Generations of Feminism – a reflection on AWID 2012

Alison Carney

Two weeks ago I attended the international Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) forum in Istanbul, Turkey. AWID hosted more than 2,500 feminists, development professionals, activists and students at a four day forum to share ideas, experiences and plans for mobilization for women’s rights. I met some amazing, inspiring people from many different countries, working on different issues. The ideas that they planted in my mind, the things I had forgotten have made me all the more excited about the work I do on gender issues, and the work I plan to do. In spite of the wonderful experiences I had, there were a few things about this forum that just didn’t sit right, and that seem to me to be indicative of bigger problems within the movement for gender equality, among self-proclaimed feminists.

One would assume that at a forum that is intended to be a sharing of knowledge, an opportunity to inspire one another, there would be no hierarchy among attendees – especially in a feminist space where we are talking about gender issues. I realized over the course of the four days that this was not the case. As was echoed in conversations with my nine classmates who attended as well, there was a very clear generational division. We kept hearing phrases like “We are so proud of the young feminists here today”, or “it was so nice to talk to so many young feminists”. The feeling of being patronized was not helped by the young feminist corner that was set up, and felt more like a play corner. Where was the “old” feminist corner? It became very clear in the speeches during the opening plenaries, as well as in the daily sessions, that the older, more experienced feminists felt that they could not wait to pass the baton on to us young people, contingent on our adequate indoctrination with their version of feminism, of course. I had the feeling that my own form of feminism was not recognized, or was seen as naive simply because of my age. My more radical beliefs about sex workers rights, integration of LGBTQI issues into the global feminist movement and my desire that women with disabilities be recognized within the movement were brushed aside with an attitude that we young feminists just “didn’t yet understand”.

It seems to me so contrary to the feminist movement to silence voices based on the age of the activist. In a setting where the organizers of AWID clearly made a massive effort for multi-national, racial, religious and linguistic representation, why are the voices of young people not given equal importance? As students, it was assumed that any work or activism that we had participated in before starting out Masters degrees just didn’t really count. One of us was even told, “oh you are just a student, you will get it eventually.” In fact, it was the young people who I met at AWID who I found to be the most exciting in their activism and openness to new ideas and collaborations. For example, a woman in her early twenties from Palestine who is fighting for the rights of women with disabilities, a group that continues to be forgotten by the greater women’s movement. Another was a young lesbian from Uganda who works for a very minimal wage on the fight for LGBTQ rights in a country where her very identity puts her in constant danger. Is this not what feminism, and development for that matter, should be about? The people who truly embody their beliefs and work on issues that they themselves feel everyday. It is hard for me to understand why these young women are less legitimate in the eyes of the global feminist movement than some of the “experienced” speakers talking about women’s economic equality and then jumping into their privately hired car on their way back to the nearest 5 star hotel.

Now, this is not to say that the voices of experienced and well-paid feminists are not important. It is every woman’s right to live her life the way that she chooses. But, what needs to be recognized is that we can all learn from each other. Creating space for young voices by providing a ‘young feminists corner’ is not only condescending, but only reinforces the attitude that we as young people can only be heard by each other because we just don’t know enough yet. An older feminist economist, for example, may have something to learn about economic empowerment from a young sex worker activist. AWID should have made an effort to put young voices in the plenary speeches, as well as have sessions run by young people about our ideas and work. The attendees of the conference should not only engage with the issues that they know well and have been working on for years, but should also attend sessions on some of the new issues that are being taken on by young feminists and that are essential in all gender and development work, for example working with men, climate change, and sexuality. Feminism, and the work we do in development on gender issues, should be thought of as evolving, constantly growing to react to the multitude of oppressions that we all agree face women in the world.

Alison Carney is an MA Gender and Development student at IDS.

Read other recent blog posts from IDS students:
The real story after ‘Kong 2012′
Developmental hackspaces: fostering a meta-participatory ethos for Information and Communication Technologies for Development
Spring uprisings calling spring academcs: #bring books out to the streets!

Three things the crisis (should have) taught us about women’s empowerment

Naomi Hossain

Reviewing the proofs for a new book called Living with Crisis (published by the World Bank in April – an e-book which means its free!) and a World Bank Policy Research working paper synthesising the same have meant reflecting on what the last three years taught us about women’s empowerment. The three things we (should have) learned are:

1.     Paid work ≠ women’s empowerment

Earning money for working is all very well and yes, very very important for women’s agency and the balance of power at home. But anyone who seriously thought that getting a job as an export factory worker or access to microfinance was the same as women gaining real power over their lives no longer has such good reasons for thinking so: the gains are too fragile and too easily swept away. Our synthesis of qualitative research across 17 countries on the impacts of living with the food, fuel and financial crises  found that:

• The supposedly privileged industrial elite of export sector workers was highly exposed and easily abandoned when orders were down. This was clear in South East- and South Asia. As women were the most ‘flexible’ workers they were typically first to go or find their pay and conditions got worse. When orders returned, women were often in more demand, but only the youngest, most flexible (and most docile?). Women reported the jobs they got back in the recovery were worse – poorer conditions, more uncertain and far harder pressure for productivity, all in an era of rising living costs.
• When the growth machine stopped or slowed, the problem of indebtedness rose to the surface. It turns out juggling debt had become a serious problem for people living in poverty in a lot of places – Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh among others – sub-prime was not only a problem for low income Americans or Greeks. Certainly it looks like time to revisit the link between credit and women’s empowerment.
• Women were particularly likely to diversify into the informal sector to cope – setting up as street vendors, mobile hairdressers, laundry service providers, sex workers, and so on. Our synthesis work supported what WIEGO  (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) found – dramatically increased competition in the informal sector, meaning many more women working far harder and competing with each other ever more fiercely for an ever smaller share of the pie. If this is empowerment, I am Rick Santorum.

2.     It’s the care economy, stupid!

The aid industry’s fixation on getting women to earn money (on why this has happened see the paper by Rosalind Eyben and Marzia Fontana for the Bellagio Initiative) meant it neglected the fact that most women in the developing world work long hard invisible hours in the care economy and that that is what makes human development happen. What the crisis did was show us what happens when the unmeasured everyday work of getting families fed, clothed, healed, reared and fit for work suddenly gets much harder and less rewarding – for example, because the cost of living spikes in 2008 and 2011. What happens, as we saw in our research, was that women’s power over their work and wellbeing was suddenly and dramatically reduced. From across the world came evidence of how tough this was – more time spent shopping around for cheaper, nutritious, edible meals; the strain of getting hungry kids off to school or of keeping husbands around and happy; gathering food and fuel (I will never forget the image of a Dhaka woman in her fifties hacking a log with an axe I could barely lift – she saved a few measly takas, but thought nothing of the effort involved); self-medicating; helping and getting help from neighbours; begging, borrowing and stealing; humbling themselves to apply for official or charitable assistance; portfolio working in the ever-less profitable informal economy etc. Some women reported their efforts to cope stretched to 18 hour working days; in a Central African Republic village, women remarked wryly ‘it is the sleep that drags her away from her housework’.

A real risk here is that the aid industry not only continues to neglect the all-important work of care, but that – worse – it depends even more on harder care work to supply the resilience needed to get poor people through hard times. The lesson here should be the sound of alarm bells whenever ‘resilience’ is mentioned – a reminder to listen closely for the sound of women’s unpaid care work softly absorbing the pain of economic shocks, without complaining or showing up in the statistics.

3.     Women’s empowerment depends on social protection

The policy ‘takeaway’ from 1 and 2 is clearly 3: women’s empowerment depends on proper social protection. But we have to rethink this. It is not because women are the helpless victims of crisis – the ones who eat last or least when food is scarce because cultural values favour men – but because if their strategic unpaid care roles are protected against big shocks, women have a fighting chance of making use of opportunities that come along. That is the point of social protection.

For all the big talk about social protection in the past decade you could be forgiven for thinking that social protection actually exists in the real world: in fact it remains notional in many places. It doesn’t cover much of the population at the best of times, does not extend to the rest in the worst, and when it does, it often doesn’t make much of a difference – as a system it just doesn’t protect.  What does protect people during shocks is mainly informal – the labours of love of parents or partners, gestures of compassion and solidarity between neighbours or kin, small helping acts, organised charity, even moral support – the stuff the policy-wallahs cannot see because it is neither monetised nor measured. I don’t think people prefer to help themselves – let us not romanticise this as Big Society writ global – but little else was on offer. A decent functioning system of social protection, one that did not work people harder for a measly handout or punish them for being carers, made a lot of difference where it existed. But apart from the former Soviet bloc countries and a few places where lessons of previous crises had been painfully learned (for exampl, Indonesia) few people seemed to be getting anything to help them through the crisis.

There is still the chance that the crisis turns out to be the opportunity it could have been in terms of a seriously ramped up social protection agenda. The global protest movement might yet buy some social protection, just like the Communist threat used to, once upon a time. In these volatile times, the project of women’s empowerment depends on it.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at IDS.

Just do women’s empowerment

Naomi Hossain

You’ve got to love War on Want for soiling the wholesome purity of the Olympics brand with a study documenting the exploitation of Bangladeshi garments workers stitching 2012 Olympics sponsor brands Adidas Nike and Puma products for as little as 72p a day. And before you even think it, no, 72p is not a lot of money, even in Bangladesh, not these days. You can get a meal, but it won’t be a good one; pay for a room where you can shift-share a bed with another worker; with any luck and a lot of overtime you might be able to pay for the healthcare you will need when you get ill or worn out from the routine of 10-12 hour days of manual work. There are no doubt Bangladeshis who are worse off than these garments workers, but the study findings suggest they are still paid less than the minimum wages they have struggled so hard to secure.

War on Want missed out two very interesting facts in their study of the exploitation of Bangladeshi garments workers by Adidas, Nike and Puma. First, while the same old sweatshop problems remain, those women workers have changed dramatically in the last ten years: they have a lot more collective and political power than before as a result of several years of direct, often violent, action and organisation; the helpless victims seeking UK NGO help depicted in the Observer article that covered the report are a figment of a particular kind of European imagination. (The report itself is far more respectful of the workers’ capacities for organisation and their own struggles for a rise in the minimum wage). While the exploitation remains a serious concern, we must not forget that these are a group of women whose power to articulate their own demands has grown, and grown in large part because of their work in these factories. My new Working Paper makes this point in detail.

The second missing fact is altogether more interesting. This is that the UK taxpayer not only buys the clothes that these workers make, but in the case of Nike, it also then funds their corporate social responsibility activities through funding to the Nike Foundation. Nike, whose outsourced women workers complain of long hours, illegal and unpaid overtime, abuse and general ill treatment, appears to be the self-same Nike whose Foundation promotes The Girl Effect – an effort to get girls in the developing world empowered through – well the website doesn’t make it entirely clear how they are going to get empowered but it involves some very nifty graphics. I can’t find a detailed budget breakdown, but the UK Department for International Development (DFID) budget suggests that £12,939,129 is going to the ‘DFID Nike Foundation Girl Effect Hub’. You could empower a hell of a lot of Bangladesh garments workers with that much money.

If anyone knows, can they please explain to me why the UK taxpayer is paying the Nike Foundation to empower women when its mother company Nike squeezes its suppliers so hard they pay those same women rock-bottom wages? Or is it all an incredibly cunning plan to empower women by treating them so badly that they are forced to fight for their rights … ? After all, impossible is nothing.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the IDS Power, Participation and Social Change Team.

Challenging attempts to silence civil society in Uganda

Stephen Wood

Barely a year after the murder of gay rights activist David Kato focussed international attention on the treatment of sexual minorities within Uganda, there is a sense that renewed attacks on freedom for these citizens are growing in momentum once again.

Yesterday, a conference organised by Freedom and Roam Uganda (FARUG), a campaign lobbying for the recognition of same sex relationships was ordered to close by the State Minister for Ethics and Integrity, Simon Lokodo, who threatened force against participants unless they dispersed. The Minister ordered the arrest of Kasha Jacqueline Nabagasera, a prominent LGBT rights activist, but she managed to escape the venue in time.

This follows at the heels of the announcement in the last couple of weeks that the “Anti-Homosexuality” Bill that prompted international revulsion last year, has now been reintroduced by backbench MP, David Bahati. Whilst details remain unclear on which elements of the Bill have been discarded aside from the headline-grabbing death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, it remains a fierce incursion into the lives of Ugandan citizens and a grave new source of human rights violations. For me, a particularly worrying element of the bill is the potential criminal penalties for those who know of homosexual behaviour, but do not report individuals to the authorities. Medical practitioners, teachers, relatives and aid workers may find themselves under threat of arrest.

The broader implications for civil society in Uganda are exceptionally worrying and play into a wider narrative of intimidation of those threatening the hegemony of the state, such as attacks upon journalists covering the presidential and parliamentary elections and the cancellation of similar conferences of organised sex workers. FARUG and the other participants are exercising the right to organise around sexual rights and the forced cancellation of this meeting undermines the right of citizens to freedom of expression and association in Uganda, rights guaranteed under national and international law.

In many ways, the treatment of the advocates for sexual minorities mirrors the silencing of oppositional political parties by the state, making it harder for their case to be heard and distracting attention from the real problems facing Uganda – accusations of Government corruption, poverty and the painful reconstruction of northern Uganda as a result of the armed conflict by the militant Lords Resistance Army. A more authoritarian approach is emerging from the Government, one that finds strength in targeting sexual minorities as a Western imperialist “enemy within” that plays to comforting nationalist tropes. These repressive events demonstrate even more keenly that the rights of sexual minorities are as important as all other human rights and that the methods used to suppress their political freedom are as pernicious and familiar as those experienced by other parts of Ugandan civil society. Building solidarity across these movements remains as important as ever.

As a gay man, I know through experience how important the fight for equality is for those people outside normative gender and sexual identities in shaping our sense of identity and self-worth. It fuels my commitment to development and the transformative impact of international aid in building sustainable communities that possess the confidence to support all their citizens. This current existential threat to the daily lives of sexual minorities in Uganda undermines their ability to participate in their communities in that manner and could also prevent their ability to work in partnership with international aid agencies, consequently undermining the viability of valuable work around poverty alleviation, health outcomes (including, but broader than HIV/AIDS) and access to education. The IDS Sexuality and Development Programme continues to focus our attention upon the links between sexuality and poverty and how heteronormativity in aid programming reinforces these inequitable structures in outcomes for groups within society. An essential part of tackling this involves working in partnership with community organisations in countries such as Uganda to reach these vulnerable populations, work also imperilled by this renewed intrusion into civil society by the Government.

As I’ve argued previously in an earlier post, these latest events present a challenge for the international community. I believe we need to see a nuanced, collective strategy that continues to build diplomatic support internationally for the human rights of all citizens, coupled with support on the ground for those NGOs with a proven track record in working with marginalised and vulnerable communities. International pressure should be available as a tool at the disposal of southern communities and exercised as their strategic political needs dictate. Their voices and needs should lie at the heart of our development policies, not least at a time when they are under sustained threat of being silenced.

Stephen Wood is a researcher for the Sexuality and Development Programme in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and can be found on Twitter at: stephenwood_UK

Reflecting back upon the PPSC team’s activities in 2011

Danny Burns

As 2012 begins, I want to take this opportunity to wish you a happy (and stress free) New Year. In this blog I want to talk offer a few flavours of things that members of the team have been working on; others you will see from recent contributions to the blog; more will follow over the next weeks…

An increasing area of interest for development actors at all levels, from grassroots movements to major donors, is how to better understand the complex, shifting and multi-layered social and political environments in which development and change occur. Many organisations are searching for more relevant tools of context analysis. Jethro Pettit and others have been working on new tools for power and political economy analysis. Popular frameworks like the Powercube (developed by John Gaventa) are being adapted and combined with other approaches. Recent learning partnerships on power have included Oxfam, Novib, Hivos, Christian Aid, the Swedish Cooperative Centre, and Trocaire. Work has also been carried out within the UK voluntary and philanthropic sector with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,  Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the Carnegie UK Trust, Trust for London. This work has included three, year-long action learning processes with dozens of participants from these foundations and more than 20 of their partner organisations Training modules on power have adapted into Spanish and French and facilitated by IDS staff in universities and workshops in Spain, West Africa and Latin America.

The team’s work around “unruly politics” has been growing steadily through the “Summer of Unruly Reading” group facilitated by Akshay Khanna. We have been building a collective conceptual analysis within the team, and growing a work programme with Hivos and their partners.  We have also been building connections with people in the Occupy movement. Mariz Tadros continues to be closely engaged with the emerging situation in Egypt and other parts of North Africa.

PPSC has been contracted to engage in a number of new programmes this year. These include:

• a three year programme on gender and sexuality funded by SIDA (Sweden)
• a three year programme with SDC (Switzerland) –on  participatory methodologies and developing the resource centre as a hub for materials on participatory methodologies
• a three  year programme with SDC working with the IDS Governance team to support the work of their Decentralisation and Local Governance Network
• an extension of Gates Foundation funding for our Community Led Total Sanitation Hub

The PPSC team played a major role in designing and delivering the Bellagio initiative on the future of international development and philanthropy in pursuit of human well being which comprised a series of global dialogues, commissioned papers and a major international summit. PPSC fellows – Danny Burns (Delhi and Kinna, Kenya), Patta Scott-Villiers (Kinna, Kenya), Alex Shankland (Sao Paulo) and Mariz Tadros (Cairo) – facilitated four of the global dialogues. Georgina Powell Stevens co-ordinated the summit participation of around 200 participants.   In June of this year Alex Shankland and I, will be facilitating another Bellagio conference on Indigenous health with colleagues from KIT (Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam).

Rosemary McGee has recently carried out a major review of accountability and transparency initiatives with John Gaventa. Naomi Hossain continues her longitudinal work with Oxfam and others on food price volatility; Joanna Wheeler, Peter Clarke and I are working on a six country action research programme with VSO and the international volunteering network FORUM on the impact of volunteering on poverty; Joanna Wheeler and Tessa Lewin have been working on a range of participatory video initiatives; Marzia Fontana has been working with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of Lao PDR on a project which has brought Lao-based women’s groups and international organisations into dialogue with each other. Rosalind Eyben has been organising The Big Push Forward – an international initiative that links practitioners and researchers to identify and share strategies and approaches for fair assessment and evaluation. Patta Scott Villiers is leading a programme of action research in Karamoja Northern Uganda funded by Irish Aid. Alex Shankland is opening up new areas of work on the role of emerging powers in reshaping development especially through civil society.

Pathways to Women‘s Empowerment in the Middle East hosted a UN Women organized conference on “Pathways for Women in Democratic Transitions: International Experiences and Lessons Learned” in Cairo. The meeting featured Michele Bachelet and others discussing legal reform, women’s movements and gender-responsive accountability systems. Mariz Tadros was a speaker on the panel “Building Strong Women’s Movements in Democratic Transitions”.

The team has recently published a number of IDS working papers and bulletins and will publish a bulletin on Action Research in International Development this spring.

Finally I want to say a huge thank you and good luck to John Gaventa and Kate Hawkins. John has been an inspiration to the PPSC team for more than a decade. He has joined the Coady Institute in Canada as their new Director. Kate Hawkins our sexuality programme convenor who has initiated and developed a great deal of exciting work within the team will be leaving IDS (but will continue to work with us as a free lancer). I would also like to welcome to the team  Research Fellow Jerker Edstrom and Jas Vaghadia who will be working on our gender, masculinities and sexuality programmes. Welcome also to Naomi Vernon who is joining our CLTS team.

As I say, just a few flavours of the many different things that are happening. If you want to find out more, follow the links, or contact us directly.

Danny Burns is the Team Leader for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and will be publishing IDS Bulletin 43.3 ”Action Research in Development” in May 2012

Participation team online: blogging highlights from 2011

Stephen Wood

As we move into 2012, I thought it would be interesting to reflect upon some of the blog highlights that were written by colleagues in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) since we launched last year:

• Aid conditionality dominated the headlines again in the latter part of last year when the British Government made an explicit link between aid and Southern countries’ treatment of LGBT human rights. Research Fellow akshay khanna tackled the political fallout of this announcement head-on in a blog post “Aid conditionality and the limits of a politics of sexuality”, when he challenged the usefulness of an LGBT politics that fails to account for the complexity and variety of sexualities outside of dominant western models and how countries such as India and Brazil are leading the way in developing much more nuanced politics of sexuality.
• With much internationally attention being paid to efforts to increase economic growth, Research Fellow Rosalind Eyben’s blog post, “Care work should be at the heart of a people-centred economy”, was a timely reminder that discussion is still desperately needed around the vast amount of unpaid work existing outside the market economy, that underpins and sustains human wellbeing and yet is unaccounted for by most development organisations. Those taking on these care responsibilities, mostly women, are usually those with least voice and ability to influence policy change that might account for this within societies across the globe.
• Finally, as the struggle for democratic representation continues across the Middle East, the reports by Research Fellow Mariz Tadros from Cairo on the unruly politics being conducted by Egyptians protesting in Tahrir Square against military rule have been an eye-opening insight into the hopes, fears and challenges experienced by those fighting for change. Her blog post “From unruly politics to ballot boxes: rethinking the terms of democratic engagement in Egypt” was a particularly thought-provoking contribution.

As always, these recommendations only scratch the surface of the rich discussion and debates we have been conducting on our blog. If you haven’t done so already, I really would encourage you to sign up via email to receive each of our blog posts as they are published and engage our authors in dialogue by commenting upon their work.  As we are building up our audience, if you can recommend us to anyone who might be interested in engaging with our work, we’d be appreciative. We have some really exciting material due in the coming weeks and months that you don’t want to miss.

Stephen Wood is the Team Administrative Co-ordinator for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and is also a member of the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme. He can be found on Twitter at: StephenWood_UK