Category: Gender

On recentring women鈥檚 grassroots struggles to decolonise FinTech narratives

serenanatileLeave a comment

Drawing realised by artist Pawel Kuczy艅ski for Serena Natile’s book

I came to the study of fintech as a feminist socio-legal scholar researching the gender dynamics of South-South migration. While doing fieldwork in Kenya for my PhD in 2012, I came across M-Pesa, a mobile money service used by locals as an instrument for transferring money from urban to rural areas. From the start of my research in 2011 to the completion of my PhD in 2016, ongoing studies on M-Pesa were mainly celebratory. It was acclaimed as an innovative instrument for poverty reduction, development, and gender equality and was enthusiastically supported by donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as by tech entrepreneurs and corporate philanthropy. Its success story was so uncontested that I decided to change my research question to focus on the gender dynamics of digital financial inclusion, rather than on my initial interest, migration.

The key narrative of M-Pesa鈥檚 success in terms of gender equality was, and still is, that it facilitates women鈥檚 access to financial services, providing them with a variety of opportunities to improve their own livelihoods and those of their families, their communities, and ultimately their countries. In the specific case of M-Pesa, a basic-mobile-phone-enabled money transfer service is considered more accessible and available than transferring money via mainstream financial institutions such as banks, and more reliable and secure than informal finance channels such as moneylenders or the handling of cash via rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs). This claim is based on three assumptions: first, that women have less access to financial services than men have; second, that women would use their access to finance to support not only themselves but also their families and communities; and third, that digital financial services are better than informal financial channels because they overcome the limits of cash, ensuring traceability and security. These assumptions motivated advocacy and investment in digital financial inclusion projects and the creation of ad hoc programmes and institutions, all strongly focused on the question of how digital technology can be used to facilitate women鈥檚 access to financial services.

Read More »

Is women鈥檚 access to land path dependent? Evidence from Punjab (Pakistan)

hanazahirLeave a comment

Women have historically been excluded from formal land rights in the Indian subcontinent. For its rural population, land remains the most prevalent and significant asset, making bequests of land parcels the main channel through which women can acquire land (Gazdar, 2003; Nelson, 2011; Agarwal, 1994).  Customary land rights prevented inheritance along gendered lines and in colonial times, these laws were codified to prevent the sale and purchase of land parcels (Nelson, 2011). To what extent and how have such gendered patterns of land ownership persisted in different areas of Punjab in Pakistan? To what extent is there path dependence in gendered land ownership? Those are the research questions I鈥檒l tackle in this blog post.

In 2015, the Government of Punjab introduced a series of reforms aimed at enforcing women鈥檚 existing legal land rights in the process of inheritance. One enforcement mechanism introduced was making it the responsibility of local revenue officials to ensure that after the death of a landed individual, each heir would be transferred their inherited share in the land parcel by revenue officials even if the family did not initiate an inheritance mutation process. In addition, paper-based land records originating from the era of British colonial rule were digitized and stored in a central database. The new system made it mandatory to conduct in-person biometric verification of all heirs (male and female) of the deceased for an inheritance mutation case to move forward with the official transfer of land parcels. The introduction of these enforcement mechanisms made an historically exclusive inheritance mutation process more inclusive towards women. But fieldwork suggests that previous patterns of land ownership continue to be repeated in Punjab putting women at a disadvantage. In this blog post I unpack some of these findings, which raise questions about land reform alone as the solution to gendered division of land ownership. Instead, I find that the manner in which old patronage structures interacted with the British colonial system has had lasting implications on the way in which land is distributed.

Read More »

Gender and Trade Explainer

Regions RefocusLeave a comment

The Gender and Trade Coalition was initiated in 2018 by feminist and progressive activists to put forward feminist trade analysis and advocate for equitable trade policy. This article is the first in a series of short, Q&A format 鈥榚xplainers鈥� unpacking key trade issues produced for the Gender and Trade Coalition by Regions Refocus. It was written by Erica Levenson (Regions Refocus) with inputs from Fatimah Kelleher (Nawi鈥揂frifem Macroeconomics Collective), Mariama Williams (ILE), Hien Nguyen Thi (APWLD), and Senani Dehigolla (Regions Refocus). Read the full article .

  1. How Are Gender and Trade Connected?

At the core of the modern global economy is an array of trade and investment rules that have been designed by developed countries鈥� elites and corporations. These interlinked rules reinforce the others鈥� impacts on national economies, enabled by international finance and trade institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) as enforcement mechanisms. From worsening human rights violations to degradation of the environment, the effects of trade and investment regimes impact every aspect of women鈥檚 lives, exacerbating and creating inequalities based on hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Behind the scenes of global economic policymaking spaces, corporations and the financial sector set the policy menu: liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. Through predatory loan conditionalities, trade agreements, and other practices, international finance and trade institutions have enforced these policies and created 鈥榚nabling environments鈥� for foreign investments. Trade tariffs have been lowered; investment possibilities and controls have been liberalized; and regulations on the financial sector, markets, and corporations have been dismantled while at the same time the rights of major corporations (especially intellectual property) have been increased (Aguirre, Eick, and Reese 2006; Hathaway 2020; Hursh and Henderson 2011). Cheap imports are dumped by transnational corporations and their subsidiaries, primary commodity export dependence is perpetuated, public goods and services are privatized, and social protections are cut, among other things (Hormeku-Ajei et al. 2022). These are the effects of 鈥榮uccessful鈥� neoliberal policies, and in particular trade liberalization.

The manifestations of deeply unequal trade and investment governance regimes can be seen in worsening poverty rates and gender inequality; widening gaps between the world鈥檚 richest and poorest countries, and the richest and poorest people; and adverse impacts on supposedly inalienable human rights, including access to education, secure housing, food security, and healthcare (Koechlin 2013; Navarro 2007; OHCHR 2015; Western et al. 2016). The severe impacts of trade and investment rules have been increasingly borne by people in developing countries, especially women (Grzanka, Mann, and Elliott 2016; Pearson 2019; UNCTAD 2014; UNCTAD and UN Women 2020).

Contemporary trade intensification, expansion, and privatization in the modern global economy relies on the systematic exploitation of women. Women form the backbone of the economy, in terms of both production and domestic labor: women are systematically underpaid, occupationally segregated, and marginalized, and their domestic labor is invisibilized and devalued. Gender inequality is not a question of happenstance but rather something that is necessary to the current function of the economy, in particular to trade. A critical analysis of trade from a feminist lens proves the urgency of recognizing the crucial role that gender inequality plays in sustaining global and national economies and illuminates key areas that serve as opportunities for policy interventions.

Read More »

The Salaried Man and His Others: Rethinking Pressure in the Longue Dur茅e

Jordanna MatlonLeave a comment

Colon statue, C么te d鈥橧voire. Author鈥檚 collection, 2023.

The burgeoning scholarship over the past several decades documenting youth stalled in their quest for adulthood, the scholarship on waiting, on restless underemployed laborers buying time in the informal economy, on the crisis of African masculinities, on the accumulating material and psychic pressures of unmet familial and community responsibilities 鈥� all these are ways of depicting the longue dur茅e of failure best contextualized within the beguiled patriarchal promise of colonial civilizing missions: the breadwinning wage.

In this blog, I draw from my recent book, , to explore how socioeconomic forces particular to the postcolonial African city induce a permanent state of pressure among young men at the interrupted point of social becoming. Observing that the crisis of work is also a crisis of masculinity, I historicize the pressures of late capitalism in African cities 鈥� namely, surviving in informal economies 鈥� within the longue dur茅e of the wage economy. I show how the introduction of wage labor during European colonial rule produced at its outset an overwhelmingly unachievable male breadwinner norm. The salary was both an entitlement and a source of intense pressure as it produced a novel form of patriarchal privilege but also the social and domestic responsibilities that came to collapse manhood with this exceptional, and exceptionally rare, form of economic activity. Examining these pressures within the long shadow of colonialism critically illuminates the role of race-making and racial difference in the emergence of financial expectation and deeply personalized societal failure among contemporary urban African men.

Read More »

The labor of land

ramasalladieng1 Comment

Contemporary  and agricultural investments have generated huge attention. The transformations in land tenure, production and social reproduction in the aftermath of land rushes have generated a  . A central question is about , and its implications for structural transformation and .

Extraversion, exports and the labor question

In Senegambia, the intersecting pressures of food, land, and capital were historically linked to the quest for new labor and cash crops (cotton, then groundnut, followed by fresh fruits and vegetables) in frontier markets for Europe. Some of these transformations have been widely documented by Egyptian economist , Senegalese historian  and American historian . In 1819, the Ndiaw Treaty between France and the leaders of the Waalo Kingdom (in northern Senegal) was signed, allowing France to . This agricultural colonization project failed mostly because of the resistance of the inhabitants of the Waalo Kingdom (the Waalo-Waalo) and the inability of  French colonial leaders to secure land concessions they thought were automatically and permanently transferred to them through the treaty. The Waalo leaders, who managed the land on behalf of their community, understood otherwise. This conflicting interpretation on how land is governed became a recurrent source of conflict.

Another problem was the shortage of labor鈥攖he Waalo-Waalo refused forced labor and preferred to cultivate their subsistence crops rather than those for export. This refusal led to the return of clandestine slave trade and related abuses. The insecurity created by Waalo鈥檚 neighbors and the resistance of merchant capital added to the failure. These are key to understanding how various historical dynamics have sedimented to make the Senegal River Valley Region (historical Waalo) the site of the land rush that began in 2007-2008, especially for the production of export fresh fruits and vegetables.

Revisiting this rich history offers us a better understanding of relations of exploitation and contemporary resistance to  by a number of communities in this region. It is a reminder of the violence of primitive accumulation, a violence that is ongoing. Tanzanian historian  puts it well:

The early encounter of Africa with Europe was not commercial involving the exchange of commodities, but rather the unilateral looting of human resources. African slavery was neither a trade, nor a mode of production. It was simply a robbery of a people on a continental scale perpetrated over four centuries through force of arms.

Despite the subsequent attempt to develop new crops in 1826 in Saint-Louis, merchant capital eventually prevailed with the failure of agriculture. As a result, post-colonial leaders 鈥渋nherited a country organized by and for merchant capital鈥� after 1960 as  puts it. In the same vein,  note how merchant capital subsequently established colonial and post-colonial structures of extraction.

Beyond processes of land acquisition, it is important to pay attention to how land becomes capital and how agricultural workers are included, excluded, or rather  into these agri-food networks.For instance, in her 2011  on land grabbing in Southern Africa, Ruth Hall provides a useful typology of agricultural transformations from subsistence to capitalist imperatives. Besides models that are based on the displacement of primary producers and the establishment of large export-oriented agricultural estates, Hall emphasizes 鈥渃ommercialization in situ鈥� and 鈥渙utgrower鈥� schemes whereby petty commodity producers and other land users are incorporated into commercial value chains. This is a further invite to go beyond  in our analyses of the genealogy of  and of processes of exploitation.

Read More »

Layers of compounding pressure: the gendered experiences of rural migrant youth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

elizabethdessieLeave a comment

鈥淚 have lived everything there is to be lived in this city. Now I need to leave because all that is left for me here is misery and I want a better life for my child.鈥�

It is with these words that Tizita, a 21-year-old mother-of-one from Gojjam in northern Ethiopia, described her dismay at life in Addis Ababa when I interviewed her in 2022. After living in the Ethiopian capital for eight years, she had had enough. Tizita was set on moving to one of the Gulf States, a part of the world from where many of the women she met on the street had returned from and were planning to re-migrate to. Having previously worked as a domestic worker in Addis Ababa, and having learnt that sex work was the only way to make 鈥�real money鈥� in the city, the young woman remained focused on meeting the fundamental purpose of her migration project: transforming her life. 聽

For Fikadu, a 27-year-old man from Wollega in western Ethiopia, the strain of life in the city is similar, yet different. Unlike for young women like Tizita, whose income-earning activities are overwhelmingly limited to domestic work, petty street work, commercial sex work and begging, the fractions of the informal economy available to migrant men are slightly wider. Nevertheless, this is not to say that times have not been hard. Having previously worked as a street vendor selling second-hand clothes, Fikadu has had to downscale his work and is struggling to meet the rising costs of food, rent, sending money to his family of origin, and realising his plans for the future:  

鈥�Our supplies disappeared and when they were back, the price went up by more than double. That was the end of it. Now I pay for my life here by selling socks, but I don鈥檛 let that dismay me. I remain focused on my plans of transforming my life here, and once things improve I will start saving for my own metalwork shop.鈥� 

The testimonies of Tizita and Fikadu form part of a longitudinal qualitative research project that maps the livelihood strategies of a sample of migrant youth in Addis Ababa at two points in time between 2018 and 2022. Drawing on these findings, this blog outlines some of the ways in which rural-urban migrant youth between the ages of 15-27 experience and counteract pressure. Through an exploration of migrants鈥� everyday strategies of navigating the city, findings presented here show how dealing with the intricacies of urban life relates intimately to the lives rural youth left behind and the imaginary futures they aspire towards, the ways in which youth relate to the social and economic responsibilities they carry, and the manner in which subjective pressure experienced by women and men has a compounding effect that further exacerbates the challenges migrant youth face.

Read More »

Gendering the debt crisis: Feminists on Sri Lanka鈥檚 financial crisis

kanchanaruwanpuraguse1 Comment

By Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Bhumika Muchhala and Smriti Rao

Countless images of women carers flitted through April-July 2022 on Sri Lankan television screens, social media, and newspapers. Carers with young children, mothers with new-borns leaving them with equally young children while they stood in queue for gas or kerosene, children doing their homework on tuk-tuks while their parents got in line for petrol and diesel. Yet, Sri Lankan policy pronouncements rarely mention working-class women. In a country where women comprise 52% of the population, this is astounding. Especially so when the dominant three foreign exchange earners for the country 鈥� garments, tea exports and migrant workers to the Middle East 鈥� rest on the efforts of women workers. 

In the current response to Sri Lanka鈥檚 debt crisis, the voices and needs of working-class women are once again being ignored by policymakers, despite the evidence all-around of women intensifying their unpaid labour even as the conditions under which they perform paid labour deteriorate. 

As feminist economists, our argument is straightforward: debt justice is a feminist value and principle. And at the core of our understanding of debt justice is the principle that working class women cannot be made to pay for the 鈥榦dious debt鈥� generated by the recklessness and corruption of (almost entirely male) Sri Lankan political elites.

Read More »

What Happens to 鈥楪ender鈥� in Food and Agricultural Research? Mapping Four Broad Trends

picchiofLeave a comment

By Merisa S. Thompson and Fiorella Picchioni

The Women and Development Study Group of the Development Studies Association (DSA) recently revisited Sally Brown and Anne Marie Goetz鈥檚 1997 Feminist Review  鈥榃ho Needs (Sex) When You Can Have Gender? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing?鈥�. The article examines challenges to the concept of 鈥榞ender鈥� at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, including debates on its institutionalization and depoliticization, the tendency for it to be used as a synonym for 鈥榳omen鈥�, and the conservative backlash against the very use of the concept itself. The retrospective value of doing this showed just how relevant these questions continue to be for Gender and Development policy, practice, research and teaching today.

For example, when teaching sex and gender, critical feminist theorising can sometimes lead students to feel that Gender and Development (GAD) approaches are too instrumentalized, too much like an industry and disconnected from reality. Moreover, the positionality of working as 鈥樷�� in larger projects, where the gender component is often seen to stand alone with little connection to other intersectional dynamics, remains an ongoing challenge. The increasing and worrying trend of an anti-woke  against feminist analysis and gender equality across the globe was also a recurring theme.

We also considered how 鈥榞ender鈥� as a concept is mobilised and used in food and agricultural studies specifically. In this blog, therefore, we examine what happens to the concept in food research, policy and practice, mapping out four broad trends. Firstly, the centring of the connection between gender, nutrition and mothering remains pervasive. Secondly, 鈥榞ender equality鈥� is often instrumentalized as a tool to increase marketized forms of agricultural productivity. Thirdly, while a focus on gender is obviously welcome, it can in fact obscure other important axes of oppression, such as race, class, sexuality, disability and nationality. Finally, it is consequently crucial to ground research, policy and practice in historical specificity and context in order to take into account multiple underlying oppressions and structural inequalities that influence the ability of a range of different actors in the food system to participate both socially and economically.

Read More »