Women economic empowerment through microcredits:The successful cases of cloth dyers and shea butter women in Mali

    In the 1980s, bad economic conditions worldwide, especially in Latin America and Africa have led the IMF and the World Bank to implement the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). Under the SAPs, many workers were laid off, salaries reduced and local currencies were devalued. Fonderson (2002) argues that these factors have led to the incremental of women role in economic activities.The International Financial Institutions (IMF and the World Bank), national governments and Non-Govermental Organizations have seen women economic integration as an important mean to alleviate poverty in many countries. One way these institutions tried to integrate women in the economy is by providing microcredits (Fonderson, 2002). Microcredits, in this context, refer to small amount of money given to women to undertake an economic activity that will reduce poverty.                 
    
     In Mali, several microcredits initiatives have been undertaken to alleviate poverty rate among women with encouraging results. For example, Nyesigiso, a local malian bank, has started to provide microcredit loans to women in many field, especially in cloth dyeing. Mali has a long history of cloth dyeing. According to Down (2007), malian women have used plants, Kola nuts and mud for dyeing cloths. Nowadays, they use imported dyeing materials and need to borrow money to buy them and improve the quality of their work. Several women have been interviewed and they both agree that these loans have made them improved their buisness and now they are able to take care of their children and their husbands. However, Nyesigiso has imposed disciplinary rules to women to get loans. In order to be eligible for microcredits, women must be part of an organization, attend meetings and training sessions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0LEO7o6zAk

    The shea butter microcredits project is another successful example in Mali. The Islamic Relief Canada, a development and advocacy organization, has empowered women economically by  providing small loans to malian women to boost they shea butter production. Not only Islamic Relief Canada has provided loans, but it has trained and monitored women to improve the quantity and the quality of their products. As a result, women have improved the quantity and quality of their shea butter and are now able to sell abroad and generate more benefit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZxX3vjdbTI

    Overall, microcredit loans have been successful in Mali. It has also demonstrate that malian women can do more with very little. However, I have some suggestions to make to improve micro credits efficiency. First, micro credits can be more efficient if interest rates are low because low interest rates are easier to pay. Second, women should be given the choice to invest the loans in activities they want because some women are more successful in self designed projects.

             

                                                     Works cited
Down,M. (2007). Microcredit and Empowerment among Women Cloth Dyers of Bamako, Mali, A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Florida, 1-146 

Fonderson, J. (2002).The disciplinary power of micro credit: examples from Kenya and    Cameroon. in Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Global/Local World edited by Jane L. Parpart, Shirin M. Rai and Kathleen Staudt. New York: Routledge  182-198 

Cyberfeminism

Cyberfeminism is not a recent phenomenon. During the 80s most feminist voices referred to Dona Haraway, the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, as one of the first academic writers in establishing a relationship between women, technology and virtuality and the potentialities of it. In the early 90s feminist artists thought that inequalities could be diluted in and by the virtual world. Australian collective Venus Matrix was one of the first initiatives to experiment with cyber feminism. Describing themselves as irreverent, the collective was known for its manifestos and for the collective nature of its initiatives.

Since those early conceptions of cyberfeminism, this field of thought has been connecting women, machines and utopia for more than twenty years. This feminist movement, highly motivated by the ICTs, was producing valuable contributions in the artist sphere and platforms for feminist activism. All of the aforementioned efforts were further fueled by the advent of the web 2.0 and the boom of social networks during the 2000s. Thus, cyberfeminism set a series of primary goals that aimed, in the first place, to create a less violent and more inclusive web, and expand women’s participation.

As Haraway claimed in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) “in early twenty-first century there is now a breakthrough in knowledge, with new technologies opening up the possibility of questioning the body in new ways (p.112).” This optimistic view also “sees the new communication and bio technologies as fresh sources of power to be harnessed by feminists” (Harcourt, 2009, p.22). In the following map you can find the various groups and projects that undertook the challenge of connecting hemispheres to try to build a more humane and inclusive web usage.

In the 21^st century, Internet is a significant space of expression of feminist practices and “a tool for creating a communicative space that when embedded in a political reality can be an empowering mechanism for women” (Harcourt, 1999, p.219). Within this current context, cyberfeminisms include a wide range of feminisms and diversity. There are woman who cause chaos in the networks; initiate virtual campaigns to denounce sexism or sexual harassment on the streets; who develop and share software, apps and games; artists who through installations, videos or performance challenge

heteronormativity, motherhood, menstruation, domestic and other social norms imposed on us women; individuals who bring experiences of lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, intersexuals and queers thinkers; writers who analyze and write the experiences of women in the network; and grassroots collectives that challenge notions of patriarchy through its art. The list is unending.

As I am reading about cyberfeminism I can’t help thinking that amidst the diversity of methods, goals and processes of these feminist activists, sometimes there seems to be a lack of a clear political project that appeals beyond the boundaries of their individual efforts. As I reckon the potentialities of the net to create bonds and strengthen feminist movements, to sustain and nurture global feminist causes, for knowledge sharing, for raising consciousness about other women’s struggle, I think that the challenge at this point is to explore how to establish an articulated techno-political agenda with a common goal.

Without disregarding the efforts of this contemporary feminist community, there is a knowledge gap concerning the role, impact, and potential of cyberfeminism in the task of creating sustainable ties among women worldwide. In this regard, my question would be how can cyber feminists use Internet to create a cohesive, inclusive and powerful political movement toward gender equality that can simultaneously develop political solidarity and commitment among women worldwide.

Women and Poverty - Unpaid work and empowerment

Women, whether they engage in paid work or not increasingly engage in unpaid care at home for the benefit and wellbeing of all the members of the household. According to Pearson (2007), Amartya Sen indicates that women’s material and social status is derived from the part of scarce resources they contribute to the households and communities. A high proportion of their earnings go directly into meeting the basic needs of household members. Chant (2007) terms it as the intra-household resource distribution and this can lead to serious vulnerability and secondary poverty among women and children which are often experienced in male headed household since the privilege of men allow them to get higher part of the resources than even what they bring into the household.

   https://youtu.be/VVW858gQHoE. This video shows what women go through in their efforts to provide for the household coupled with limited social amenities. This woman, I will name, Wowman - goes through a whole lot in a single day to provide food and care for her family, she is denied job because of her child and does a low a paid job to get something to feed on. She indicates; people say this is not work. Until she broke down, there would have been no help from government to provide anything. Even when she had a job that paid her quite well she still thought of things needed by her family. This is the highlight of Sen, in which he indicated that the earning of women may extend their options but also intensify their workload and responsibilities without necessarily their autonomy.

Pearson indicated the problem with the idea that micro-credit and micro-enterprise has the highest tendency in empowering women. He asserted that although the micro-finance empowers women, it however reduces their autonomy. Women become responsible for debts and care for the household while their husbands control their activities.

  https://youtu.be/sg4DXX4BrYI. This link shows how microloan foundation has provided small loans to women which have empowered women to work their way out of poverty. One woman indicated that she is no longer depending on her husband for up-keep money while another indicated she is now able to buy needed items for household and take care of her children. It was also brought up that the woman is there to care and when she is financially empowered, the family will be well looked after.     

With helping women, Pearson further asserted that there should be a link between demands for international support that improve the working conditions and wages of poor women to explorations of universal entitlements in terms of minimum income and services. Women must be empowered and moved from poverty not from the sale of their labor which does not benefit them much in anyway. 

More help is needed!

Reflections on women and work: Cheap labor, "The Market," and the Marines

Many of the articles we read this semester have either implicitly or explicitly discussed how work by women is devalued or not seen as “real work.” Because earning money for one’s family is so deeply connected to masculinity in a lot of cultures (Whitson, 2010), the very act of a woman making a living can threaten her husband’s sense (and performance) of being a strong man. This brings me back to the class discussion we had several weeks ago—with constructions of masculinity so deeply tied to not being feminine, how can we go about creating a more equal, just place, without doing away with the very idea of gender? Or we need to somehow completely flip ideas of gender so that there are so many more options that are unrelated to binary oppositions.

Pearson (2007), among others, explained how often, throughout the world, women are seen as sources “cheap labor” for businesses. This idea of anyone being “cheap labor” feels so devaluing, exploitive, discriminatory, and unfair. I dislike what the economy “decides” is valuable and the ways that people speak of wages and prices as unquestionable and accurate truths created by “The Market.” The economy is so talked about as if it is an external object or fact and not as a socially created (and interpreted) system. Because “The Market” is a social construction, the structure and consequences of the market reflect and sustain a lot of the patriarchy and unequal power relations that already exist.  

Many people assume that the U.S. is so advanced in terms of gender (perhaps mostly people outside of academia), but these narrow and rigid gender norms are still very prevalent here. In the U.S. we would not call women “cheap labor” but I think that still accurately describes the way that women’s work is paid and devalued. Furthermore, there are still sectors of work that are very hostile and difficult for women to work in. One very good (but also extreme) example of this is the military. I was listening to public radio the other day, and the program Here & Now interviewed former U.S. Marine Chad Russell. Russell’s interview was about his strong opposition to allowing women to work in certain combat roles in the Marines. Through his discourse he generalized and implied that women did not have the stamina to withstand certain combat situations, they were a distraction to people (because they increased sexual relations), and that this led to complacency (and eventually a lack of safety). At many points during the interview I wondered if it was 1950 and not 2015. One of the questions he posed was “Is this a necessity to do this or is this a political desire from outsiders?” His inability to think outside of his male gendered body was incredibly frustrating, as was his acceptance of policies that are discriminatory at their core. He also perpetuated that notion that things connected to feminism are political while everything else (misogyny included) gets to main the status of being neutral or apolitical. I have never had any desire to join any part of the military, but despite this, Russell’s (very essentializing) interview struck a nerve. I could see how these policies would continue to stigmatize women in the Marines and also potentially limit their careers. I am not sure why breasts and a uterus equate to less stamina, so Chad Russell, please explain this to me?

Here is the link to his interview: https://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/10/19/women-combat-chad-russell

Gender, HIV/AIDS and Development

Questioning Gender, HIV/AIDS and Development in Sub-Sahara Africa`

Africa, the “problem child”, as most would refer to it, harbors all different kinds of adversities. Over the past few decades, there has been a growing feminization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Looking at the number of incidences from a development perspective, it is essential that close a attention should be paid through identifying and supporting HIV/AIDS programs that may, somehow, help to reduce gender disparities particularly in Africa. There is a need to advocate and be proactively involved with organizations that are working to reduce gender inequalities and gender-based violence.

According to a report by the United Nations, the number of girls and women infected with HIV/AIDS is growing rapidly compared to their male counterparts. There are more than 17.7 million women living with the disease worldwide. In Sub-Sahara Africa alone, almost 58 percent of the number infected are female. More than 4,000 of young people, aged between 15 to 24, are infected around the world, of which two-thirds of them are women. This figure is probably twice to three times in some countries compared to others.

I watched a documentary on a very sad story of a young woman from Ethiopia and I could not help but to question some of the harmful social norms and practices that has contributed to the continuous vulnerability of women and girls in this region. Monina, a young and a single mother of two kids recounts her bitter stories as she struggles to battle the disease at a very tender age. The stigma and pains she went through. As I think of Monina’s story, I am tempted to take a step back and reflect on some of the cultural values that have rendered women their abilities to respond to such issues. Faced with rejections from her own people, she could do nothing but to give up her child for adoption.

Drawing a conclusion on such issues, then question then becomes, what should be the role of  governments and, how should the development organizations work to support these women and girls? Because of the social and cultural values, women have limited access to HIV/AIDS information and services, they have no control of over their sexual bodies, leaving them defenseless to sexual violence and abuses that expose them to HIV transmission. The reversal effect of this is alarming as women are denied of access to economic resources and legal rights that needed for protections and to contribute productively to caring for others affected by the disease.

This documentary is clearly a good example that shows how women in Sub-Sahara Africa carry a disproportionate care-giving burden when family and community members are diagnosed with HIV/AIDS or die. It is the young girls and women who often suffer the most. Surely, turning our deaf ears to their cries is not different from preventing them from acquiring education and losing the potential for economic empowerment. My plea is that, gender and development practitioners should be aware of the fact that women who provide care or HIV/AIDS positive women are faced with double challenges. Approaches to gender and development should therefore, incorporate and critically evaluate the need to cater for these women.

Below is a link to Monina’s story, spare some time and watch it.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/video/2013/dec/01/world-aids-day-a-mothers-story-living-hiv-ethiopia-video

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Sierra Leone

Female Genital Mutilation is one of the cultural practices that involve the removal of female genital part mostly penetrated in some parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Bjalkander et el (2012) claim that the practice originated from Africa, where the practice could be found in 28 countries (p.119). The authors also explain that over 90 million girls have suffered from this practice (p.119). In fact the practice is widely regarded as a violation of human rights of girls and women. As a result there are many advocacy organization and nonprofits that are aggressively engage in campaigns to end the practice.

Sierra Leone is one of the countries where the practice is very high in the Sub Saharan Africa. However, a downward trend has been noted between 2006 and 2010 from 91% to 88% respectively (p.119). Education play a vital role in its practice in Sierra Leone, a higher rate is noted among the non- education than the educated with prevalence rates of 95% and 74.2% respectively (p.120). It has also a generational dimension in the different age brackets. For example, between the age bracket of 45-49 and 15-19 it stood at 96.4% and 70.1% respectively (p.120).  The widely held belief among older women is abandoning the practice simply means abandoning their culture and tradition. These elderly women also believe that FGM could prevent women from being prostitutes, because it decreases women desire for sex. The lower pattern among younger women is explained by the campaigns that are being carried out by the advocacy groups and the impact of education on them. The authors also discuss the decision making process to carry out FGM. The authors reveal that the decision to carry out FGM are mainly influenced by the community, family and individual, but family decision is more profound among them through mother and grandmother.

I think it is through concerted effort that could put an end to the practice in Sierra Leone and other countries where the practice is very high. I would suggest an intensification of campaigns on the negative consequences of FGM especially among the uneducated. Public policy could also assist in stopping the practice through incentivizing for compliance and also punishing for non-compliance to legislation or rules banning the practice. On a last note, the importance of culture influence in the practice should also not be underestimated, therefore there should be continuous dialogue between actors and communities on the health implications of the practice and promote or inculcate habitual change in the practice.

         In conclusion, FGM is complex issue to address, therefore stakeholders needs to revisit their approaches to put an end to the practice. Communities also need to be a ware that the campaign to end the practice is to their best interest and should not consider themselves as winners or losers.

Reference

Bjalkander.O., Leigh, B. Harman,G., Bergstrom, S., & Almroth. L.. (2012). Female genital mutilation in Sierra Leone: Who are the decision makers? Africa Journal Of Reproductive Health, 16 (4), 119-113.