CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 4
4.3 Gender and development in the third world
4.3.6 Gender and Development (GAD)
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.
different (Moser 1993:3). The underlying rationale of the WID approach remains that
women would be better served if they were incorporated into existing development processes (Moser 1993:3). Women are focused on mainly in isolation with measures such as access to credit and employment seen as the best strategy towards integration (Moser 1993:3). GAD on the other hand resists focusing on women in isolation, asserting that this ignores the real issue which is patriarchy (Moser 1993:3). GAD researchers thus focus their planning efforts on gender relations.
Proponents of the GAD approach (Rathgeber 1990; Young 1993) argue that it is a holistic approach that does not focus exclusively on the productive and reproductive aspects of women’s lives to the exclusion of the other. Primarily, the GAD approach “acknowledges the need to understand gender relations on the ground, and to investigate the specific ways gender ideology and relations contribute to women’s subordination and the sexual division of labor and power” (Parpart 1995:235). This approach consciously seeks to understand
women’s subordination in terms of political, economic, and ideological forces. Influenced by third world perspectives (Kabeer 1994; Sen and Grown 1987), GAD places emphasis on poverty and global inequalities (Parpart 1995:235).
From this perspective the basic problematic is not women’s integration into development, or their invisibility, or their lack of training, education, credit, self-esteem, but the structures and processes that give rise to women’s disadvantage (Young 1993:134).
Rathgeber (1990:494) suggests that the GAD approach rejects the private/public dichotomy that has been used to undervalue family and household maintenance work carried out by women. Rather GAD theorists enter the “private” sphere of the family and analyse structures of oppression in the family (Rathgeber 1990:494). Having said this, Rathgeber (1990:494) argues that the state has an important role to play in promoting the emancipation of women and to provide adequate social services.
For both Rathgeber (1990) and Young (1993), women are not seen as a homogenous group.
Divisions of class, race and ethnicity between women are recognised while simultaneously
acknowledging the importance of both “class solidarities and class distinctions” (Rathgeber 1990:494). Ultimately, “the ideology of patriarchy operates within and across classes to oppress women” (Rathgeber 1990:494). However, Parpart (1995:236) continues to maintain that, as with the DAWN group, in the GAD literature women in the south remain “victims”
trapped in their poverty and needing salvation. This salvation lies with the “expert” whose expertise comes from her northern-based training (Parpart 1995:236). Hence, for Parpart (1995), in GAD practice, planning, and policy formulation there is no acknowledgement, let alone use of, the indigenous knowledge of the so-called “victims”. Short-term planning strategies of GAD include education for women, credit availability, and improvements in the legal system. These strategies, Parpart (1995) argues, sounds very similar to the language of WID and adopts the same modernist stereotypes.
While I too am not convinced that the arguments of Rathgeber (1990) and (Young 1993) around issues of difference and solidarity are nuanced enough, they nonetheless provide an important counter to WID planning which tends to erase difference and de-emphasise
solidarity amongst women. My own conviction in working with the women of Vulindlela, is that despite, and perhaps even in spite of, the class and race divisions between us we share a solidarity in our experience of patriarchal oppression. It is this reality that provides
motivation to my work with women and, I suggest, is what ultimately “matters” in the feminist project in South Africa. The rootedness of the GAD approach in collaborative efforts between first and third world women offers this study in particular and the broad feminist debate in South Africa in general, potential possibilities to build solidarities based on shared experience of patriarchy without our differences being erased.
Building alliances between first and third world women does raise the question as to the basis on which such alliances are built. The Fourth United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing, China in 1995 focused world attention on women’s rights. Women from the third world challenged development practitioners from the north adopting the GAD approach about their emphasis on gender equity rather than on poverty alleviation (Baden and Goetz 1998). Nonetheless, GAD practitioners in the north have continued to argue for an emphasis on gender equity through the mainstreaming of gender in all institutions and state structures (Baden and Goetz 1998; Jackson 1998).
As I will show in the next section, the GAD approach has been broadly adopted by the South African state in its approach to gender and development and underlies the current emphasis on ensuring gender equity throughout the society.