Document(s) 11 de 13

Chapters 5 and 6 have suggested promising directions for new research, both in terms of specific methodologies and approaches to the problem of technology transfer and in terms of larger theoretical questions that will provide the grounds for a sounder understanding of gender, technology, and power in Africa. This chapter proposes some concrete guidelines for conducting such research, organized around five tasks. The first proposal suggests a checklist of research topics for the task of classifying sex-gender systems. Second, a template for exploring interrelationships between development policy and social systems is explored. The third proposal offers a model for concrete action on technology dissemination that accounts for the need for community participation in such dissemination, and the scarcity of resources for it. Fourth, a program inventory to catalogue successful development efforts is suggested. The fifth and final proposal presents an exercise in the application of theory to a practical aid issue, the aid expert - aid recipient relationship, as an example of how to tackle the task of addressing the knowledge crisis in Africa. These guidelines should not be construed as posing a unified, singular approach to research problems and opportunities; rather, they spin off in several methodological directions with the aim of stimulating an imaginative search for possible methods and objects of more fruitful research.

Classifying sex-gender systems

One of the major findings of this book is the lack of understanding regarding sex-gender systems in both the developmentalist and WID) literature. The historical and cultural specificity of gender practices have been almost entirely ignored in developmentalist literature and given only descriptive treatment in WID literature. Meanwhile, feminist political economists have, on the whole, not paid detailed attention to the issues of technology transfer. Knowledge needs to be generated in a systematic way for African societies, using a standardized framework of analysis so that comparisons can be drawn between communities and generalizations can be made (or rejected if they are inappropriate). It would be particularly useful for policy planners to know, for example, that the experience of the Kamba in Kenya with regard to the adoption of a particular program is likely to be similar to that of the Ibo of Nigeria, given similar sex-gender systems. At the same time, the different political economies of these two groups can be taken into account.

What I am suggesting is a typification of sex-gender systems, as they existed in the past and as they have been transformed in the present From such a framework, one would be able to make the generalization that, in patrilineal bridewealth societies, land tenure arrangements were X and Y, and have become A, B, and C; in matrilineal bridewealth societies, by contrast, land tenure operated according to P, Q, and R, and contemporary political economy has transformed it in a way different from that of patrilineal bridewealth societies.

Such a typification will, on the one hand, provide the space to analyze each target community in historical and cultural terms, and, on the other hand, provide the framework for generalizing, comparing, and applying successful results from one area to another. The typification must draw upon the following resources and methods:

• Good, nonethnocentric and nonelitist existing studies, especially those of African researchers;
  
  
• Interpretive reading of older texts, particularly the early anthropological literature, trader’s diaries, etc.¹; and
  
  
• New research focusing on sex-gender systems and, in particular, women’s communal activity.

Sex-gender systems may be typified by following a checklist of research questions, to be covered by archival work, interviews, observation, and use of secondary sources. The study should have detailed information about, and analysis of, contemporary political economy, precolonial political economy, and the process of transformation.

Contemporary political economy

With regard to contemporary political economy, the following topics should be investigated.

• National political system (i.e., military dictatorship, nominally democratic, socialist, multiparty, etc.).
  
  
• Local formal power structure (i.e., system of local government, power of political parties at the local level, role of government-sponsored cooperatives, etc.).
  
  
• Local aspects of economy such as the resource base (i.e., pastoral, agricultural, or mixed), the degree to which commodification of production and integration into the national and international market has occurred, and the nature of crops and their price history.
  
  
• Ethnicity: “tribalism” must be treated historically. Ethnic divisions have become much sharper than in the past What have been the advantages or disadvantages facing the ethnic group under consideration? How does it stand in relation to national political power and distribution of resources?

¹Although many of these texts are sexist, they contain crucial information regarding precolonial sex-gender systems and modes of production. Contemporary oral history is too far removed from precolonial times to be of much use. An excellent example is Leakey’s (1933) compendious study of the Kikuyu before 1903. Several feminist scholars, such as Clark (1980) and Mackenzie (1986), have found this text a mine of information.

Precolonial political economy

With regard to precolonial economy, seven topics need examination.

• Kinship and residence system (i.e., patrilineal-patrilocal, matrilocal, etc.); this determination will draw on classical ethnological material.
  
  
• Sex-gender system (i.e., structure, ideology, and practice of gender relations). Closely linked to the topic of kinship, this investigation will draw on recent theory and research. Particular attention should be paid to the relationships and rights of cowives, with respect to both each other and to their husband and his lineage. The differing status and rights of women as wives and as sisters should also be explored.
  
  
• Land tenure, stock ownership, and inheritance laws.
  
  
• Usufructuary (use) rights of both men and women.
  
  
• Household and village division of labour, especially the sexual division of labour.
  
  
• Local power-knowledge (Foucault 1979; see pp. 129–130) regarding the functioning of society, specifically, with respect to agriculture, health practices, and nutrition. To what degree did this power-knowledge reside in individuals and to what degree did it reside in community organizations (from elders’ councils to women’s groups to cowives)?
  
  
• Organized associations of women. Was this formalized in age grades, trading groups, or secret societies? If not, what kind of ad hoc association characterized women’s cooperation among themselves? What functions, responsibilities, and authority did women’s associations carry? What was the relation between men’s and women’s authority? What was the relationship between the position of women as wives and their position as community members?

The process of transformation

Once a picture of precolonial society has been created, the basis has been laid for considering the elements in its transition. For example, the way in which women’s traditional organizations have been transformed should be investigated. In particular, the ways in which special-purpose groups (e.g., church group, rent-strike group, weeding group, etc.) become the basis for wider political action or other community tasks should be thoroughly examined. It is important to consider the process of transformation in terms of the community as a whole (linked to the wider political economy), rather than in terms of changes for individuals.

The following seven areas should be examined: kinship and residence, sex-gender system, land tenure and inheritance, use rights, division of labour, local power and knowledge, and women’s organizations. The following points give examples of specific questions that may be asked.

• Kinship and residence: What impact have housing projects with a Western design had upon polygyny? Where cowives share a dwelling, how has this affected the wives’ rights and responsibilities and the family’s ability to perform its economic and caretaking tasks?
  
  
• Sex-gender system: The above questions may also be considered as questions about changes in the sex-gender system. What has happened to the practice of bridewealth and what are the implications of these changes in the status and autonomy of wives and daughters? Has there been a shift to monogamy and, if so, how has this affected women’s rights and their role and authority as mothers? What has been the impact of Christianity on gender relations?
  
  
• Land tenure, inheritance: How has the individualization of ownership of land and stock affected resource use, resource control, and inheritance patterns? Has the shift to individual ownership negatively or positively affected families’ self-sufficiency? In the context of the move toward a patrilocal, nuclear family, how have matrilineal land tenure and inheritance rights been affected, and what does this mean for the education and health care of children?
  
  
• Use rights: Closely related to the above, how has individualized land tenure affected women’s use rights in land and livestock? Have these changes affected the ability of women to carry out their economic responsibilities? It is also important to consider the use rights of sons, who may be excluded from access to family resources by individualized ownership.
  
  
• Division of labour: How have the above four issues affected the village division of labour, especially the sexual division of labour? What has been the impact of male out-migration upon the division of labour, especially upon women’s work? Has mechanization altered the division of labour, and if so, has this been to the disadvantage of women?
  
  
• Local power-knowledge: What has been the impact of the domination of Western knowledge (formerly under colonialism and today in the context of independence and development aid) upon traditional knowledge? How has this affected the ability of local communities to make informed and relevant decisions, specifically with regard to health practices, agriculture, and nutrition? Has community-based knowledge, residing in men’s and women’s councils and groups, given way to specialized knowledge monopolized by certain individuals in the community or by “expert” outsiders? Have women lost out to their husbands or the community regarding the production and dissemination of knowledge? Given the breadth of this area of inquiry, the questions should be focused on concrete, specific practices.
  
  
• Women’s organizations: What is the form and function of contemporary women’s organizations, from household to district? How do these relate to former organizations? To what degree are women’s groups — whether for trading, cultivation, processing, social events, or religious purposes — locally generated or imposed from above? What has been the relative development success of locally generated groups versus imposed groups?

These are selected questions that may be asked about the process of transformation and are, as such, far from exhaustive. Beyond a general analysis of the broad changes of each of these topics, studies should pose questions that directly deal with their specific, practical concerns. Studies concerned with health technology should focus on questions of power and knowledge. Such questions have a strong bearing on a family’s ability to manage its health care or solicit medical intervention.

Table 1. Template of possible interrelationships for studying technology transfer.

Overcoming the boundary problem

While the larger political and philosophical issues are being considered at the organizational level, research/action loci may make progress using practical tools. Interconnections must be made between previously unrelated or poorly related areas of concern (Table 1). To begin, using the preceding guidelines, a study should be conducted in every area for which a development program is planned. It may not always be possible to conduct a full-scale study; however, with the use of secondary sources and this focused methodology, an analysis of some degree of depth should be possible. The case study thus obtained is the necessary basis for the applied research that will generate the specific project.

The technique involves asking a series of questions about the proposed technology-transfer program. These questions should determine whether participation, knowledge, and organizational practices as well as abilities and resources of women have been taken into account. The questions should also uncover the impact of any new technology upon gender relations, both within the family and in the community at large. In turn, consideration should be given to the possible ways that existing organizations might divert the proposed program, or support and enhance it, given the nature of their economic and political interests. The template of interrelationships in Table 1 is far from exhaustive: considerable effort should be devoted to developing the lists of correlating factors to be examined according to the practical aims of the proposed research.

Organizing for the dissemination of technology

This study has substantively demonstrated the value of women’s grassroots organizations, and their power (even if construed as “informal”) to influence village developments. The problems with the top-down approach, from sexist bias in policy to inadequate accounting of women’s participation in development, have also been shown. It is also clear that the resources for disseminating new knowledge are limited. This scarcity may be advantageous, however, in forcing a more cost-effective use of existing resources. The use of local human resources is also a more desirable approach from both a political and an ethical point of view. Self-reproducing schemes are the most desirable of all.

Rachlan (1986) discusses the “Human Action Model,” developed at the Environment Research Centre of the Institute of Technology in Bandung, Indonesia. This model has been applied successfully in pilot projects for rural development. The project discussed by Rachlan (1986:i) was aimed at “significant and efficient use of available inputs to produce optimum outputs and at the continuous use, dissemination, reconstruction and development of outputs by the target beneficiaries to accelerate the achievement of social and economic welfare of, and most importantly instill sense of independency from outsiders in, the rural population.”

The mechanism used to disseminate technology for the improvement of the environment is known as “horizontal dissemination of technology by vertical changes of roles.” This method produces

more and more non-paid village extension agents who continuously try to improve their knowledge and practical skills to get better social status in their community. The physical impact seems to justify this mechanism. By spending about 60% of the originally planned inputs the amount of hectarage treated by the ever improved technologies is 12 times as many as originally targeted.… Experience shows that by applying the horizontal dissemination of technology the government monetized inputs decreases at each phase of the dissemination process. At the demonstration phase the government input is purely advice, and at the diffusion phase the government field extension worker visits the farmer group only by request.

(Rachlan 1986:10)

The full development of this model in the context of African village groups is the research task suggested here. Given the vigour of community-level groups in Africa, the prognosis for the effective functioning of this kind of model should be excellent. Tables 2 and 3 provide a model that could be evaluated for, and tested in, the African context. Table 2 sets out the process whereby villages become empowered as disseminators of technology. Table 3 shows the four project phases: pilot, model, demonstration, and diffusion. The Indonesian statistics in Table 3 reveal the changing ratio of inputs from a majority by the government in the pilot year (year 1) to a majority by the villagers in the diffusion year (year 4).

Table 2. Horizontal dissemination of technology by vertical changes of roles.

Source: Rachlan (1986).

Table 3. Comparison between government’s and villager’s inputs over the course of the horizontal dissemination project.

Source: Rachlan (1986).

Inventory of successful initiatives

The problem for gender, technology, and development in Africa is not a lack of material; rather, the material is fragmented, divided among research/action loci, buried in documents that fail to cross the boundary between one area of expertise and another, and divorced from Africans’ knowledge of the problems. Of particular concern to African women is the failure to document successful development initiatives (see ILO 1985; also discussed in Chapter 2, pp. 37–44). A crucial research task to meet this concern is the development of an inventory of successful initiatives. The inventory should include both aid agency projects and locally devised efforts. Part of this task is the development of criteria to ’success’ (e.g., a water supply project that puts a water tap in a village but leaves women more harried than before should be excluded from the definition).

The time span that should elapse before an initiative’s success is judged must also be determined. A review of the continuing benefits of a project several years after completion can reveal a less successful picture than appeared immediately after the project’s completion. Setbacks to an initially successful project, however, should not disqualify it from inclusion in the inventory: useful lessons may be learned from both the positive and negative aspects of the initiative, as the following case summary of the Mraru women’s bus service demonstrates.

The nature of the inventory

Four kinds of documents should be reviewed. The first three comprise material produced by development-oriented research/action loci; the fourth is more specifically academic. First, case studies that capture the struggles and achievements of women in all their rich texture and detail are invaluable for assessing the interplay of social and technical factors in a successful endeavour. These narrative accounts, moreover, are particularly useful for women in other villages seeking to pursue similar technological innovations. Second, studies that provide overviews of development efforts in a broad area of technology transfer, such as water and sanitation, are useful for the comparative context and the framework of assessment that they generate. The first type of study provides a detailed analysis but few if any comparisons; the second type of study provides comparisons without much detail. Thus, the two types of studies complement each other. A third type of document is the research project that assesses a particular piece of technology (e.g., mechanical flour milling) and evaluates its development and application in the African context Academic texts comprise the fourth category of document to be scanned for inventory material: case studies, overviews and bibliographies should be found and collected.

Case studies

An example of the kind of case study that should be reviewed and catalogued is the initiative of the Taita women of Mraru, eastern Kenya, to solve their problem of getting their produce to market (Kneerim 1980). The SEEDS (Sarvodaya Economic Enterprises Development Services) pamphlet series, which published this case study, is exemplary of the kind of documentation being called for here. A jointly sponsored project of the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and The Population Council, it was developed

to meet requests from all over the world for information about innovative and practical program ideas developed by and for low income women. The pamphlets are designed as a means to share information and spark new projects based on the positive experiences of women who are working to help themselves and other women improve their economic status. The projects described in this and future issues of SEEDS have been selected because they provide women with cash income, involve women in decision-making as well as earning, are based on sound economic criteria, and are working successfully to overcome obstacles commonly encountered. The reports are not meant to be prescriptive, since every development effort will face somewhat different problems and resources. Rather, they have been written to describe the history of an idea and its implementation in the hope that the lessons learned can be useful in a variety of settings. They are also being written to bring to the attention of those in decision-making positions the fact that income-generating projects for and by women are viable and have important roles to play in development.

(Kneerim 1980:i)

The Mraru Women’s Group is typical of the self-help groups all over Kenya, with features much like the Mitero groups described in Chapter 4. In 1971, the Mraru women decided to raise funds to purchase a bus to carry them to the market in nearby Voi. This action was impelled by the difficulties the women faced in getting a seat on the local bus service; people from more remote villages and men usually occupied all the space. Over several years and with the help of various agencies, including a bank in Mombasa, the women raised sufficient funds and solved the logistical problems of ordering and purchasing a small bus. The bus entered service in 1975 and, for several years, made good profits. By 1977, the bank loan was paid off and substantial savings were being realized. The women’s group invested these funds in other projects including a village store and a herd of goats. Meanwhile, they succeeded in managing the technical aspects of servicing and repairing the bus.

For some time, the efforts of these women were praised as a model of what women could achieve through their own efforts and on the basis of self-defined needs. The life of the village was improved, with reliable access to Voi (a benefit also for those needing hospital services) and women-managed, local store supplies. There were also substantial intangible benefits: e.g., a greater voice for women in village affairs and the addition of a whole new dimension of organizational skills to the traditional repertoire of women.

When the bus wore out, however, the Mraru women did not have sufficient capital to purchase a new one at the vastly higher prices of 1979. When Kneerim (1980) wrote the review, they were following two main strategies: first, to save the additional 60 000 Kenyan shillings (KES) (about CAD 6 000) necessary for a down payment and, second, to have the land and buildings they owned in Mraru surveyed so that the shop could be accepted as collateral for a long-term loan. The author draws a number of general lessons from both the positive and negative aspects of the Mraru experience that could usefully be applied in other contexts (see Kneerim 1980). One lesson that is particularly important for Kenyan women is that they avoid the inclination of small businesses to diversify hastily without attention to long-term capital needs (for an analysis of this phenomenon in Kenya, see Marris and Somerset 1971).

The Mraru Women’s Group has shown unusual creativity and persistence in identifying common needs and organizing to meet them. They have also demonstrated that a small, private organization with few resources can effectively call on the skills and resources of other agencies, both public and private, to help them achieve their goals, while remaining independent and self-reliant.

(Kneerim 1980:1)

Overviews of development efforts

An example of the second type of study, the overview of technology-transfer endeavours, is the briefing document prepared by INSTRAW and UNICEF for the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference (INSTRAW/UNICEF 1985). Referring to the world water supply and sanitation crisis as well as the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD) launched in 1980, the document proposes a two-pronged plan of action: first, development of a strategy for “the enhancement of the role of women within the IDWSSD” (INSTRAW/UNICEF 1985:21) and, second, assistance in ongoing activities associated with IDWSSD programs. With respect to the latter, INSTRAW/UNICEF (1985:21) proposed that it “initiate and undertake action-oriented research to improve the data base, following identification of specific issues, countries and pilot projects” and “promote awareness from community through international levels through collation and dissemination of information and experiences about the stake and potential of women in improved water supply and sanitation.”

The document summarizes efforts by international agencies (e.g., FAO, UNDP, Unesco, UNICEF, the United Nations Department of Technical Cooperation for Development, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and WHO) and regional commissions (e.g., ECA). The two main parts of the publication are an annex on “strategies for enhancing women’s participation in water supply and sanitation activities” — the recommendations of the interagency task force on women and water of the IDWSSD steering committee (INSTRAW/UNICEF 1985:23–31) — and an annex entitled Insights from field practice — how women have been and could be involved in water and sanitation at the community level (INSTRAW/UNICEF 1985:32–45).

The second annex is the most interesting section, with its proposed inventory of successful programs. It surveys a wide range of water and sanitation projects and organizes conclusions about their value or inappropriateness into useful categories. It considers the past and possible future involvement of women in the different aspects of water and sanitation projects: planning at the community level; needs assessment; data collection; design and choice of technology; implementation (construction, operation, and maintenance), monitoring, and evaluation; and the special issues of training, and health and hygiene education. The document also reviews the broader context of primary health care, women’s involvement in the community, and women and development. The section on design and choice of technology is typical of the useful (and sometimes humble) prescriptions that the document has produced. For example,

In reaching technology decisions, full advantage must be taken of women’s knowledge in water and sanitation aspects of the environment, including water source and water quantity during dry and wet seasons. Women as water drawers can provide important information. For example…in Panama, women took the engineers to a fresh water source on the shore of the island which had not been found during the feasibility survey.… Consulting with women on the design of latrines can often result in simple technological changes which make latrines more acceptable to users. For example, in Nicaragua the latrine was not used by women because their feet could be seen from the outside.…

(INSTRAW/UNICEF 1985:38)

Assessments of specific types of technology

Although many technical assessments ignore or treat simplistically the social factors implicated in the technology being reviewed, some documents do account for these factors. These assessments are particularly valuable because aid policymakers cannot read sociological analyses to put real equipment in place in African villages. Unfortunately, far too much of the criticism of technology transfer has been general and sociological; the interface between the new material objects and the individuals and communities that are to use them tends to be ignored. Well-researched, organized technology assessments should be sought, both to provide concrete, detailed information on the technology under consideration and to provide models of how future assessments may be carried out

An example of such a document is An End to Pounding: A New Mechanical Flour Milling System in Use in Africa (Eastman 1980). This booklet, which considers several prototype dehullers and grinders designed to produce acceptable flour from both cereal and legume crops, “is not intended to be a comprehensive instruction manual; rather it attempts to review the accumulated knowledge and experience gained during the development, testing and operation of the several mills referred to” (Eastman 1980:5). The dehuller that is singled out for its special merits in the context of societies in Africa’s semi-arid tropics is from a prototype designed in Saskatoon, Canada, and modified in Botswana. The booklet begins by discussing the need for a special milling system for the semi-arid regions of Africa, in which millet and sorghum are the human staples. The problems with traditional flour-making methods and the various environmental and economic factors contributing to the need for a special milling system are also described. “The most convincing reason for developing a simple, dry mechanical milling process is that people in the Third World want it. In a survey done in several villages in Senegal, the three most desirable additions to village life were reported as a reliable water supply followed by grinding and dehulling facilities that would produce an acceptable product from local grains” (Eastman 1980:8).

The study discusses the development of the technology, giving an account of the first pilot mill in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Following purely technical sections on the dehuller and milling systems, focusing on their suitability for the cereals of semi-arid areas, the booklet gives guidelines on planning a mill. Two types of mill are considered, a continuous-flow mill, which would serve a large market area and operate as a regular factory, and a service mill, designed to process the produce of local growers for their own consumption. Eleven planning steps are proposed for the latter these include analysis of grain production and consumption patterns; selection of appropriate sorghum-growing areas; conducting a mill-utilization survey; testing existing grain and flour samples to ensure a popular flour from the mill; choosing a mill site; and budgeting, financing, and implementing mill construction.

The final section of the booklet, the most important for our purposes, evaluates the milling systems discussed in the previous sections. On the basis of a number of technical, economic, and social factors, the service mill is suggested as more appropriate than the continuous-flow mill in many rural contexts (the latter being of value for urban populations).

Mill planners must recognize that mechanical milling is apt to cause some changes in a society. For example, in many rural communities, much of the social interchange revolves around routine household tasks such as dehulling and grinding cereal. A continuous-flow system may remove this focus for community socializing, whereas a service mill still provides the opportunity for social interchanges. In addition, if a continuous-flow mill is functioning with full community support, the local economy is based on trust — trust that the grain that is sold now will be available later in the form of flour. Service processing does not require the same degree of performance from or confidence in the mill and in the marketplace.

(Eastman 1980:43)

Academic texts

In addition to surveying the two types of development-oriented studies, the inventory of successful programs should also review the more strictly academic literature for case studies, project overviews, and bibliographies. Regarding case studies, the corn mill societies in Cameroon, whose success was chronicled by Wipper (1984:75–76; also see Chapter 3), and examples in Chapter 3 are evidence of the value of this literature. These cases are often amongst the most interesting because they are set in social-science analyses and, often, in the context of feminist critique. Overviews written from an academic perspective are also valuable; they provide a critique that is independent of allegiance to commissioning agencies or governments. Rogers (1980) gave a hard-hitting analysis of the aid process and its impact on women, with evidence from a number of specific development cases. Mascarenhas and Mbilinyi’s (1983) analytical bibliography is an excellent example of a focused resource that draws together both academic and nonacademic literature. The result is a picture of the overall state of knowledge regarding women in a specific country (Tanzania).

Research tasks for creating the inventory

The following seven research tasks emerge from the concerns raised in the preceding section and throughout the book and from consideration of the nature of the material to be included in the inventory.

• The criteria by which a project or initiative will be judged successful must be set (Does the project treat women as central actors? Is the community adequately involved as a collective decision-maker? Does the interface between the material technology and women’s physical and social attributes, preferences, needs, etc., work smoothly? Is the technology sustainable at the village level, particularly in terms of the knowledge and work patterns of women? Does the technology transfer enhance or, at least, sustain the authority and autonomy of women in the community? etc.).
  
  
• Determine the time span to be examined. Establish guidelines according to different types of technology transfer on the basis of case reports that cover a number of years and identify the point at which problems appear, such as the Mraru study.
  
  
• Where the time span is inadequate to evaluate long-term success or where inadequate information has been given in terms of the established criteria for success, follow-up investigation in the field should be considered.
  
  
• Specific field research should eventually be designed to recover information regarding initiatives that have escaped the attention of aid agencies, governments, or academics. This is likely to be particularly valuable for community-initiated efforts.
  
  
• Information from the investigated initiatives should be organized according to the four types of documents previously described: case studies, overviews of development efforts, assessments of specific types of technology, and academic texts. For case studies, the possibility of a correlation between the origin of the initiative (agency, community, or government) and its success should be investigated.
  
  
• In each African country, an analytical bibliography modeled after Mascarenhas and Mbilinyi (1983) should be produced. Covering topics from the theoretical to the applied, such a bibliography can set out the state of intellectual resources in a given country, the political commitment to women’s issues, and the concrete achievements regarding women in development. The document can thereby provide an invaluable source of information both for local activists attempting to bring about legislative and other change and for aid practitioners seeking to situate themselves accurately in the gender politics of the country in which they are working.
  
  
• Conduct research on how to disseminate the inventory for wide use among research/action loci and communities. The inventory, or parts of it, could be compiled in different ways according to the desired audience. For example, the inventory might be presented in a more narrative form for community groups. Where the inventory has revealed comparable social and economic problems in the application of two different types of technology, a partial inventory that includes both types could be constructed. In this way, villagers concerned with one type of technology could benefit from the lessons learned regarding the other type. A computerized inventory could also be used to generate custom-made part inventories for specific communities or research/action loci.

Transforming the aid expert – aid recipient relationship

This study has identified a crisis in knowledge about Africa and, in particular, the alienation of Africans from their own knowledge of themselves, African women being the most alienated of all. The task of addressing this dilemma is huge and daunting, but a start can be made that has practical value for aid efforts. The relationship between aid expert (as scholar or practitioner, whether African or foreign) and aid recipient (as individual or community) is a transfer point of both power and knowledge. As such, it provides a distinct object of inquiry around which a number of the problematic issues of development policy can be looked at. Most importantly, the conditions for the presence or absence of locally generated knowledge about development problems may be illuminated by such research. The aid expert – aid recipient relationship is thus suggested as a topic of research; at the same time, the discussion here is an exercise in applying theory to practical aid issues. The following argument and suggestions for research proceed by reference to the general problems in knowledge about Africans as aid recipients, rather than through specific reference to women. Implicit throughout, however, is the general purpose of this book: to elucidate the problems for women, technology, and power in Africa.

Thinking about theory

The context for understanding the aid expert – aid recipient relationship as an object of inquiry is, again, the thinking of Foucault.² The important task of synthesizing materialism and discourse analysis has been set aside. The dynamics of the aid donor – aid recipient relationship depends largely on how the recipient takes up the discourse. This process, in turn, is partly determined by the recipient’s material circumstances. Because the aim of this exercise is to focus on the way development discourse constructs aid recipients as targets of aid activity, the question of the recipient as an active subject, embedded in local relations of production and engaged in a dynamic relationship with the aid donor, is not discussed. Investigation of this important topic is a necessary aspect of the research tasks delineated on p. 154.

²The purpose here is to apply theory to a concrete problem and not to review the literature within that theoretical tradition.

It is difficult to characterize the ideas of Foucault without simplifying them; through his “genealogies” of contemporary cultural practices, however, he has diagnosed a trend toward an increased pervasive organization of society. As the excellent commentators on Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983:xxvi), put it,

[this comprises] the increasing ordering in all realms under the guise of improving the welfare of the individual and the population. To the genealogist this order reveals itself to be a strategy, with no one directing it and everyone increasingly enmeshed in it, whose only end is the increase of power and order itself.

Although there are other ways of interpreting contemporary history and other thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger have interpreted it this way before Foucault, his special contribution is his focus on the link between “the most minute social practices” and the “large-scale organization of power.” Foucault argues that human beings have, in the last two centuries, been increasingly constructed as subjects and objects of knowledge. This argument is elaborated via several powerful examples, including the evolution of penal institutions and the development of modem ideas about sexuality (see Foucault 1979, 1980a). These examples “show us how our culture attempts to normalize individuals through increasingly rationalized means, by turning them into meaningful subjects and docile objects” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:xxvii).

Following Foucault’s thinking, it is seen that first colonialism and then international aid required that the colonized and, later, aid-dependent people become objects of knowledge in a new way. They could then be categorized and rendered manageable first as colonial subjects and, subsequently, as aid recipients. The World Bank’s report on Africa (IBRD 1986) (see Chapter 2, pp. 27–28) exemplifies the overt aim of aid discourse to construct manageable populations of aid recipients. Governments are called upon to create a “social consensus” around the World Bank’s family planning, resource, and agriculture policies. What will create a compliant population is, quite explicitly, acceptance of the World Bank’s understanding of development problems and it is African governments’ responsibility to inculcate this understanding.

Given our immersion in the Western system of knowledge, it is hard to recognize the degree to which what is known about Third World peoples, how it is known, and how much is known is not what they have known about themselves. The very categories we employ, the systematization and generalization of knowledge about them, are products of our will for knowledge, rather than theirs. This knowledge is, moreover, a product of the power relations between the West and the Third World, and is a shaping force in those relations (see Payer 1982).³

Foucault is “frustratingly elusive when it comes to capturing our current condition in general formulae” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:xxvi). His refusal to give us a grand theory, however, is consistent with his conclusions: “Once one sees the pervasiveness, dispersion, intricacy, contingency, and layering of our social practices, one also sees that any attempt to sum up what is going on is bound to be a potentially dangerous distortion” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:xxvi). Another problem in applying his ideas lies in the interpretive nature of his work:

³This is not to argue that Western aid is devoid of deep altruism. As Foucault (1980:95) says, within the grand strategies by which history proceeds, the “inventors” of tactics are “often withom hypocrisy.” It is instructive to remember, however, that colonialism was animated by a powerful discourse of altruism, expressed (and eventually caricatured) as the “white man’s burden.”

Foucault says that he is writing the history of the present, and we call the method that enables him to do this interpretive analytics. This is to say that while the analysis of our present practices and their historical development is a disciplined, concrete demonstration which could serve as the basis of a research program, the diagnosis that the increasing organization of everything is the central issue of our time is not in any way empirically demonstrable, but rather emerges as an interpretation. This interpretation grows out of pragmatic concerns and has pragmatic intent, and for that very reason can be contested by other interpretations growing out of other concerns.

(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:xxvi)

To bring this problem into the context of development thinking, critics such as Mbilinyi (1985a) (see pp. 122–124), whose pragmatic concerns lead to a particular interpretation of colonial discourse, could find a challenge from the position of quite different concerns (e.g., male-dominated postcolonial elites). These concerns could insist on interpreting the same evidence differently. “Interpretive analytics” are always open to such challenges.

In spite of this and other problems in Foucault’s work (such as a concept of power that is ultimately so inclusive as to weaken its utility), the insistence on standing back from our own systems of meaning creates refreshing possibilities for tackling the epistemological dilemmas at issue here. Precisely because it is an interpretive method, it is useful for drawing “local knowledges” out from under dominant systems of thought Minson (1985:ix) tells us succinctly what we should and should not do with Foucault’s theory:

The most appropriate respect for Foucault need not necessarily consist in devotedly awaiting and consuming his every last word on every subject There is something absurd in Foucault’s intellectual heroisation. His enduring value will, I believe, be found to lie in a series of quite unspectacular suggestions (including some instructive errors) on a limited set of theoretical, historical and political questions.… To my mind, the most appropriate tribute [to his memory following his death in 1984] is on the one hand unremitting critical attention to his arguments, whilst on the other hand, producing arguments of one’s own in the areas he has done so much to open up.

To demonstrate the utility of Foucault’s approach, while suggesting a concrete program of research regarding the aid expert – aid recipient relationship, I draw upon his concept of ‘“local centers’ of power-knowledge” (Foucault 1980a:98). He argues that, in discourse, objects of scientific inquiry are not external to the “economic or ideological requirements of power.” For example, in the discourse on sexuality that has developed since the 18th century,

If sexuality was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object; and conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was because techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse were capable of investing it

Local centres of power-knowledge are the nexus of this intertwined process. Examples of local centres are “the relations that obtain between penitents and confessors, or the faithful and their directors of conscience. Here, guided by the theme of the ’flesh’ that must be mastered, different forms of discourse — self-examination, questionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews — were the vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of forms of subjugation and schemas of knowledge” (Foucault 1980a:98). The relationship between medical professionals and their patients is another such local centre that has emerged in the last several hundred years and is now a potent force in contemporary society throughout the world.

I believe that the aid expert – aid recipient relationship is such a local centre of power-knowledge. It is a key point in the technology transfer process and, more broadly, a significant site of the formulation of both power relations and knowledge about the aid recipient To adapt Foucault’s (1980a:98) expression, the recipient of development aid was “constituted as an area of investigation” because “relations of power had established it as a possible object” Conversely, people and communities could become targets of power relations because of the development of “techniques of knowledge” that could construct them as aid recipients. In other words, knowledge about Africans as aid recipients constructed during the aid process is used in turn to inform, organize, and expand aid as both a discourse of development and a set of practices. A concrete example of this process can be found in Rogers (1980:120–138) (see Chapter 6, p. 117). Rogers shows how knowledge about matriliny is constructed out of the relationship between the aid expert (the World Bank) and the aid recipient (matrilineal Malawians). This knowledge of matriliny as “socialistic” and “matriarchal” is then used to shape appropriate (i.e., antimatrilineal) policies. It also provides the matrix (or “grid of intelligibility”) into which any further information about kinship is inserted. Therefore, the discourse and practice of development in the Lilongwe project both act to suppress matriliny and seriously to undermine women’s rights and control of resources.

Because of the overt, intentional, and massive nature of international aid, it is a particularly powerful example of the permeation of new relations of power-knowledge throughout societies. The transformation of penal institutions and of ideas about the criminal explored by Foucault (1979) was piecemeal and followed no overt, global strategy (although the outcome is a global approach to prisons and prison reform). In contrast, aid is based on an immense and obvious disequilibrium in scientific knowledge between the giver and the receiver, a situation that the aid process should at least partially correct Although it is possible to argue that penology and criminology are pseudosciences (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:162–167) and that much of the supposedly objective knowledge about Africa is pseudoscientific, there is an irreducible core of technical and scientific knowledge implicated in technology that cannot be wished away by critiques of development discourse. Moreover, no liberation of subjugated knowledges can correct the inequality in power-knowledge relationships that are based on this irreducible core. The task of transforming the aid expert – aid recipient relationship requires that truly superior knowledge be separated from ideology or poor science masked as superior knowledge.

What is the intellectual process whereby insights developed in a different empirical context appear as relevant and useful for the study of development aid in Africa? Applying theory always proceeds, in part, by intuition; interconnections do not necessarily emerge at the level of linear reasoning. Given the overt systems of domination in which Africa, in general, and women, in particular, are enmeshed, thoughts about the relations between power and knowledge are obviously useful. Africanists, both indigenous and foreign, have reflected for many years on the history of knowledge about Africa (e.g., Davidson 1969:17–31). A primary impetus for 20th century feminism has been the recognition that knowledge about women and gender relations is entangled in male-dominated power systems.

I have chosen the ideas of Foucault as an exercise in the imaginative application of theory; however, there are other philosophical and sociological traditions that might fruitfully suggest new research possibilities. The most developed, current model for the dual process of critique and application of theory is the ongoing, 20-year debate on the relevance of Marxist thought for the study of Africa. The debate has resulted in a rich and varied adaptation of Marxist method and theory for the illumination of African political economy. The fruitful results of this exercise, specifically within feminist political economy, have been referred to throughout this book.

Given the problem of subjugated knowledges, it may appear contradictory to suggest another use of Western scholarly traditions to clarify the African condition. The contradiction, however, is only apparent. The key here is that useful theories and methods are being identified (in contrast, for example, to the political science of the early 1960s that described new African political institutions as variants of the American or European systems [see the influential Almond and Coleman 1960]). The solution for subjugated knowledges cannot simply be geographic, as Africans are the first to attest The utility of a theoretical framework is the space it provides for identifying and rectifying culturally relative, ethnocentric, and sexist explanations of non-Western societies. This utility neither depends on whether the theorist addressed non-Western society (Foucault did not) nor on the theorist being free of empirical error and ethnocentrism if non-Western society has been addressed (e.g., Marx’s writings on India are regarded as Eurocentric and incorrect [Katz 1989]). The point is that both theorists offer Africans the tools to critique non-African knowledge about Africa and place it in a historical context It is no accident that Marxist thought has proved so attractive to African critical thinkers; it seems inevitable that African scholars engaged in discourse theory will turn to Foucault in coming years.

The aid expert – aid recipient relationship is but one possible area for applying ideas about discourse (and one of the most important for clarifying the problems of technology transfer and gender). Other objects of aid-related inquiry that may be subjected to scrutiny include the concepts of population and health. For anyone familiar with the current Western preoccupation with birth rates in the Third World, the following statement about the changing politics of health in the 18th century will seem in many ways apt for our own time:

The great eighteenth-century demographic upswing in Western Europe, the necessity for co-ordinating and integrating it into the apparatus of production and the urgency of controlling it with finer and more adequate power mechanisms cause “population,” with its numerical variables of space and chronology, longevity and health, to emerge not only as a problem but as an object of surveillance, analysis, intervention, modification etc. The project of a technology of population begins to be sketched: demographic estimates, the calculation of the pyramid of ages, different life expectations and levels of mortality, studies of the reciprocal relations of growth of wealth and growth of population.… The biological traits of a population become relevant factors for economic management, and it becomes necessary to organise around them an apparatus which will ensure not only their subjection but the constant increase of their utility.

(Foucault 1980b:171–172)

This is not to argue that high birth rates pose no real danger in Africa. Rather, it is to indicate that one of Western aid’s most important projects is to define and manage African peoples as “populations,” and as the wilful authors of a paramount economic problem for Africa: “the continent’s troublesome population trends” (Sai 1986:130). This aspect of development discourse has proved one of the most politically sensitive and controversial among Africans and African governments.

Applying theoretical insights

The following six hypotheses about the aid expert – aid recipient relationship are suggested by the application of discourse analysis to the development literature and to commentaries on development policies. The hypotheses draw on many of the conclusions reached in the preceding chapters. These hypotheses could be useful in shaping questions about the premises underlying aid research and policy, for studying either individual cases or a genre of aid projects (e.g., health technology transfer, agricultural extension work, etc.). It is neither that all aid projects are informed by this development discourse, nor that the aims articulated by the discourse are necessarily inappropriate or wrong. Rather, the source of many of the problems with aid efforts is the construction of a particular kind of knowledge about the problems and their solutions and, in particular, about the relationship between aid expert and aid recipient

Hypothesis 1

Individuals are constructed, at the levels of both general aid policy and individual projects, as a collectivity of “resources” to be mobilized for development Thought of in this way, people in developing countries cannot be envisaged as active decision-makers in development policy: “resource” implies an essentially inanimate object, part of a system where useful and unusable elements are decided in advance. The only possible participation for people as “resources” is their passive acceptance of a predetermined vision of their problem and its solutions.⁴ The dilemma is particularly poignant for African women, whose active agency in their own societies has been ignored or trivialized since colonial times. The notion of aid recipients as “resources” has come to the forefront in the present era of economic constraints and crises. In the more prosperous, less cost-conscious 1970s, aid recipients were often referred to as “beneficiaries,” another passive definition that construed developing peoples as recipients of Western generosity. The discussion of women as “welfare” subjects in Chapter 3 addresses a concrete aspect of the problem of thinking about Africans as passive recipients of aid.

⁴Here, Foucault’s (1980a:140) concept of “bio-power,” developed in the context of his analysis of transformations in Western society over the past 200 years, is particularly relevant. He argues that there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations. On the notion of humans as “resources” for the developing nation, Foucault’s thinking about Western society is again useful. Regarding the increasing “intervention of the state in the life of the individual” (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:138), in our context, such intervention is not by the state alone, but by an international apparatus to recruit humans as resources for development.

Hypothesis 2

A more negative perception of Africans can be found in much of the discussion about economic growth. Once growth is taken as a self-evident good, as it is in most development thinking, any factors that do not contribute to the preconceived pattern of growth are inevitably in a position of logical opposition to growth, i.e., they become “obstacles to growth” or “constraints on growth.” People’s problems, people’s attitudes, and, sometimes, people themselves are among the obstacles to be addressed by development aid policy. “Resource” at least connotes an inherent value in a developing country’s populace; “obstacle,” however, devalues humanity and distorts the problems of the very people the aid is supposed to support. Occasional concessions to local rationality (e.g., “Poor people in Africa, as elsewhere, find it in their interest to have large families” [IBRD 1986:26]) do little to mitigate the negative and punitive approach to aid recipients’ own choices found in so many aid documents. This hypothesis is intimately linked to the problem of conceptualizing “the traditional” as a timeless pole of the traditional-modem dichotomy (see pp. 121–124).

Hypothesis 3

Where recipients are not talked about as collectivities (“population,” “resources,” or “obstacles”), they are constructed as “targets” of aid policy. In many cases, it is the individual rather than the community that is the target. Indeed, Africa’s traditional patterns of collective economic activity — with regard to land tenure and use, for example — have been considered obstacles to development; consequently, aid policy fostered the individual at the expense of the collectivity (see Leonard 1986:198).⁵ Yet, as development thinkers have come to admit, “it is now clear that these conceptions greatly underestimate the adaptability of collective land tenure systems.… ‘Traditional’ systems have not in fact inhibited agricultural development.… There are few costs and many benefits to land tenure systems under the control of local communities” (Leonard 1986:198). The aid policy problem goes deeper than a distaste for dealing with communities: the notion of human lives that find their primary identity and expression as inseparable elements of a community is foreign to most Western thought. This is an urgent epistemological problem for aid research and policy, as has been demonstrated throughout this book.

Hypothesis 4

Individual aid recipients are not only “targets” of development policy, they are problematic targets. Project analyses commonly consider the attitudes and practices of women problematic, even when the intent of the project is to involve women in the development effort. Getechah’s (1981) useful assessment of the role of Kenyan women in water development (see p. 30) is, nevertheless, symptomatic of the treatment of aid recipients as problematic. Her discussion of the possible contribution of women to water-supply projects is set in “conditions of poverty, ignorance, and lack of technical know-how among rural women” (Getechah 1981:86). This suggests that women lack “self-reliance,” a quality that, paradoxically, is to be introduced from above (this paradox is at the heart of the movement in Kenya to prod rural women into self-help groups). Where groups are

⁵Note that the language still poses the question of land tenure in strictly economic rather than social or ethical terms. genuinely “self-help,” i.e., originating locally out of the collective needs and practices of women, they often fall outside the net of administrative control and aid. As such, they are either ignored or treated as targets for “assistance,” to be drawn into the management net.

The notion of a lack in the qualities of aid recipients has the notion of “potential” as a necessary correlate (e.g., “Although the women are making a substantial contribution, their potential has not been fully exhausted” [Getechah 1981:87]). Thus, even though recipients are problematic, they provide an empty slate of unfulfilled “potential” upon which the latest fads in development aid can be written: from the 1950s preoccupation with promoting the virtuous, clean housewife (see Koeune 1952); to fostering the creative, income-generating craftswoman; to creating the fuel-efficient, tree-planting environmentalist; to restoring the nurturing, breast-feeding earth mother. Once again, I am not denigrating the goals associated with these images; rather, I am seeking to expose the degree to which development discourse is based upon such imagery, which often has more to do with Western political or cultural preoccupations than with the real needs of the women concerned.

Hypothesis 5

Overall, recipients, as communities or individuals, are constructed by development discourse as subjects to be managed; recipient input is limited to “feedback to the research system” (Leonard 1986:197). The site of interaction is “extension,” a term with a venerable history in Western agricultural development that poses particular problems for understanding the development task in the Third World. The aid expert – aid recipient relationship, which is the most crucial transfer point for technology and other aspects of development, becomes an outpost of a system, a frontier whose boundary is the extension worker, the aid recipient is on the other side of this boundary. The World Bank’s Training and Visit (T & V) System of agricultural extension, one of the most acclaimed solutions to the problems of agricultural development, nevertheless epitomizes the construction of the aid expert – aid recipient relationship as a “management system” (see IBRD 1983:94–95). “A highly disciplined approach to extension management,” the T & V System is “the best available solution to these management demands” (Leonard 1986:196–197).

Even Rachlan’s (1986) excellent model for the dissemination of technology previously discussed (pp. 139–140) succumbs to the concepts of “resource,” “target,” and “beneficiary.” Obviously, aid programs, by their nature, are “systems” that extend information and technology from an area where these are known to an area where they are unknown. Researchers and policymakers should be more aware of the power relations and domination over local knowledges entrained in this logic of dissemination.

Hypothesis 6

Women’s knowledge is invisible in development discourse. Anthropological studies have shown that these are large, gender-specific areas in the production and use of knowledge in Africa. In the older anthropological literature, this fact emerged by default; e.g., the following astonishing entry appears in Lambert’s (1956:96) study of political institutions among the Kikuyu: “Men say they do not know for certain whether…gatherings of women are merely called for specific purposes or whether they are ad hoc committees of permanent and organized chiama [councils].” Like many social scientists, Lambert was content to leave women’s areas of knowledge in the shadows, reported vaguely by male informants (the idea of interviewing women directly did not seem to occur to him).

Development studies have continued the tradition, so that women’s knowledge about family, agriculture, health maintenance, nutrition, and associated technology has never been systematically solicited and analyzed. Consequently, aid projects have been built on erroneous, incomplete knowledge, as many examples throughout this book reveal. Male-dominated aid institutions and governments seek male knowledge in the “local centres” of power-knowledge, thereby unwittingly reinforcing male domination, disrupting the local power-knowledge relationships and alienating women from the development process. The incomplete male knowledge structure is taken to stand for the entire local knowledge. Women’s knowledge is considered, if at all, as part of a private realm outside the responsibility and jurisdiction of the aid project, a type of knowledge on a par with a stereotypical Western housewife’s knowledge about which laundry detergent or diaper to use. The suppression of women’s knowledge, and the distortion of the local power-knowledge relationships is one of the most tragic consequences of Western aid as it has been practiced in Africa over the last 30 years.

Transforming the expert–recipient relationship

The preceding theoretical exercise only has value (beyond its possible contribution to scholarship) if it provides a means for a sharper understanding of inappropriate aid policy and practice and a means for transforming such policy and practice. By engaging in what Althusser (1977:253) calls a “symptomatic reading” of texts, the six hypotheses have generated a set of concrete ideas about how the knowledge of development problems is structured. Testing these hypotheses against existing aid projects and using them in the design of future aid efforts may open the way to a transformed aid expert – aid recipient relationship. This final section of Chapter 7 suggests research tasks for such a transformation.

First, a survey of aid efforts that have accounted for local knowledges and local agency, with regard not only to women but also to community decision-making structures and practices, is necessary.⁶ A starting point would be a literature review in each research/action locus. Some development agencies have made a particular effort to survey and assess such efforts; the IDRC study, Coming Full Circle: Farmers’ Participation in the Development of Technology (Matlon et al. 1984) is a notable example. The survey should particularly seek studies such as Matlon et al. (1984) that emphasize participatory research. The survey should systematically arrange proposals for, and experiences with, such participation, evaluate the nature of the aid experts’ knowledge about the aid recipient, and explore how the experts utilize and characterize local knowledges. In thinking about women as aid recipients, it is necessary, but not enough, to review the position papers and proceedings of all WID) conferences; these all too often merely give prescriptions backed by brief project-summary statements (e.g., INSTRAW/UNICEF 1985).

⁶It is important not to idealize local knowledge or to assume that successful traditional practices have necessarily survived rapid and overwhelming change. We must also keep in mind the processes whereby influential people in the locality use traditions for their own benefit. The politics of the construction of local knowledge is an important topic to be considered in this research.

Second, the key principles for a transformed aid expert – aid recipient relationship need to be extracted and codified from the documents identified in the survey, both specific cases and overviews such as Matlon et al. (1984). The boundary problem has prevented the circulation of insights from the few good studies beyond the specialists in the field surveyed. The study of Matlon et al. (1984) on farmers’ participation exemplifies the possibilities for crossing the boundary. Among other useful tasks, this study presents and assesses the “research–development–production” (RDP) approach to agricultural development, in which “farmers’ participation is required, first, in diagnosing the problems, second, in designing technical improvements, and, third, in using and evaluating the innovations” (Matlon et al. 1984:12).

The RDP approach consists of three categories of methods. The first is evaluations that arise from close collaboration between experienced researchers and farmers and that “take into account relationships between the ecological and technical environments, between techniques and farming systems, and between techniques and societies.” The second is experiments that do not rely on research station methodology, but develop techniques and statistical tools for farmer-managed tests. “Some researchers consider farmer-managed tests an extension of experiments started on the station; others see them as the beginning of experiments — the true framework for dialogue with the fanner. The tests…provide information about actual production and consumption at the level of the plot, the farm, the rural community, and the country.” The third category of methods, “adoption, extension, and adaptation,” involves the precise adaptation of innovations developed both on the farm and in controlled environments to other localities and types of production (Matlon et al. 1984:12–13).

In this example, the proposed codification of principles for research and policy would take the three method categories and create generalizations that could be applied in other contexts. For example, agricultural programs that focused specifically on women farmers could include in the first category of methods an evaluation of the knowledge about techniques, soil conditions, etc., that is specific to women as well as an assessment of how this gender-specific knowledge may be integrated with techniques proposed by aid experts. With regard to the second category of methods, farmer-managed tests could be specifically designed to account for the opportunities and limitations presented by the female farmers’ multiple responsibilities and daily schedule. With regard to the third category, research could be designed to ensure the collection of data on the implications of a particular innovation for the farming activities of women.

Beyond the agricultural setting, the RDP approach could be assessed for its adaptability to the health technology field. The emphasis on participation, dialogue, and recipient-centred testing and evaluation would provide a beneficial shift away from the treatment of health care recipients as passive, individual objects of research and service delivery. This task is likely to be difficult, given the much less obvious “expertise” of the health-care recipient in comparison to the farmer and the specialized nature of medical knowledge. Regarding research methodology, as a parallel to the farmer-managed tests, medical research methodology could be weaned from a hospital orientation and adapted to rural clinics and the abilities and know-how of paramedics, traditional healers, and midwives.

The discourse of development underlying selected projects, with the projects being viewed as “local centres” of power knowledge, need critical examination. Much is made of the importance of identifying and replicating success, and rightly so; however, no attention is paid to the instructive value of poor policy and research. Feminist and other critics of aid projects tend to make general condemnations and not to explore in detail how and why a particular aid policy is poor and implicated in an inappropriate exercise of power over the recipients (whether by the foreign aid experts or the recipients’ government). A critical examination should attempt to link project failures and the framework of knowledge in which the project was initially embedded. This task is not as eccentric as it may seem: the mistakes in development research and aid policy, so often repeated, are destined to further repetition unless a clearer and more systematized understanding of the mistakes is created. Ultimately, this task could yield a document cataloguing and explaining problems in approaches to development aid.

Alternative conceptions of the aid expert – aid recipient relationship could be formulated through a survey and analysis of research projects that are based on local empowerment. African women’s research/action loci would appear to be the best candidates for such research. WRDP, for example, might serve as a model Begun as a small study group of academic and nonacademic women in 1978, WRDP was made part of the University of Dar es Salaam’s Institute for Development Studies (IDS) in 1980. “Fundamental differences over principles of organization” between the group members and the male majority of IDS, as well as efforts “to hijack the funds and equipment which the group had succeeded in acquiring,” led to departure from IDS and the formal establishment of WRDP in 1982 (Mbilinyi 1985b:75–76). Now an affiliate of the International Council of Adult Education Women’s Programme and the African Adult Education Association, WRDP exemplifies the lessons to be learned about the struggle to establish women-directed and women-centred development research. Priority is currently being given to a life history project that relates the experience of social change and development problems to personal lives. WRDP has as a central tenet of its research and action the involvement of ordinary Tanzanian women in the research and development process (see CWS/cf 1986:67–68).

The recovery of women’s knowledge is an urgent research task for the development effort. The WRDP history project is one excellent method. Other types of fieldwork should also be called upon: contemporary African history and sociology should be explored for useful methodology. Feminist scholars, in particular, have developed field techniques useful for researching women’s knowledge. As well as new fieldwork, the task should encompass a thorough survey of published ethnologies to extract information regarding individual societies, systems of male and female knowledge, and the actual content of women’s knowledge. The recovery of material from past fieldwork need not stop at published documents; living ethnologists may be solicited for relevant material in their unpublished research notes.

A model for the research task suggested here is Molnos’ (1972–1973) four-volume document on population in East Africa. The first volume reviews sociocultural research between 1952 and 1972. Volume II deals with innovations in East African societies, in particular with regard to family planning; the second part volume n surveys these themes in 28 East African ethnic groups. Volume III deals with the traditional beliefs and practices of these groups, the survey of the groups forms the empirical core of the study. The fourth volume is a bibliography arranged by ethnic group. In addition to reviewing published texts, Molnos solicited contributions from 37 social scientists. Many were the original ethnographers of the 28 groups (e.g., Philip Gulliver for the Turkana of Kenya and Monica Wilson for the Nyakyusa of Tanzania); however, they had not written about fertility, attitudes to children, and other factors specifically relevant to population planning. Indeed, as a consequence of Molnos’s solicitation, there is now a unique body of comparative material focused on gender relations that would otherwise have been lost in the heads and unpublished notes of major anthropologists.

A central element in the success of Molnos (1972–1973) was the careful selection of anthropological contributors. Molnos sought those whose fullness of fieldwork and interest in the issues of social process in the family would render them most likely to have answers to her questions in their raw data. Another aspect of this publication’s success was the meticulous methodology she devised for ensuring an enthusiastic and systematic response from the contributors. Molnos’ effort, sponsored by the University of Nairobi’s Institute of African Studies and funded by the Ford Foundation, ranks as one of the brilliant, unsung efforts in applied social science.

Conclusion

A central dilemma lies at the heart of efforts to transform the aid expert – aid recipient relationship. By the very nature of aid, there is a giver and a receiver. Yet, the preceding exercise — and the book as a whole — has shown that the constitution of African people as recipients by the aid process has entailed conceptualizing them as passive targets, obstacles, or beneficiaries who are receiving a handout for which they have not worked. How can aid agencies continue giving while rethinking the way the gift is given and while turning the receiver into a genuine partner in the transaction? With regard to women and technology transfer in Africa, a solution may only be found through the insights of those African women and men who have struggled with the question themselves.

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