an image of passivity in speaking about the situation of poor women (Parpart 1995:236). This implies that “expert” help (albeit that of other third world women) is still needed by poor women to get them out of their oppression (Parpart 1995:236). My own work makes a particular contribution to this debate. I argue that the role of the activist-intellectual is not to conscientize women into active organising, but rather to open space for women themselves to explore ways of resisting their oppression which might
not always be consistent with “expert” opinion.
Having said this, I do not want to suggest that I am not sympathetic to the DAWN paradigm with its stress on women networking and organising for change. I am, however, also
sympathetic to the critical voices that want to highlight the complexity of this task. An important foundational premise in this task must be the presupposition that poor and marginalised women are not passive recipients of their oppression, but resist it in ways that are not always obvious. I will argue that poor women have developed strategies of survival which render them anything but passive, but are sometimes not carried out in the public realm. A particular contribution that I make to this aspect of the debate is my argument that these strategies are deeply rooted in women’s Christian faith. In the South African context, this dimension is, I contend, not taken seriously enough in the gender and development debate. To date little research has been undertaken regarding the impact of faith on survival strategies as acts of resistance. This study is an attempt to make this theoretical contribution.