Document(s) 7 de 13

Scholars researching women, technology, and development have identified a common set of problems throughout the Third World regarding technology-related development efforts. Africa shares these problems, although its particular sex-gender systems and historical experience create unique technology-transfer problems. As previously indicated, however, the studies of the problem, whether conceived globally or regionally, are richer in description than in explanation. It is feminist political economy that has explained African gender relations and social change in the village and family. Feminist political economy, however, has not yet addressed itself substantially to problems of technology transfer. A deeper understanding of technology, development, and gender, therefore, requires a synthesis of these two areas of inquiry.

This chapter deals with one of these areas, the women and technology literature and technology-related components of WID literature, drawing on case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Chapter 4 focuses on the findings of the other area, feminist political economy, using an extended Kenyan case study and synopses of research by two African scholars to demonstrate the explanatory power of the framework. Chapters 5 and 6 in Part III discuss the synthesis of the two areas as an interrelation that has not been addressed in previous research. Throughout these chapters, the goal is to elucidate the dialectical relationship between technology and local community. Inevitably, in this investigation, national and regional organizations must also be considered, given that state policy impinges directly upon choices made at the village level.

African women and technology

Writers on women and technology generally share with scholars working on WID the view that women are caught in a nexus of political and economic dependency (e.g., see Dauber and Cain 1981; Nelson 1981; Charlton 1984; ILO 1984; Afshar 1985; Ahmed 1985; Momsen and Townsend 1987; for succinct overviews of the social science literature on African women, see Strobel 1982; Robertson 1987). Concepts from dependency theory inform this writing to some degree, although the full implications of the dependency framework are usually not explored. In some studies, the dimensions of the analysis are undermined by a reductionist tendency, borrowed from radical feminism, to treat men as a unitary category responsible for the oppression of women. Furthermore, most of this work shares the major flaw of dependency theory: a static, ahistorical perception of dependent societies, in which nations and individuals are seen as passive recipients of exploitative, capitalist structures and practices. In the dependency framework, therefore, neither the complexities of indigenous political economy, including class formation, nor the agency of local communities can be adequately understood. Specifically, the influence of community organizations upon the introduction and sustained use of technology remains largely invisible in the literature. Even though many studies call for more community involvement, especially of women’s groups, they rarely explore the historical basis upon which such involvement could be built.

Nevertheless, the dependency approach applied to women and technology sets a useful, descriptive context Charlton’s (1984:23–28) description of the powerlessness of women in development decisions exemplifies this utility. She sees women as being caught in a “triad of dependency,” whereby

In virtually every country in the world…women are dependent upon men in formal politics at the local, national, and international levels. Equally important in this conceptualization is the recognition that these three levels are increasingly interrelated. Events at the local level, whether in the private (family/kingroup) sphere or public sphere are more and more influenced by the institutions of the national state. Moreover, the expansion of multinational organizations means that virtually no country can be considered impermeable to influences that originate outside its border.… The choice by a village woman to breast-feed her infant is conditioned in part by forces over which she has no control: the availability of manufactured formulas, advertising and other sources of information (such as health workers), prices and cash income, and government policies regulating the operations of multinational corporations.… The conditions of a woman’s life — even in remote villages — are influenced by institutions and events that are physically far removed from her.… Whatever their traditional condition, women in general have little or no formal, institutionalized power at the local, national, and international levels in comparison to men. Even when [women] do acquire public influence locally or nationally, that influence is often undermined by the limited autonomy of their nation-state.

(Charlton 1984:24–25)

The powerlessness of women to choose is especially important with respect to technology transfers, which impinge so dramatically upon their lives. Many researchers (e.g., Cain 1981:5–6) agree that the people responsible for technology choices are usually those least affected by them; those most affected, who must adapt and live with the choices, have the least say about them. To make matters worse, this contradiction has scarcely been recognized, let alone addressed, in any quarter. Geographers, for example, have ignored the issue. The Women and Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers has criticized the silence of their discipline regarding gender issues (Momsen and Townsend 1987). However, two feminist atlases have been compiled to address the gap in geography (Seager and Olson 1986; Sivard 1985).

Women’s lack of choice and the invisibility of this powerlessness are significant in the context of Africa’s dependence on women as food producers. Lewis (1984:170) summarizes this role (see also Monson and Kalb 1985):

African women are usually the primary food producers in the countryside. Rural women typically work two to six hours per day longer than rural men. On the average in African societies, women put in 70 percent of all the time expended on food production, 100 percent of the time spent on food processing, 50 percent of that spent on food storage and animal husbandry, 60 percent of all the marketing, 90 percent of all beer brewing, 90 percent of time spent obtaining water supply and 80 percent of time spent to obtain the fuel supply.

Agricultural technology has had the most profound negative impact upon the ability of women to maintain not only their responsibilities as food producers but also their position within the village and the family. Inherent in much of the early policy from which agricultural technology flowed were what Tinker (1981:52–53) described as “irrational stereotypes of appropriate roles for women.” According to these stereotypes, which are reinforced by inappropriate definitions of economic activity, “women don’t ‘work,’ or, if they do, they shouldn’t. Thus a draft of [a USAID] agricultural policy paper done in 1977 could suggest that a measure of development would be reducing the number of women working in the fields” (Tinker 1981:52–53). WID organizations and WID branches in aid agencies have recently engaged in much rhetoric regarding the neglected economic contribution of women (e.g., see ILO/INSTRAW 1985); however, this rhetoric is at odds with assumptions that govern concrete aid policies regarding technology.

There are serious consequences to such thinking. The role of African women in production is ignored because it does not fit into existing economic models. Because women’s choices regarding their economic activities have been so drastically curtailed, their allocation of labour time is considered irrational when measured using Western economic theory (this theory assumes that individuals allocate labour time as they allocate resources, according to marginal utility, i.e., according to rational choices that maximize return). As a consequence of being considered economically anomalous, women’s farm labour has not been computed as a measurable economic activity. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA 1981), drawing conclusions from a study of African farming that only surveyed male labour, asserted that labour is the major scarce resource in African food production.

Henn (1983) points out the absurdity of this assertion, citing data for Tanzania and Cameroon that are probably fairly typical for Africa as a whole. Beti men in Cameroon and Haya men in Tanzania spent 220 and 450 h/year on food tasks, respectively; Beti and Haya women spent 1250 and over 1000 h/year producing food, respectively (an average of 4–5 h/day compared with the men’s 1 or 2 h/day). In the light of this, “it is ludicrous to suggest that all labour will remain scarce in the food sector until the gap between urban wages and [economic return] on food production is closed” (Henn 1983:1047–1048). It is precisely on assertions such as the USDA’s, however, that the World Bank policy on correcting rural–urban bias (cited in Chapter 2) is based (removal of food price controls to close the gap between urban and rural income is an important component of this policy). The focus on labour renders invisible the real scarcities in African food production: material and financial inputs to the major producers. The role of women as primary producers, unequal access to inputs, and the inequitable distribution of food crop income within the family remain unaddressed in conventional Western economic thinking. Almost all WID studies reveal, however, that any increase in farm income is appropriated by men and put to uses that do not benefit women and children. Women, meanwhile, are largely responsible for generating such increases, the production involved adding seriously to their workloads and reducing their ability to produce food for the family.

Given women’s different experience of development opportunities, it is not surprising that they have different perceptions of development than men. Nelson (1981:4–6) and many others describe the increasing gender conflict in the context of development processes and “attribute the situation to women’s unequal share of the new options or society’s resentment when one group of women…) has co-opted a large enough share to threaten the balance of power in gender relations.” Nelson cites a study of Zambian nurses (Schuster 1981:77–97) to illustrate this point. The nurses were drawn into radically different gender relations as a result of their high-profile role as healers in a Western system of hospital nursing. This system did not account for social problems arising from conflicting indigenous and Western healing principles. Consequently, the nurses became scapegoats for hospital problems, as well as for disruptions in gender relations in Zambian society generally.

Agricultural development projects have created a principal arena for gender conflict. Dey (1981:109–122) discusses the deep rivalries that emerged between women and men in a Gambian wet rice scheme. The Chinese engineers who designed the project misunderstood the division of labour: Gambian women are traditionally responsible for wet rice cultivation; yet, women were left out of the project design. These and other studies “underscore with depressing predictability the ways in which the new economic opportunities have been controlled and co-opted by men. African men (as elsewhere) have moved into a more advantageous position vis-à-vis women in their respective communities over the past century” (Nelson 1981:5). Some studies (e.g., Stamp 1986:42) also point out, however, that such privileging of men within the sex-gender system contributes to the inequitable political economy that disadvantages both men and women as peasants.

The loss of traditional rights and power in the village and family is a constant theme of the WID literature on Africa. As Bryceson (1985:7–8) notes, however, there is surprisingly little material written specifically on the topic of women and technology, in contrast to the large amount of material on women and work (such as Nelson 1981; Bay 1982; Hay and Stichter 1984; Monson and Kalb 1985; Leacock and Safa 1986; Robertson and Berger 1986). This material tends to analyze the relationship between women and technology in a cursory fashion. Nevertheless, both the general literature on women and work and the specific studies on technology transfer describe clearly the complicity of new technology in the subversion of women’s position. The following survey of key issues regarding technology and gender is gleaned from the few specific studies on women and technology and from a disparate variety of studies that touch on the subject (for a review of relevant literature, see Bryceson 1985:37–44).

Bryceson’s (1985) lucid definition of technology serves to summarize the meaning usually given to the term in the women and technology literature. In its wider sense, technology is the

objects, techniques, skills and processes which facilitate human activity in terms of: first reducing human energy expenditure, second, reducing labour time, third, improving spatial mobility and fourth, alleviating material uncertainty.… [These] objects, techniques and processes…have arisen from the application of human understanding and knowledge of matter and…serve to enhance human capabilities. “Human capabilities” denote not only an individual’s physical and mental capacities but also the social freedom for pursuing one’s capacities.

(Bryceson 1985:8–9)

This definition is useful in that it takes a step away from the notion of technology as artefact toward an understanding of technology as a social construct (I would add to the definition of ‘human capabilities’ the community’s capacity to fulfill its members social and physical needs). The definition delineates what technology is supposed to accomplish and optimally does accomplish, rather than what is actually achieved in the process of technology transfer from the Western world to Africa.

In exploring the realities of this process at the local level, whereby technology’s purpose is subverted, I identify 10 issues in the literature around which a degree of consensus has emerged:

1. African governments and development agencies treat technology as a neutral, value-free tool, which renders the problems cited above invisible. Development will inevitably flow from a technological “fix” in this erroneous view.
   
   
2. African government policies generally show a sexist bias, whereby development planning and implementation are structured so as to ignore women’s relationships with technology, even where insights about this relationship are available.
   
   
3. “Appropriate technology,” a slogan in development literature and policy, is often inappropriate when gender issues are taken into account Who decides what technology is “appropriate” and whose interests does it serve?
   
   
4. “Income generation” projects, popular with WID policymakers, are of questionable value or are even harmful to women. Projects that push women to make objects for sale trivialize their main work as food producers and reinforce the “home economics” stereotype of appropriate women’s activities. Furthermore, market demand is rarely investigated before craft production is encouraged.
   
   
5. Development literature and policy often view women as “welfare” subjects (recipients of social service projects) rather than as active agents in development. This approach overlooks the centrality of women in the African economy. Furthermore, the “target-group” approach assumes that there are systematic links through which resources can be channeled to women: an erroneous assumption (although he does not make the point in connection with women, see Hyden 1986:63).
   
   
6. Women have unequal access to development resources, particularly sources of capital formation and credit
   
   
7. Women commonly lose legal rights and political, economic, and social autonomy within the community. The loss of land rights is a particularly severe aspect of this problem.
   
   
8. Gender relations are disrupted, enhancing traditional tendencies to male domination and undermining the counterbalancing power of women within the family. Consequently, African women experience both a greater degree of subordination to their husbands as well as a loss of control to their husbands over their own labour. This often results in resistance by women to innovations they perceive, quite rightly, as contributing to their loss of power and economic control.
   
   
9. New agriculture and health technologies often intensify the labour of women. This is coupled with a loss of decision-making power in the realm of production, health, and nutrition.
   
   
10. Positive consequences for technology transfer and sustenance are evident when women are central decision-makers. The decision-making power of women depends on effective grass-roots women’s organizations.

These 10 issues are inextricably intertwined in the experience of African women and African communities. The first five issues relate to the politics of aid, development ideology, gender bias in policy, and misguided conceptualizations of the problem. The next four issues bear intimately upon the relationship between new technology and changing political economy in Africa, both national and local. In particular, these issues pertain to the relationship between technology and sex-gender systems (a more detailed analysis of the transformation of gender relations, which are the background to these technology and development issues, is given in Chapter 4). The final issue remains largely in the realm of potential and should be the primary focus for future research and policy.

The politics of technology and gender

Issue 1. The technological fix

The inherent difficulties in perceiving technology as artefact have already been mentioned. Anderson (1985:59) succinctly summarizes the problem for women in development:

The basic assumption persists that technical solutions can be found for any problem. Efforts to develop Science Policy Institutes in many developing countries, to negotiate systems for the equitable transfer of technical knowledge, to develop international journals for the publication and dissemination of discoveries — even the appropriate technology movement — all rest on the assumption that a technological “fix” may be found. If we can only get the technology “right,” then the assumption is that progress and development in the Third World will be inevitable. Many advocates of women’s involvement in development are now searching for the “right” technologies for women to assure their participation in and benefit from development. [Behind this is the belief] that science and technology, because based in nature, are separate from all normative and political influence and free from cultural or class bias. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. Among scientists there is an increasing acknowledgement of the interactions of their discoveries and knowledge with their social experience.

Anderson (1985) stresses the importance of acknowledging the power of these hidden assumptions and of exploring the link between “access to and control of knowledge and the effective application of technologies in development” A major consequence of the view of technology as a neutral tool is that technology transfer efforts, with relatively few exceptions, have carried with them a Trojan Horse of Western economic ideology: development means increased productivity through large scale, capital-intensive enterprise (or at least through intensive commercialization of small-scale farming).

Thus, as Palmer (1978) and many others (e.g., Sharma 1973) have pointed out, the high-yielding variety (HYV) technology of the Green Revolution, seen as a miraculous solution to Third World food problems, has had a serious impact It has resulted not only in less equitable gender relations but also in growing class divisions as land becomes concentrated in the hands of those land owners with previous advantage (such as access to credit or membership in the dominant ethnic or religious group), who are able to maximize that advantage in the use of the new technology. All aspects of crop production are affected by the new seeds and their accompanying technology. Thus, even though there has been an overall increase in cereal yields, the burden of work has increased considerably and large categories of peasants are no longer able to produce food or have been forced to sell their land and become labourers. Women have been particularly hard hit by the new agricultural technology. Therefore, one can question whether it is accurate to measure increased productivity simply by the gross statistics on crop yields.

In recent years, the neglect of women in agricultural policy has been increasingly linked to the theme of environmental degradation. As Baxter’s (1987a) collection of studies on women and the environment in the Sudan shows, a neglect of women’s roles contributes to destructive policies. In turn, the resulting environmental impoverishment creates more hardship for women, whose work is most directly affected. The studies in the collection (Baxter 1987a), which is based on a workshop held in the Sudan, pursue this theme in analyses of energy, food production, water, and nutrition. In her introduction to the study, Baxter (1987b) gives an example with regard to water development schemes:

Some parts of Sudan have bore holes installed with pumps, but these…have their difficulties: Long line-ups may consume as much time as the trip to other water sources; pumps often break down and may not function for months if spare parts and benzene cannot be found; or other, less safe, water sources may continue to be used during the rainy season because they are closer. In villages where water is brought to the houses by donkey, some families may not be able to afford the cost. Although the provision of bore holes seems a relatively simple solution to the water supply problem, nearly 75 percent of the country is not underlain with the water-bearing strata necessary for bore holes to function. Even when bore holes are present and working, they can create a “cone of depression” effect, pulling water away from nearby areas, causing wells to dry up and women using them to struggle harder to raise the water.

An important conclusion to be drawn from these studies and analyses such as Palmer’s (1978, cited in Whitehead 1985:30–36; see also Palmer 1985) is that those technological changes having the most significant impact upon women are not usually aimed at women at all: large-scale development projects and their attendant technology rarely include policy regarding women in their initial planning stages. The problem does not lie chiefly with projects aimed at women (although these are indeed problematic); rather, as Whitehead (1985:32) points out, “for large numbers of rural women the most significant forms of technological change are more likely to be the indirect consequences of both planned and unplanned innovations in agriculture as a whole. In many cases, far-reaching effects on women’s work derive from the powerful drive to commercialise the potentially profitable sectors of women’s work.”

In the context of Africa, the drive to commercialize has involved not only food land but also nonfarm productive activities that were also the province of women. The consequence for women has been not only a loss of income from production but also a dependency on sophisticated consumer goods, often imported or made from imports. This dependency creates debt problems for the country as well as placing severe financial strains on the budgets of women, who are traditionally responsible for consumer items. Commodities removed from the realm of local, small-scale production to factories include beer, cloth and clothing, bread, bricks, and cookware. Women were responsible for much of this production. “But urban-based planners and industrial ministries viewed production of pots, clothes-making, brick factories and modern bakeries as potential fields for government promotion of investment to spread modern technologies” (Seidman 1981:117). The industries did not involve much capital or skilled labour and, thus, were attractive. Seidman (1971:117) records that

The rural industries division of Zambia’s parastatal development corporation, INDECO, for example, proclaimed that it was introducing “modem” bakeries in small towns throughout the countryside. Little attention was paid to the fact that local bakers, many of them women, would no longer be able to sell their home-made produce in competition with these government sponsored concerns.

Tanzania, where a massive bread factory was built with Canadian funds, has a similar story.

New agricultural technology carries particular dangers for women, and may consequently harm the local economy. In Tanzania, for example, tractors introduced into settlement schemes allowed a dramatic expansion of the acreage cultivated; weeding, however, remained the task of women, and they were unable to keep up with the work. As a result, yields fell substantially below that anticipated by planners (Fortmann 1981).

Capital-intensive technology does not always have a negative impact on women. In western Cameroon, for example, corn mills bought by the Department of Education in the 1950s and loaned to villages continue to function today, benefiting both the women who run them and the communities they serve (O’Kelly 1973:108–121, cited in Wipper 1984:75–76). It is only when, by coincidence or design, women collectively appropriate capital-intensive technology, however, that such success stories can be told. In other words, the miracle of technology lies not in its physical attributes but in its enlightened application.

Issue 2. Sexist bias in policy

Although feminists are always hoping for something better, it is not surprising that sexist bias exists, given the cloistered, men’s club environment of policy-making. Afshar (1987) has provided an evaluation of the impact of sexist ideologies on state policies in several African and Asian countries (for a good analysis of Kenyan policies toward rural women, see Feldman 1984). Mohammadi’s (1984:4) generalizations regarding the national planning process generally hold true for Africa.

With few exceptions, planning takes place in a small unit, dominated by economists, and in a large number of countries…by expatriates. These planners and their concepts of planning have little to do with the conditions of people in general. The decision making and policy formulation is dominated by the wishes of a small group in power, the process is influenced by powerful interest groups, more often than not, unaware or indifferent to a consideration of women as participants in planning, policies, and national strategies. Not only women, but the ordinary male citizen is also only a number in the work force. Secondly, a realistic look at the levels of decision making and the sex composition of people who occupy them would show that women can hardly have much influence on policy and planning decisions as the majority occupy lower echelons and are mere workers. Inequality of access to training, education, employment and also traditions have limited the number of trained women who could participate in planning.

This is the setting within which notions of technology as a neutral tool, as previously discussed, are easily promulgated. It is also the setting, however, where positions far removed from the needs and roles of women can be taken. In many cases, these positions are assured of no challenge from men at the local level, relying as they do on current stereotypes and expectations of women. Particularly popular with governments (and many aid agencies) is the technological fix for women’s overburdened workloads, which are seen as a major constraint upon development. A comment by a Tanzanian village leader gets to the heart of the matter (Wily 1981:58, cited in Henn 1983:1049): “RIDEP [the regional development agency] should help the women with water. Water is a big problem for women. We can sit here all day waiting for food because there is no woman at home. Always they are going to fetch water.”

Similar assertions of male prerogative, supported by sexist bias, may be found in the more sophisticated guise of social science jargon. The following statement in a recent book on social services in Nigeria by a geography professor at the University of Benin (Onokerhoraye 1984:156) exemplifies an attitude and language that categorizes women as minors and a “problem” in a way that would be unacceptable in Canada today. As well, it presents a stereotypical and erroneous view of the past position and role of Nigerian women.

Women — like children, the disabled and the aged — represent a special group of people in Nigeria as in many other parts of the developing world. Consequently, they require certain personal welfare services to enhance their contribution to contemporary Nigerian society. The need for special services for women in Nigeria arises from their traditional subordinate economic and social status compared with that of men. Although, traditionally, the conception of the status and role of women varied slightly from one part of Nigeria to another depending on the customs, religion or culture, a woman’s role was largely restricted to the home where she was expected to rear children while the men were the breadwinners. Although women in some localities were involved in farming, fishing, trading and the fetching of firewood, their primary function was to rear children.

It is analyses such as these that inform contemporary Nigerian policy toward women, as the Women in Nigeria (WIN) organization has noted. In a recent policy recommendation document (WIN 1985:6–7), the organization complained that

Men remain dominant, wield and disburse power. Despite the crucial and basic contributions of women to the economy of the nation, their indispensible labour is unacknowledged, unpaid-for and poorly taken into account in national development plans.… We hope [the policy recommendations of the WIN Document] will be received seriously and will not go the way of most recommendations which end up neglected, un-read, stacked up in file cabinets or on dusty floors.…

Bryceson (1985:24–28) confirms these insights through an analysis of the relationship between the state, technology, and women. In it, she reviews policies affecting women’s relationships to production technology, reproduction technology, scientific exploration, destruction technology. She agrees with a number of writers that both Western individualist ideology as well as traditional ethnic and religious notions maintain women in a state of social dependency.

Bias in national policy presents one set of problems; another set exists at the level of field administration, as Staudt’s (1975–1976, 1978, 1985b) extensive research on agricultural policy implementation in Kenya reveals. In 1975, Staudt conducted a study in Kakamega District of western Kenya, in which she surveyed 212 small farms in terms of the impact of agricultural services. The services included visits from agricultural instructors, loans, and training, and were structured by an agricultural development policy that included among its objectives the provision of technology “on an equitable basis” (Staudt 1985b:xi). Staudt found that those farms jointly managed by a man, as opposed to female-managed farms of the same size, received a much higher level of service in the form of visits and training. Farms managed by women received no loans at all.

Staudt attributes this inequity to “prejudicial attitudes and ideological bias” (Staudt 1985b:37) institutionalized in a system where “men dominate administrative offices and political authority networks which provide contacts and information about valuable agricultural services” (Staudt 1985b:xi). The exclusion of women from cooperatives or the discrimination within cooperatives against women members was one of the most serious aspects of this dual ideological and institutional bias against women, hampering their ability to develop their farming practices or adopt improved technology. Cooperatives were important sources of soft loans for maize seed and fertilizer, tractor services, and high-grade cows. Kenya has an advanced artificial insemination program, and cross-breeding of European dairy cattle with hardy indigenous stock has been a major means of increasing milk yield. One high-grade cow may make a substantial difference to family nutrition. Staudt’s findings regarding access to high-grade cows demonstrates the disadvantage of women in this respect:

Given the high value of a grade cow and the committee selection process used to determine eligibility for the cow loan, the potential for discrimination was high, be it political, economic or gender-based. Not enough cows were available for the entire membership. Influence and contacts were thus essential for pressing or “reminding” committee members of an application. This is generally considered men’s activity, particularly because it is largely men who sit on the committee.

(Staudt 1985b:30)

Thus, even though most women belonged to organizational networks providing mutual aid and shared labour, they had no means of countering the bias that dominated local policy-making and implementation. According to Staudt’s findings, sexist bias was the most important factor explaining the inability of women to take advantage of new knowledge and technology offered to households. Her interviews with agricultural instructors recorded negative comments about women farmers. They also revealed that the instructors were avoiding women on customary grounds, where speaking directly to women was considered incorrect. The preference of agricultural staff for speaking with men is articulated in the following comment by an interviewee: “In the African way, we speak to the man who is the head of the house and assume he will pass on the information to other household members. Being men, of course, it is easier for us to persuade men” (Staudt 1985b:37).

There is a disingenuous quality to the pleading of “customary propriety” by agricultural instructors. The political economy evidence in Chapter 4 reveals that “household,” “head of household,” and men’s authority over women were not always as conceptually clear cut as they appear in today’s stereotypes. As with the notion of “breadwinners,” “head of household” as a characterization of men in traditional African families has a distinctly imported flavour. This is not to say that, in precolonial African society, authority and “family” were not coterminous. Relationships between fathers and sons, between brothers, between cowives and their husband, and between sisters and brothers made it very difficult to assign “head of household” status to one individual.

It is a Western vision of family and its spatial disposition that has informed a particularly crucial area of development technology: that of housing construction. In Tanzania, during the “villagization” campaign of the mid-1970s, men were encouraged to build Western-style houses in the new collective villages (Caplan 1981:106–107). A district official called the men in one village and gave them the following instructions:

Let there be one house, and let that house be built according to the family that you have.… To build one small hut here, and another over there in a corner, that is not a good way to layout a village.… We want everyone to have proper houses. So try to get corrugated iron for the roof, and cement floors. If you can’t manage all at once, buy a little at a time. We don’t want people living any more in houses which are full of snakes and mice.

(Caplan 1981:106)

Among the many problems Caplan (1981) identifies in this speech, the most serious is the lack of recognition of the complexity of the African family, whereby women’s autonomy is practically rooted in her right to her own dwelling. Complex and shifting family responsibilities cannot be encompassed within the four square walls of a Western-style house. No provision is made for the widow, the polygynous family, or the young couple. Caplan (1981) points out that the speech referred to the men as “You and your families.” Yet,

In Swahili, the term “family,” in the sense of a bounded domestic group does not exist. Indeed, it has been necessary to take the English term and turn it into a Swahili form “familia.” Such a linguistic usage contains a number of premises — that the unit in society is “a man and his family,” and that this unit requires a house and an area of land. In other words, concepts foreign to this society, of closely bounded units in the form of households, possessing property in the form of a house and land, and headed by a male, are being introduced. If this becomes a reality, then women, along with old people, will have lost much of their autonomy.

(Caplan 1981:107)

Along the same lines, a poignant illustration of the linguistic subversion of African sex-gender systems can be found in the dedication of a classic medical text, a text that was the bible for a generation of African health-care workers. Maurice King (1966) dedicated his Medical Care in Developing Countries “to the common man and his family in developing countries everywhere.”

A final, concrete example of policy bias at the level of the village is a case from the Sahel involving a matter of not only resource development but also of survival itself. An American solar technician promoting the use of solar water pumps gave demonstrations to male village leaders only, claiming that women would not understand them. Given the gender division of labour, whereby men are rarely if ever involved in water procurement, the demonstration was thus received by members of the community who were in no position to use their new knowledge or to evaluate the appropriateness of the technology (Hoskyns and Weber 1985:6).

Issue 3. Appropriate technology

Once the negative impact of capital-intensive technology began to be recognized, a new approach was adopted by agencies and governments as the basis for development programs. The concept emerged in the 1970s with a growing concern about world poverty and a shift to a “basic-needs” strategy (see ILO 1977:145–149). According to usual definitions of the term, “appropriate technology” is the most effective and acceptable technology in any given social, economic, and ecological context. The notion of appropriate technology is, therefore, relative as well as subjective, i.e., susceptible to the judgement of the users (this is, of course, desirable; unfortunately, it is also susceptible to the subjective judgement of the providers).

Appropriate technology would appear to be an admirable concept, in that it treats technology as a social process. Indeed, its appeal is such that its celebration in an exhibition held in Nairobi during the Forum ’85 Conference, Tech & Tools: an Appropriate Technology Event for Women, was one of the most popular features of the Forum. The objectives of the exhibition were “to increase women’s access to, use of, and control of technologies in agriculture, food processing, health, energy, communications and income-generation” (ATAC 1985:1). Displayed at the exhibition, with accompanying brochures including blueprints for manufacture, were a number of devices (including a series promoted by UNICEF): e.g., the Umeme energy-efficient charcoal stove, the oil drum bread oven, and the bamboo-reinforced water tank for collecting rainwater from the roof. African educational institutions are enthusiastically endorsing the dissemination of appropriate technology and training for its use (e.g., see Osuala 1987).

There is no question that appropriate technology is an improvement over earlier approaches. However, evaluations of appropriate technology programs reveal that many projects do not achieve their objective of significantly improving women’s lives. Furthermore, if a criterion of success is the spread of the technology beyond the original recipients, then the record is even bleaker. What has gone wrong? Once again, value judgments by development planners and a lack of account of social and economic impacts have undermined effectiveness of appropriate technology. As Bryceson (1985:11) says,

There is a wide array of technological devices that could reduce women’s labour intensive activities in transformation work [i.e., domestic labour] e.g. for food processing: grinders, graters, oil extractors, improved stoves, solar cookers, low cost refrigeration; for water supplies: pumps; for transport: handcarts, wheelbarrows, etc. Often these ‘appropriate technologies’ have met with less-than-hoped-for success because of limited dissemination, limited access or poor design.

Part of the problem is a lack of clarity as to what is appropriate. The thinking of Ventura-Dias (1985:194–196) is a case in point. In discussing the question of appropriate technology in the context of Kenya, she distinguishes between the concept of “improved” village technology and “appropriate technology.” The former is a conservative notion, she argues, because it does not intend to introduce changes into the environment or into the social or cultural order. Instead, it should “provide a solution to a felt need, should depend predominantly on locally available skills and materials, should be affordable and culturally and socially acceptable to the community” (UNICEF 1980:7). An improved technology could also allow a traditional task to be performed better or enhance the use of existing technology.

Ventura-Dias (1985) argues, however, that such village technology cannot be considered appropriate because it does not reorganize production to increase either output or the competitiveness of the producer in the market What is important is that appropriate technology be supportive of the ability of women to produce for the market and to obtain credit and technical assistance. The analysis of Ventura-Dias (1985) is intended as an advocacy of women’s empowerment vis-à-vis technology and her argument has valuable points, including a critique of the limitations of the “project approach” and an insistence that production as opposed to consumption be highlighted (see also Hoskyns and Weber 1985:6). Her argument has problems, however.

The distinction of Ventura-Dias (1985) between a conservative “improved technology” concept and a more modem “appropriate technology” concept reveals the flaws in much of the thinking about appropriate technology. First, the economic bias of earlier approaches remains. It is assumed that noneconomic benefits (such as improved health) will flow inevitably from improved market position and from activities that further integrate village economies into the world market. Furthermore, the traditionat–modern dichotomy is implicit in the denigration of customary technology management in the village.

Second, the error of discounting the importance of collective village involvement in the technology-transfer process also remains. As a result, women are once again passive, problematic recipients of “inappropriate” technology, a situation that can be fixed by providing them individually, within the Household Unit of Production (HUP), with the means of improving their lot. In this case, an improved lot is equated with an improved ability to produce for, and improved access to, the market Ventura-Dias’s (1985:157) basic premise is that “the problem of rural women in Kenya is…one of level of income and physical assets.” According to her, it is through analysis of the “specific characteristics of the HUP [household unit of production] and its insertion in the market economy” that an understanding of appropriate technology transfer can be generated (Ventura-Dias 1985:196). Another flaw in this thinking, the assumption of a unitary, bounded category, “the household,” was previously analyzed in the summary of Caplan’s (1981) thoughts on the concept of “family” in Tanzania. “Family” is one of the problematic concepts requiring evaluation that is cited in Chapter 6.

The reasons for the failure of appropriate technology programs must be sought in factors other than women’s low productivity and lack of access. Hoskyns and Weber (1985:6) give a clue to the problem:

Introducing appropriate technologies is not new. Groups throughout the ages have shared or copied others’ technologies when they found-them appropriate. On the other hand, some groups living next to each other for centuries, in what appear to be similar situations, have rejected the others’ tools, materials and techniques.

This statement implies that societies throughout history have had valid grounds — cultural or environmental — for rejecting available technologies. If we start from the reasonable assumption that women are refusing to accept or sustain appropriate technology on sound grounds, rather than out of “backwardness” or “ignorance,” we can begin to see the problems with the appropriate technology movement Who controls the technology would be the first issue to enter the mind of an African woman. In many projects, technology introduced for the benefit of women has been co-opted by men for their own use. For example, where women have been given carts to carry water and firewood, the carts have often been put to other uses by men (Hoskyns and Weber 1985:6).

There are other issues relating to technology acceptance. One is that the quality of the product may be compromised. Another is that traditional technological processes may be lost. A third is the question of propriety; for example, some equipment requires women to assume immodest body postures. A fourth is the effect of the technology upon work patterns; for example, solar pumps restrict water lifting to daylight hours. A fifth involves the expenditure of energy; certain water pumps are tiring to use, requiring foot pumping, an unfamiliar and awkward muscular activity. A final and particularly important issue is the fact that some technology requires a level of organization for specialized tasks that does not exist in the community. The collective maintenance of community property such as well pulleys is an example of this; governments rarely budget for such maintenance.

The experience of a Nigerian community with new technology in the form of a hydraulic palm-oil press demonstrates these issues and makes the point that “to be fully appropriate, a technology should ideally grow from within a society and reflect local choices” (Charlton 1984:86).

For generations, the extraction of oil-palm fruits, a time and energy consuming task, has been done by women in some Nigerian communities. When a hydraulic oil press was to be introduced in one community, the village, a piece of land was allocated by the village head. When the oil press had been installed, 72 percent of the people used it, but after a year the figure dropped to 24 percent. Although they knew about the benefits, they withdrew from the use of the oil press for several reasons — the by-products of the pressing pit were lost, i.e., the fibre was used as a source of heat; the daily time schedule for using the oil press did not coincide with that of the women; the size of the mortar was designed for men and women could only use it with an increased labour force; during peak season, the women had to wait for the use of the press; all oil from it belonged to the men, and the women did not benefit from the increase of oil per unit of fruit processed.

(Janelid 1975, cited in Charlton 1984:85–86)

Improved stoves are one of the most popular artefacts of the appropriate technology movement. Although valuable in many situations, they have also created a host of unforseen problems and have been accepted only slowly and unevenly. Many stoves are unsuited for local cuisine; do not fit the local cookware; require women to cook and serve food in the daylight at the expense of other tasks, as there is no longer firelight to see by; or, in many cases, require the purchase of expensive charcoal in places where gathering free fuel is still an alternative (only in areas where fuel is habitually purchased, such as in towns, is there large-scale reliance on such stoves). Solar stoves require women to cook in the heat of the day. Hoskyns and Weber (1985:8) identify the most common complaints by women about their new stoves.

[they have lost] smoke for chasing insects or waterproofing roofs,…a centre for conversation and a symbolic focus for the household. The three stones offer the benefit of flexibility of being moved due to the weather, etc., and of cooking with pots of various sizes. There are technical solutions to some of these losses, if women have carefully identified and project officials have listened to the real uses and benefits of traditional cooking fires.

Stove projects also fail because they do not take account of polygynous households. Replacing the traditional three-stone fireplace in each hut with a single stove for the “family” raises the question of where to locate the stove and how to allocate cooking time. Given that separate hearths structure polygynous marriages, the promotion of technology that undermines this practice is bound to fail or, worse, seriously disrupt the marriage institution.

The Kenyan poet Okot p’Bitek’s diatribe against stoves from the Song of Ocol says much:

I really hate the charcoal stove!

Your hand is always dirty

And anything you touch is blackened…

I am terribly afraid

Of the white man’s stove

And I do not like using it

Because you stand up

When you cook

Who ever cooked standing up?

You use the saucepan and the frying pan

And other flat bottomed things

Because the stoves are flat

Like the face of a drum

The earthen vegetable pot

Cannot sit on it

There are no stones

On which to place

The pot for making millet bread.…

At the 1981 seminar on rural development and women in Africa held in Dakar, Senegal, criticism of appropriate technology was sharp.

Appropriate for whom? Who exactly benefits from this “appropriate technology” and why is it now felt that Africa needs appropriate technology? Given the fact that the ideology behind what is appropriate for Africa as well as the original design and parts would be brought from external sources, what is the implication for the balance of payments?… What may seem cheap to an urban male official may be impossibly expensive to a poor rural woman given her very limited access to resources. This is particularly true when the work to be assisted does not yield any income.… The assumption that rural women do not accept or are slow to accept innovation is a false assumption generated by an ideology of disdain for rural people; and it is a concrete symptom of blaming the victim. Given the precarious nature and economic insecurity of the rural poor, women are cautious rather than backward. Once convinced of the usefulness of a given innovation, rural women not only accept it but have often adapted and improved the technique.

(ILO 1984:22–23)

Carr (1981) gives a brief, useful overview of the “theory, practice, and policy” of technologies appropriate for women. In more recent work, Carr and Sandhu (1987) introduce another important question on appropriate technology: Even if technology is adopted successfully, does it achieve the planners’ desired ends? If not, what does this say about the planners’ goals? An important example is the misplaced assumption that appropriate technology will automatically release women’s time for economically productive activity — farming or income-earning activities. The studies surveyed by Carr and Sandhu (1987) reveal, however, that women often spend their time improving the quality of family life (i.e., sewing and child care) rather than on food production or cash-generating activities. One reason for this is that women cannot take advantage of time saved because of a lack of access to land or credit. This point demonstrates the necessity of taking the complex socioeconomic approach when planning technology transfers. Another important consideration in appropriate technology planning is the possibility that the new technology may put many women out of a paid job, such as the sale of water or wood (Carr and Sandhu’s [1987] findings are discussed further in Chapter 6, pp. 119–120).

Issue 4. Income generation

Like appropriate technology, income generation is a pet concept of WID policy. Resting on the same assumption underlying the appropriate technology initiative, that improved income is the answer to the exclusion of women from development, income-generation schemes encourage women to make articles for sale, providing them with the necessary technological know-how and, sometimes, equipment. For an indication of the popularity of income-generation schemes in Kenya, see the list of activities and organizational goals presented in the Mazingira Institute (1985) guide. As Ventura-Dias (1985:202–204) points out, however, a major reason for the popularity of the schemes in Kenya is that they do not challenge conventional ideology about the sexual division of labour. The productivity of women would be enhanced, without challenging the prerogatives of men in the sphere of commercial enterprise. Bryson (1981:44, cited in Ventura-Dias 1985:203) noted that “it is important to avoid presenting [income-generation schemes] as commercial programmes as that would defeat their purpose, i.e. “cash” crops are male crops and men would be more likely to take over such programmes.”

Central to income-generation schemes, therefore, is the concept that they are “female” projects that are ancillary to the main business of the nation. This approach is not that different from the view that Western women work for “pin money” rather than for a serious wage. Skills training (e.g., sewing) can be viewed as an aspect of women’s “domestic” role. The consequence for African women is that they are discouraged from viewing themselves as competent individuals making an economic contribution to national production. To make matters worse, the presence of a long-term, stable market for the articles they are prompted to make (e.g., by the World Bank, see IBRD 1979) and the existence of an adequate transportation and marketing infrastructure are rarely considered. The danger of assistance agencies giving grants to set up noncompetitive industries has been documented: the industry often fails once the grant runs out, reinforcing the prejudice that women are economically incompetent (Tinker 1981:78). Furthermore, inadequate coordination leads to contradictions in development policy, whereby the left hand may not know what the right hand is doing. In Burkina Faso, for example, the increased production of millet beer, encouraged by income-generating schemes subsidized by the government, was jeopardized by the new Heineken beer factory, also subsidized by the government (Tinker 1981:78).

The Zambian Association for Research and Development (ZARD) duplicates Kenya’s experience with income-generation schemes. ZARD (1986:82–84) notes that government and local district councils have shifted from favouring home economics instruction for women to emphasizing training for income generation. One recently initiated project is the George Weaving Group in Lusaka, sponsored by the World Alliance of Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCA). For ZARD scholars, this new approach shares many of the flaws of the home economics approach. Even though many women have benefited from the scheme, the majority of poor women have other, more important basic needs. Once again, the priorities and needs of the women have not been researched. ZARD (1986) also points out that this approach assumes that women’s most basic need is income. An arithmetic view of development, as previously above, seriously limits an understanding of the structural social processes that must be implicated if successful development is to occur.

Income-generation schemes do not account for the capital purchases necessary to pursue the acquired craft, such as a sewing machine. They also do not provide training in setting up a production unit or in obtaining credit For the few who do manage to find work, whether part-time or full-time, long hours and subminimum wages are the norm. The increased burden these schemes place upon women remains unrecognized. Ironically, income-generating schemes, designed to reduce women’s drudgery by generating cash with which to buy goods and services they formerly produced, have increased the drudgery by adding the income-generation labour to traditional subsistence tasks. The meagre earnings from craft production are rarely adequate to purchase expensive food and services (usually from men) in the marketplace (see Ventura-Dias 1985:202–205). Meanwhile, Zambian governmental policy has paid little attention to the main occupation of women: agricultural production.

WIN (1985b:47–48) confirms Zambia’s experience with income-generating schemes in uncompromising language, providing a poignant description of the working conditions that follow logically from the promotion of such schemes.

Employment in home-based industries has for women the “advantage” that they can earn some money while carrying on their household activities. This, however, is a dubious blessing, for the ability to cater to their children and family needs is outweighed by their lack of mobility and independence from men and the fact that they have to work in isolation from other women and thus are less able (compared to market women) to organize around the conditions of their work. Like market women, those employed in cottage industry provide for low cost, labor-intensive goods and services that are essential for the reproduction of the urban proletariat. Yet (as a survey conducted in Kano has indicated) often their earnings do not match the minimum wage and they are always by far inferior to those of men employed in comparative work in the “informal sector” (e.g. mechanics, leather workers, construction workers, etc.). Like the traders, women who work in cottage industry suffer from the absence of any form of social security and social services. But they suffer more from the dilapidated housing conditions and restricted space which are typical of Nigerian workers quarters, for they must spend all their time in the house and the little space availably is further reduced by the presence of both their equipment (e.g., a sewing machine) and the materials and products they must store. Further, being home all day means that the double job is continually impinging on every minute of the day.

Issue 5. Women as ‘welfare’ subjects

Implicit in the previous four issues, as well as the issue of conceptualizing health problems treated extensively in Chapter 2, is the perception of women as a “welfare problem” to be targeted by development projects. The statement of Onokerhoraye (1984:156) that Nigerian women “represent a special group of people” epitomizes this problem. Income-generation schemes, as projects “giving women something to do,” also participate in this view of women. The view is an outcome of the application of the liberal approach to development policy, whereby individuals, or groups seen merely as aggregates of individuals, become the objects of projects. Participants in the important 1984 workshop in Tanzania on resources, power, and women (ILO 1985), in criticizing the “project approach,” identified income-generating projects as a major contributor to the categorization of women’s issues as “welfare” issues. “The orientation of women’s income generating projects should be changed from welfare to development. They should be based on women’s main economic activities and should be economically viable and profitable” (ILO 1985:6–7). Tinker (1981:78–79) supports such a change of orientation:

There is a tendency to overload women’s projects with welfare concerns: health, education, family planning. These often take precedence, and sink the enterprise. As self-sufficiency is preferable to dependency, so economic activities should be given priority over welfare programs. Recognizing the economic role of women is the starting point.

Even though much of the WID effort over the past 10 years has had as an overt purpose the treatment of women as active agents rather than passive recipients of development, the aim has not materialized in a substantial shift away from the perspective. This is not surprising, given the lack of recognition within the liberal framework that a person’s potential as an individual agent can only be actualized through collective action and, hence, that collective action is the necessary subject of research and policy.

Faulty perceptions of women are found throughout development activities. The discussion of bias in policy-making and policy implementation revealed both ideological and structural barriers to considering women differently. Staudt’s (1985b) study clearly demonstrates this dual barrier. Regarding the ideological barrier, it is hard to consider women as other than objects when they are excluded, by reticence on the part of the extension workers and planners, from decision-making and receiving instruction in the new technology. Regarding the structural barrier, given that women are absent from the formal institutions that channel policy and information, there is an organizational construction of women as “other,” standing apart from the development planning process. However, this conceptual marginality, so deeply a part of Western philosophical tradition, has not characterized African philosophy in the past

Technology transfer and the decline of women’s power

Unequal access to development resources (issue 6), loss of legal rights and political power (issue 7), disruption of gender relations (issue 8), and the intensification of women’s labour (issue 9) all bear upon technology transfer and must all be seen in the context of the complex array of political and economic transformations that have occurred in Africa over the past 100 years. Each case study discussed here documents most or all of these issues, although they usually do not provide an analysis of the political economy context. It is important to note that, in talking about the decline of women’s power, we are discussing the distortion of gender relations in such a way that men also suffer in the long run from the profound disruptions to family and community life, even though they appear to be the beneficiaries of the extra labour of women and the Western ideology of male dominance.

In examining the dialectical relationship between technology transfer and social process, a distinction must be made between large-scale projects designed to develop an entire community or region or to introduce economies of scale in production of agricultural commodities and projects or programmes designed to influence production and transformation work on an individual or household basis. Many of the factors impinging on the individual and household were reviewed in the survey of the five issues pertaining to the politics of technology and gender. As well, many of the social and economic phenomena documented by the researchers assessing large-scale development schemes are characteristic of small-scale technology transfer processes (as Staudt’s [1985b] study of agricultural extension services in Western Kenya so clearly demonstrates). This section therefore focuses on large-scale projects to develop an understanding of the complexity of the issues pertaining to the decline of women’s power. Two large-scale projects are considered, one in Kenya and one in Nigeria. Both have been thoroughly assessed in terms of the interrelationship between technology transfer, gender, and community.

The Mwea rice irrigation scheme (Kenya)

The Mwea rice irrigation scheme in Central Province, Kenya, introduced commercial rice cultivation to an area that did not traditionally produce rice. This scheme exemplifies the range of problems generated for women, gender relations, and the peasant economy in general (see Hanger and Morris 1973; Wisner 1982; for a synopsis of the Mwea scheme, see Lewis 1984:181–182; Agarwal 1985:102–105). Designed to fulfill both a social and an economic purpose (the settlement of landless peasants¹ and the production of a valuable cereal crop for the Kenyan market), the scheme has been touted as a development success story by some development policymakers. There are over 3000 titled tenants and their families working 1.6-ha family plots on a settlement where surface irrigation is provided. In 1982, the scheme was still showing a profit and incomes were, on the whole, higher than expected.

Robert Chambers, one of East Africa’s foremost researchers on, and planners for, rural development has studied Mwea since its inception in the mid-1960s. He refers rather scathingly to the Mwea scheme as a showpiece of the “rural development tourism” circuit (Chambers 1983:16).

Those concerned with rural development and with rural research become linked to networks of urban-rural contacts. They are then pointed to those rural places where it is known that something is being done — where money is being spent, staff are stationed, a project is in hand. Ministries, departments, district staff, and voluntary agencies all pay special attention to projects and channel visitors towards them. Contact and learning are then with tiny atypical islands of activity which attract repeated and mutually reinforcing attention. Project bias is most marked with the showpiece: the nicely groomed pet project or model village, specially staffed and supported, with well briefed members who know what to say.… Such projects provide a quick and simple reflex to solve the problem of what to do with visitors or senior staff on inspection. Once again, they direct attention away from the poorer people.

(Chambers 1983:16)

¹Thousands of Kikuyu were dispossessed of their land by British sealers in the colonial era. See Muriuki (1974) for an excellent history of the Kikuyu and Brett (1974) for a succinct account of the process of dispossession.

What of this showcase of development? Fortunately, the obsessive attention identified by Chambers (1983) has yielded a body of empirical material that feminist scholars have been able to interpret to generate a concrete illustration of the negative impact of such schemes on women and gender relations (see Dey 1981:109–122). The following account builds upon the feminist analyses of Agarwal (1985) and Lewis (1984), which, themselves, synthesize the primary studies.

The aim of the scheme was the cultivation of rice, both as a food and as a cash crop, to raise household income. The settlers came from a farming system where unirrigated crops such as maize and beans were grown on women’s plots for consumption and coffee was grown on mens’ plots (with women working on the crops to produce a cash income for men). As many studies of the Kikuyu (the dominant ethnic group of the region) show, the production on women’s food plots was sufficient for occasional sale of surplus, as well as for subsistence (for an overview, see Stamp 1986). At Mwea, because men did not like to eat rice, women were required to grow the customary food crops. The plots allocated for nonrice production, however, were small and marginal in quality; hence, they could not adequately supply the family (plots for subsistence were not initially designed into the project). Furthermore, women were required to work on their husbands’ rice plots (men being the official tenants and “their families” once again being relegated to an ancillary status and role). The workload of women was thus substantially increased over that of customary agricultural production, especially at harvest time. As is typical for Africa in the past and today, women spent longer hours in production than men.

With regard to control over their labour, women traditionally could allocate their own time, within the bounds of customary responsibilities, whose designation was the prerogative of the corporate kin group as a whole (i.e., the lineage) and not the individual husband. In the Mwea scheme, however, the labour of wives and children was entirely under the control of the husbands and men had complete claim to the income from the paddies. Women were paid by their husbands with rice, the amount varying arbitrarily. To buy customary foodstuffs and other household goods, women would then have to sell the rice on the black market, circumventing the rule that all rice be sold to the National Irrigation Board. The proceeds from the rice were rarely adequate to cover household expenses, however An additional problem was that firewood was no longer a free commodity to be gathered; women had to purchase it, often begging money from their husbands to cover the expense. Moreover, the wood was inferior, requiring more constant attention to the fire than usual. Ironically, if men hired labour to work the paddies, women’s work burden was further increased, as they had to cook for the labourers.

Hence, on the one hand, women found themselves working harder, with much less independence and control over their use of time, and, on the other hand, there was a marked decrease in their subsistence output, their access to and control over cash income, and their say in decisions concerning the family. Not surprisingly, cases of women deserting their husbands and returning to the old settlements were not infrequent.

(Agarwal 1985:104)

The loss of women’s power and autonomy chronicled here is backed up by the law of the land, given that the contract between the National Irrigation Board and each household is legally drawn up with the male “head of household”. As the sole legal tenant, the husband thus receives the full payment for rice sold to the Board. Furthermore, because women have no legal status vis-à-vis the family’s productive land (this applies to nonscheme areas as well, where male heads of household have been registered as sole land owners), they have no collateral with which to obtain credit to buy inputs to enhance production. African land in settler colonies such as Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe was massively alienated (Newman 1981:125–129). The land remaining to Africans in reserves suffered a major transformation in land tenure law, to the disadvantage of the community, which could no longer plan its use on a rational village basis. Women, in particular, lost out (see pp. 85–87, 103–105).

According to several important indices, the subversion of women’s position is linked to a decline in the well-being of the family. Although water is plentiful, it is badly polluted. The studies do not mention the health implications; however, one may speculate as to the likelihood of a serious bilharzia (schistosomiasis) problem in Mwea as well as infant diarrheal diseases associated with contaminated formula. Studies reveal that there was a decline in nutrition between 1966 and 1976; Lewis (1984:181) showed that more than one-third of children between 1 and 5 years old were less than 80% of normal weight for their ages. The women are clear about the problem: on the one hand, they do not have the means to produce for their families and are thus heavily dependent on commodities; on the other hand, they do not have enough cash to fulfill their responsibilities to their families. With this loss of ability to fulfill their customary role, they have lost self-respect. One can thus argue that women and families are subsidizing the monocropping of rice in Mwea economically, socially, and with their health.²

Lewis (1984:182) summarizes the Mwea experience as

prototypical of an extractive mode of development It appears to encapsulate the colonial economy both in the role assigned to women and in the manner male profits are dictated by official rather than by market forces. Its design precludes the diversification of productive activities among both men and women — a precondition for the development of a regional economy responsive to the communities’ perceived wants. Such schemes are predicated on a given level of profit in a given form, obtained through a hierarchy of state, scheme management, and male household heads: women’s labor is assumed to be an asset of the male head of household.

²An interesting problem is the availability of rice in the Kenyan marketplace and the impact of cereals dumping by Western nations upon African countries. During a research visit in 1981, I found rice to be extremely scarce, in spite of record yields at Mwea. Rumours circulated that the five truckloads of the National Irrigation Board’s rice had been hijacked across Kenya’s border; into several neighbouring countries — a black market activity substantially beyond the petty infractions of Mwea wives. I saw local rice on sale in country markets not far from the scheme at KES 7 per cup (about 1 Canadian dollar). At the same time, imported US parboiled (“Uncle Ben’s”) rice was on sale in an elite Nakuru supermarket for KES 9/kg — less than one quarter the price of rice in the country markets (in September 1988,16 Kenyan shillings [KES] = 1 United States dollar [USD]).

The summaries of Lewis (1984) and Agarwal (1985) are useful. Neither mentions, however, a significant negative aspect of the Mwea scheme. By its design, the scheme precludes traditional, village-based, decision-making structures including both women and men and women’s traditional patterns of association for social and economic cooperation. It was these associations that, in the past, provided women with a counterbalancing measure of power and ensured that village decision-making was balanced to favour all the community.

The Kano River Irrigation Project (Nigeria)

Cecile Jackson conducted an extensive study of Hausa women in northern Nigeria between 1976 and 1978 and has produced an important monograph (Jackson 1985) on the Kano River Irrigation Project (KRP). Jackson (1978) also studied the seemingly unlikely phenomenon of a Muslim women’s strike held by Hausa women in 1977. Her assessment of the impact of KRP upon women confirms the insights on the Mwea scheme and demonstrates the ability of women to engage in collective resistance to the subversion of their power. Her work on the 1977 strike goes beyond the understanding gleaned from the Mwea experience and, in that measure, represents a synthesis of political economy insights and WID concerns called for in Chapter 5. Although she does not investigate Hausa gender relations in depth, Jackson’s (1985) study is an example of the direction that WID work should be taking. Given their traditional participation in the market economy, Hausa women have been at a greater advantage economically than the Kenyan women in the Mwea scheme. At the same time, however, the Hausa women are relatively disadvantaged socially, given the predominance of Islam and its associated practice of the seclusion of women.

A large-scale irrigation project of 120 000 acres (48 600 ha) was established 50 km south of the city of Kano, Nigeria, in 1971. KRP was designed to increase agricultural productivity. In the way that rice was the innovative monocrop for which Mwea was constructed, wheat for urban bread supplies was the intended crop of KRP (tomatoes were also planned for). The decision was made not to purchase the land and turn the peasants into tenants; this process of appropriation would have been difficult because of the high population density (179/km2), the complexity of land tenure arrangements, and the inevitable resistance of the peasantry. Instead, the government registered individual land titles, installed the infrastructure of canals for irrigation, and exchanged the individual owner’s unirrigated land with equivalent irrigated land nearby. Farmers usually had the same neighbours. Credit was provided by the scheme for the first 2 years; thereafter, the farmer was expected to have generated enough capital to sustain the new technology required for irrigated agriculture. Management was supposed to level the land and provide fertilizer, seeds, and water at cost. The crop was to be marketed through the local trading network.

The stated objectives of KRP were “to increase food supply, to provide employment opportunities, and to improve the standard of living” (Jackson 1985:xiii). Examination of the project documents, however, led Jackson to the conclusion that there were also implicit goals. These were similar to the aims of the Mwea scheme: to convert subsistence farmers into producers for the market. In spite of the massive change envisaged,

it was also hoped that the social fabric would not be fundamentally changed, that inequalities between irrigators and nonirrigators would not develop, that new skills would be acquired, and that outmigration would be stemmed. The scheme was predicated on the assumption that the local population would move from isolated and dispersed farmstead types of settlement to nucleated villages provided with services.

(Jackson 1985:xiii)

Jackson found that the goals of the project were not reached in several important respects and that, moreover, there were serious consequences for local production and nutrition, the economic power of women, and gender relations. KRP caused a loss of traditional crops: sorghum; tree products such as dates, baobab products, and locust beans (an important weaning food, see p. 34); vegetables; and other food produced under the traditional riverside shaduf flood irrigation system (this system was wiped out by the construction of the Tiga Dam; see Jackson 1985:23). Furthermore, the traditional symbiosis between the agricultural Hausa and the nomadic Fulani — a relationship particularly beneficial to women — was undermined. Project organizers considered the wandering herds of Fulani cattle a problem and, therefore, designed the scheme to prevent the Fulani from passing through. Consequently, a vital food for both groups, jura (millet paste balls) could no longer be made and eaten at the midday meal because Fulani women could no longer sell Hausa women the milk to make the nutritious snack. Meanwhile, there were unrealized plans to produce fresh milk for Kano and the region from imported dairy cattle. “This is an example of the planners’ blindness to the food needs of the local population and to the entrepreneurial contribution of women” (Jackson 1985:24).

Another example of such blindness related to small livestock. Despite KRP’s stated objective to improve the standard of living and the traditional importance of poultry, controlled by women, to family nutrition, the project banned household poultry-keeping. In the face of drastic constraints on this practice and the lack of any support in the form of technological know-how, the women persevered in raising domestic animals, which continued to be an important food source.

Overall, the intention of KRP was that wet-season farming would meet the local food needs and all dry-season farming would be surplus. After 6 years of operation, however, rising food deficits were being recorded in the region along with a decline in the availability of sorghum, millet, beans, and cassava. Nevertheless, on KRP farms, families benefited from the tomatoes and rice grown thanks to the entrepreneurship of the project women.

It is evident that the local political economy was dramatically changed by KRP. The decline in the region’s food self-sufficiency was part of a transformation:

The range of choices available to the fanner has been reduced, as to what to grow and how to grow it. He has become dependent on the KRP management for inputs to irrigated agriculture, certain land has acquired a relatively high value, there is progressively more renting of land and so on. Although the area has been integrated into a market economy for many years there is little doubt that the KRP has accelerated certain trends and initiated others whereby the region is becoming further and further integrated into the world capitalist system.…

(Jackson 1985:22)

What this greater dependence on the state and upon the wider economic system meant for women is something that would be hard to call “development”

For farmers wives³ generally, the KRP has meant increasing seclusion and their progressive withdrawal from most agricultural tasks — with the exception of wheat harvesting. However, the specific way in which women have experienced this irrigation scheme depends on a variety of factors; age is an important one, for older non-secluded women have found a variety of wage labouring opportunities now available to them.

(Jackson 1978:22–23)

Many studies have shown (e.g., Cohen 1969; Callaway 1984) that, in African Muslim societies, a substantial increase in men’s income, as was the case with the wheat crop returns in KRP, leads to a power imbalance in the sex-gender system that is manifested in, and reinforced by, purdah (shulle in Hausa). In other words, increased productivity is often linked with increased control of women. Women who formerly worked outside their compounds are secluded once their husbands become wealthy. It is important to note, as Cohen (1969) does, that it is a mark of status, rather than a sudden access of piety, that leads men to desire that their women be secluded. The point, of course, is that religious ideology responds flexibly to political and economic conditions. Jackson reports that even when women’s labour was required in KRP wheat fields, informants would refuse to acknowledge that they engaged in this work.

Within the seclusion of their homesteads, however, women showed ingenuity in converting aspects of the project design to their own use while receiving no technological input. The drying and selling of tomatoes and the previously mentioned poultry management are examples. Women were able to generate meagre incomes and some food for the family from such activities in this restricted context; i.e., they had a measure of economic security, if little autonomy in the homestead. For older women, less constrained by rules of seclusion, a solution was found to the worsening gender relations, whereby male “heads of households” increasingly controlled the farm labour and income of women. Many moved to low-paid agricultural employment (at one-seventh the daily wage of men). The women were hired by a multinational company growing vegetables for the European winter market (Jackson 1978). The explanations for this seemingly irrational pattern are complex and are explored in the context of Kenya in Chapter 4 (see also Stamp 1975–1976, 1986). Briefly, Jackson (1978:23) argues that working for the company provided women with much more autonomy than working for “husbands or brothers or male kin of any sort,” whom they would find it impossible to defy.

The authority of men over their wives in the household, which is not altogether a product of Islam, provides a model for the agricultural work relations, such as in the wheat harvest, and this makes rebellion by the women workers a much more difficult matter. In this sense we can see again how the household is part of the reproduction of structures of domination for it is only when operating outside of kin, marriage and village connections that women were able to protest against their exploitation [in the strike against the bean-growing multinational; Jackson 1978:24–25]. And paradoxically it is also the household that enables them to make this challenge for marriage can give women tactical mobility. For women, the household allows some material independence but also entails ideological oppression.… Unsurprisingly, given the value Hausa women place on independence, the wage they are prepared to work for is very low. Wage labour, indeed female production generally, seems to be motivated not by the desire to accumulate, nor by the need to reproduce, nor by the need for subsistence, nor by the demands of the state but by the quest for autonomy.

(Jackson 1978:33,36)

³I disagree with Jackson’s (1978) use of the term “farmer’s wife.” The term implies, once again, that women are ancillary to farm production. The logical absurdity of talking about “farm husbands” makes my point.

Jackson (1985) draws the conclusion that KRP created no incentive for Hansa trading women to make investments in production within the household and made no link between women’s entrepreneurial activities and the project’s goals for agricultural production. The complete neglect of women’s concerns simply confirmed for the Muslim women that their best interests lay in removing themselves as much as possible from the household economy, creating a separate, women’s world into which to place their energies and generate independent resources, however meagre, with which to endow their daughters (Jackson 1985:57). Clearly, a vital resource for the community, the energy and initiative of women, was diverted from the community. Consequently, women contributed far less to local self-sufficiency than might have been the case had the impact of the scheme on the sex-gender system been taken into account (for another study of the impact of development schemes on sex-gender systems that makes important theoretical points, see Conti 1979.)

The importance of women’s grass-roots organizations

In practically every study that has considered the decision-making role of women within African communities, women’s organizations have been identified as central to the authority they wield. Even though cowives in a polygynous marriage have some collective say within the context of the marital economy, it is village-based groups, organized by age or by voluntary membership, that provide women with the power that can counterbalance the dominant position of men (see the case studies in Chapter 4).

In development literature, development policy, and much of the WID material, however, women’s organizations have suffered from the “target group” approach previously criticized. With little analysis of how, when, and where women have formed their own groups, development researchers and planners have no awareness of the importance of distinguishing between types of groups, particularly between those generated from within the community’s own customs and needs and those imposed from outside. Thus, it was possible for the 1976 USAID-sponsored survey of women in rural development (Mickelwait et al. 1976:xiii-xv) to conclude that in many situations, “new women’s associations, backed by educated urban women, might serve as a non-male-threatening agent for overcoming societal restrictions to an enlargement of women’s roles.”

This is the precise approach now taken by many agencies and governments. Therefore, there is the common phenomenon in African countries of nationally sponsored women’s organizations (such as Maendeleo ya Wanawake [Progress of Women] in Kenya), which are safe showcases of the government’s formal commitment to women’s interests and allow them to coopt national feminist efforts and ideology. In most cases, the organizations are deeply divided between the elite women who run them and the alienated local women whose interests are not served; Wipper (1975) analyzed this problem in Maendeleo ya Wanawake. The situation has not changed since the time of her study, as revealed by the 1986 scandal over the embezzlement of the organization’s funds by part of the leadership.

Because they have remained invisible, indigenous women’s groups have not been identified as institutions to be protected and enhanced through development efforts. Consequently, women frequently lose, through the introduction of new technology to their communities, the opportunities upon which their social activities were based. For example, in removing water collection from the daily routine of women, new water systems (such as pumps) remove an important occasion for women to gather and talk while working. Although nobody would argue that women should go back to collecting water from polluted rivers, the loss of this social time must be recognized as a serious setback for women’s ability to network and, hence, for their ability to sustain the social and economic life of the community.

Another aspect of development efforts that has undermined women’s groups is the widespread shift to cash cropping, with the attendant shift of production returns from women’s control to men’s control. An interesting study of work attitudes in a Nigerian city by a Kenyan scholar (wa Karanja 1981) revealed that almost all men and women believed that both husbands and wives should keep separate bank accounts to maintain marital harmony. The women believed that the separate accounts were necessary because of the different spending patterns of men and women (wa Karanja 1981:57–59). These findings reveal a continuity from the past to the present in the division of economic responsibility between men and women. Contemporary women use their income to fulfill their responsibility as primary contributors to the family’s well-being in the same way that, in the past, they shouldered the responsibility for production of food and maintenance of family health. Studies on women’s groups (see Chapter 4) reveal that the major channel for resources, in the past and present, whether cash or produce, has been through women’s groups. The village welfare and production system was in large part maintained, and, in many cases, is still maintained, through systems of fees and pooled resources circulating among women.

The loss of control over the product of their labour has seriously undermined women’s ability to fulfill these responsibilities. Furthermore, once out of their hands, the returns from their efforts often no longer go to the sustenance of their families. When men appropriate the cash returns from women’s work after commodity production or a new technology is introduced — as in the case of the hydraulic oil-palm presses (p. 59) and as Muntemba demonstrates in the study summarized in Chapter 4 — they treat this income as a legitimate part of the male financial domain. One example of this, personally encountered in Samburu District, Kenya, in 1973, was the case of a husband of four wives who banked the earnings from his wives’ industrious production of beadwork for tourists and, with the money, paid the bridewealth for a fifth wife, 50 years his junior. The other wives complained bitterly that the stock of cattle supporting the polygynous family was inadequate to support another wife and her children, and that their husband was satisfying his vanity rather than the needs of the family.

Given that the former relationship between women’s productive capacity and their capacity to care for their families has been broken by the diversion of a significant proportion of their economic return to the male economic domain, women’s groups have lost the secure economic basis for their activities. It is not surprising, therefore, that women prefer to work outside the family network for a small wage that they control rather than labour on the more productive enterprise of cash crop cultivation on family land. In this regard, I disagree slightly with Jackson’s (1985) conclusion that there is only a political and not an economic rationale to women’s wage labour outside the family farm.

Despite its lack of historical analysis of women’s groups, the WID literature has identified some important priorities regarding the group participation of women in development. The 1984 workshop in Tanzania on resources, power, and women (ILO 1985) was particularly forceful on this topic. In particular, participants stressed the necessity of moving beyond the castigation of development efforts for their negative impact on women, to focus on those rare projects that, by genuine development criteria, succeeded. Only through a careful analysis of such successes, in contrast to poorly designed projects, would planners generate the basis for more consistent success in future.

The purpose of the workshop was to exchange information and views on successful and innovative projects for rural women, to draw lessons from successful experiences, and to strengthen ongoing projects and stimulate the initiation of new ones.… Women’s issues are central and not peripheral to development. The struggle for equality is not a struggle between women and men — it is a struggle to change social structures and attitudes.

(ILO 1985)

Two projects in Sierra Leone deemed successful by their designers and the government were presented to the workshop by the eminent African feminist, Filomina Steady (ILO 1985:13). Their comparison provided a useful lesson on women’s organizations and development. The first project, cosponsored by the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and Sierra Leone, introduced new fish-smoking technology to Tombo, a fishing village. The aim was to improve the returns to fishing as an artisanal activity. The project, through the new technology as well as better storage facilities, made it possible for women, who traditionally processed fish for sale, to raise their productivity and control fish prices. To control the supply offish and circumvent the necessity of buying fish from men, some women purchased their own boats. Although the project had many successful elements, there were serious questions as to the sustainability of women’s self-sufficiency in the fish processing business. The need for foreign exchange to maintain the imported technology, the dependence on foreign experts, and the purely profit-making purpose of the scheme meant a greater dependency than before for women upon elements beyond their control By feminist and grass-roots definitions of development, therefore, the project was not successful.

By contrast, the second project was a self-help effort. In 1977, the Gloucester Development Association Project was founded to promote village development. It did this by encouraging improved farming methods, providing market stalls for the sale of produce, creating day-care centres and adult-education schemes, and developing a system of bulk food purchase. Its operating budget was a minuscule SLL 500/year (compared with the SLL 900 000 cost of the 6-year fish-smoking project; in September 1988, 36 Sierra Leone leones [SLL] = 4 United States dollar [USD]). “Its achievements are significant, self-sustaining and replicable” (ILO 1985).

Scattered through the literature are similar success stories. The corn mill societies in Cameroon have already been mentioned (p. 53) (see Wipper 1984:75–76). On the basis of 15 mills loaned to villages in the 1950s, com mills societies were formed, members paying a monthly fee to use the mill. After 1 year, 30 villages had paid off their loans and more mills were bought Eventually, there were 200 societies with a membership of 18 000. As is often the case when women form associations for a specific purpose, the associations soon expanded their concerns from food processing to other issues typically of concern to African village women (Keyi 1986). Wipper (1984:75–76) summarizes the Cameroonian village experience:

From the social gatherings that took place around the com mills came the idea of holding classes in cooking, soap-making, child care, hygiene, and nutrition. The women then set about making bricks and cutting bamboo in order to construct a meeting hall. As the societies’ strength increased, the women began to handle long-standing problems. They bought barbed wire on loan and put up fences to protect their gardens from stray cattle. The loan was repaid by putting more land under cultivation. Department of Agriculture assistants introduced a new and better strain of com, which yielded an abundant harvest. The women began to understand the need for contour farming. Poultry schemes were begun, village plots reforested, and water storage facilities built. The societies’ most ambitious scheme was the establishment of a cooperative store to allow women to import articles unavailable locally. Five thousand women raised the initial capital and several stores were soon in operation.

Even in conditions of deep impoverishment, women are able to create collectively the means for improving their community’s well-being. Chege (1986) reports the manner in which women in a Nairobi slum formed a communal food production group, the Mukuru-Kaiyaba Women’s Group, to farm a 10-acre (4-ha) piece of wasteland owned by the Kenya Railways that was adjacent to their shanty village. Organized along the well-structured lines of traditional Kikuyu women’s groups (labour contribution and sharing of returns are carefully regulated, see the Mitero case study in Chapter 4), the group grew maize, beans, and vegetables. The group’s purpose extended beyond collective cultivation, however.

The women sell the food they grow to get income for the group and to plan for other projects. As well, each member gets a portion of the food for her family. A major project they have proposed is the levelling of their land next to the Ngong river, so that it can be irrigated. Another is to fence in a small dam on the river, and stock it with fish. The Health Inspectors from the City Council of Nairobi have approved the proposed fish project. Once they have raised the funds and fenced the dam, the women plan to rent the dam to fishermen, charging entrance fees.

(Chege 1986:77)

Despite growing evidence as to the innovative capacities of Kenya’s many grass-roots women’s groups, their efforts and abilities have not been harnessed to development as they might be. This is because, once again, the “welfare approach” hampers viewing them as the progressive force that they are. Officials who interact with the groups are usually community development officers or home economics extension workers (Ventura-Dias 1985:209–210). If one can identify genuine development in Kenyan villages, however, the cause may usually be located in the efforts of the village self-help groups.

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