Justice for the Batwa People

As many of you may not know, I sit on the Board of Advisors for a small but fierce NGO called Initiative for Equality whose work I believe in because it is actually community-driven, diverse, inclusive and focused on bringing justice to the most marginalized.

One of their main focus areas has been in defence of the Batwa people – an indigenous group located in the Congo Basin region of Central Africa who are facing genocidal attacks and atrocities.

While I do not know anything about this topic, I know that this group is discriminated against for many reasons. One is because they are pygmies, and have been in Central Africa for at least 88,000 years.

This means that they are among the longest-surviving human cultures on earth, having developed sustainable ways of living that didn’t destroy one another through inequality and conflict, and didn’t destroy nature. 

For tens of thousands of years they survived, developing their nature-based economy and culture, and protecting the forests of the Congo Basin with all of its diverse plant and animal life. But over the past 100 years – the space of just one lifetime – the Batwa people are being destroyed so that others can take their lands, forests, wildlife and minerals.

They could teach us how to survive; how to coexist peacefully with one another and with nature. We should be learning from them, not destroying them.

Who is taking their lands and life?

* Neighboring agricultural tribes are desperate for land as their corrupt governments keep the agricultural population in poverty by supporting corporate land grabs, cash crops and mining operations.

* Corrupt ruling elites cut lucrative deals to extract timber, wildlife and especially minerals from the Batwa’s traditional lands, enriching themselves and hiding the money in offshore accounts. This has been extensively covered by one of the famous journalistic collaborations based on leaked data, called “Congo Holdup”.

* International companies and their governments enable this corruption by continuing to do dirty but profitable business deals in this region in order to get minerals and “carbon offsets” – justifying it as necessary to address climate change and build a “green economy”.

* Violent conflict is rampant in the forests of the eastern Congo as armed militias, often supported by foreign governments, fight over control of the minerals for international export.

* Huge conservation corporations like WWF and WCS, along with their donors and collaborating governments, expel the Batwa from their lands under the guise of “preserving biodiversity” – despite the fact that the Batwa were vastly better at conserving the forests and biodiversity for countless millennia. Now wealthy Westerners engage in tourism and trophy hunting, and mineral deposits are illegally exploited in the so-called Protected Areas, while the Batwa are killed for returning to their traditional lands.

Thus this vicious cycle of local corruption and violent conflict, incentivized by the profits that flow from international business interests, is destroying one of the longest-surviving human cultures on earth, along with the second largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon.

By destroying the Batwa, we are destroying our own humanity.

Why does IfE – a global network of organizations dedicated to overcoming inequalities around the world – devote so much time and energy to this one particular situation?

* Because this is our largest, most active regional network, and IfE makes its decisions through its partners on the ground.

* Because the situation of the Batwa is a microcosm of everything that is wrong in the world: from the exploitation by corrupt governments, wealthy elites and international corporations to the destruction of nature, sustainable ways of life and peaceful human societies. If we can help the Batwa people change their situation, we can apply those learnings and tactics to help change other situations around the globe, too.

* Because the level of violence the Batwa are up against is so bad that they cannot defend themselves without help. Their need for global solidarity is urgent, and that’s what IfE does best.

* Because most international NGOs that have gotten involved have failed to improve the situation of the Batwa. But we still have a large, regional, multi-partner collaboration working directly with the Batwa on the ground, and we believe we can support the Batwa to achieve their goals. We won’t walk away. 

In 2018, Gabriel1, a Batwa rights activist, was kidnapped into an unmarked government vehicle as he walked down a city street. He was thrown in prison without charges, to be tortured off and on for 4 years. When we finally succeeded in making enough noise to obtain his release, we were overjoyed – until we learned that a death squad working with a political party planned to kill him. We moved heaven and earth to help him to relocate and apply for asylum elsewhere. He lives in poverty now, but at least he is alive – for the moment. 

 1 name changed to protect his identity

What does IfE intend to do about the destruction of the Batwa and their lands?

This multidimensional problem needs to be addressed from many directions. We are looking for a way to record the voices of Batwa elders talking about their history and traditional culture, before they leave us. We are holding discussions with Batwa community members to help them to think through how to reverse the cultural breakdown. We are experimenting with conflict resolution mechanisms that could help resolve inter-ethnic and inter-community disputes. We are advocating for new approaches to conservation that work with the indigenous people instead of expelling them from their lands. And we are intervening however possible to stop the arbitrary arrests, torture and killings that are happening to Batwa people across the Congo Basin and African Great Lakes region.

But we are not only fighting for the Batwa:  by preventing this amazingly sucessful human culture from being destroyed, we are also fighting for our own survival – trying to retain some of the key indigenous knowledge, wisdom and life ways that could help all of us survive the existential threats we face today.

We urgently need your help and support! Join with us to stop the killings, reverse the land grabs, elevate the Batwa’s human and indigenous rights, and retain a model for human survival. Please support our work with the Batwa people by making a generous donation today or by sharing this post.

I am writing this today to raise awareness of these issues and of what can be done. You can help.

Donate here.

For more information:

https://www.dw.com/en/congo-deadly-violence-in-a-national-park/a-61368064

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/03/tory-linked-lobbying-firm-agreed-to-help-swing-drc-election-leak-suggests

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/30/dr-congo-expels-rwandan-ambassador-as-m23-rebels-gain-ground

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Norms, Equity and Social Protection: A Gender Analysis of the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia

New manuscript published in the Forum for Development Studies.

You can access the article here.

It was a such a privilege and joy to work with the talented Dr. Melisew Dejene and the wider team at IPDR, Hawassa University in Ethiopia.

They are the brains behind understanding one of Africa’s largest social protection programmes and are doing incredible work to translate research for policy – strengthening the much needed interventions aimed at reducing social inequality and justice.

This article is about how social protection programmes do not generally account for gendered power dynamics.

Oftentimes, they target women only as beneficiaries, which can intensify gendered disparities.

This case study uses a mixed methods research approach to conduct a gender analysis of the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia.

We find the programme has progressive gender equity goals, but these are not well implemented. Since special provisions for women are neglected in the case study sites, they do not challenge unequal social norms nor recognize unequal roles and responsibilities.

For example, there is a recognition that women in this context have unique time constraints and reproductive work burdens. The programme aims to make special consultations and allowances for them (e.g. workload reductions, flexibility in work timing, special grievance communication). Maternity leave, awareness raising and reproductive health initiatives are also major parts of the programme. Some of these special provisions made for women are critical for gender equity.

These special provisions need to also be balanced by making them requirements to men’s participation as a way to challenge gender norms and work burdens and as a way to encourage men to participate in stereotypically feminine roles, such as childcare.

There is a need for social protection to redress inequitable social norms and structural factors that perpetuate women’s vulnerability to poverty, as opposed to simply including women or targeting them to meet their practical needs.

Alongside implementing the gendered provisions, we recommend further research into the ways that the programme can challenge discriminatory social norms.

Overall we found upon implementation that in the case study sites:

  • The workload requirements for women, which should be half compared to that of men, as well as flexibility in work timing, were enforced unevenly across the communities.
  • Women and men were also not consulted separately and implementing such provisions for women involves awareness by supervisors, none of whom were women.
  • Most participants felt the distance needed to travel for Public Works, specifically for women, and the scheduling of activities were inconvenient.
  • No networks or associations were established to represent different community needs and a large majority of women and men thought that they had little choice in the types of work they could pursue and that current activities compromised their health.
  • Finally, the representation and consultation of women were politicized and sufficient childcare was unavailable.
  • In some instances, gender sensitivity was not necessarily facilitating the transformation of norms, roles and responsibilities. Instead, negative gender norms tend to be reinforced by the program design and implementation.

Political Economy of Agri-Nutrition: What’s Politics Got to Do With Nutrients?

Our blog post at the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy is published here.

We are discussing the importance of a political economy approach to understanding agri-nutrition globally, which is often taken as a technical, biomedical and production issue that requires highly specialized, external input intensive farming systems and micronutrient enrichment.

Differently, a political economy approach to agri-nutrition centres issues of power and control in global food systems. This includes considering wider issues of who is setting the agenda on which technologies, business and production models promoted, and who is profiting off of interventions. Also, this approach goes beyond concerns of profit, growth and vitamin intake to consider diversity in the biophysical environment, rural livelihoods, water, sanitation, education, indigenous farming practices and local food cultures and traditions.

Considering gender differences in measuring household food security

Our latest study compares men’s and women’s reporting of household food insecurity in northern Ghana, where we find differences even among husbands and wives living within the same household.

Household food insecurity estimates were lower on average for men than women’s estimates.

There is also a statistically significant decrease in men’s estimates when compared to women’s.

Men’s and women’s estimates within the same household varied widely for both the scale and prevalence of household food insecurity.

This study shows that husband’s and wives’ perspectives differed greatly, which raises important questions about the reliability of household food insecurity measures.

It also raises the need for further questioning of the reliability of household-level measures on poverty, well-being, and other phenomena more generally.

This study points to the need to consider gendered experiences and knowledge of food insecurity.

See the study here.

A feminist political ecology of farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana

This article is published in Gender Place and Culture [link here] where I find that intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities in land access (based on ethnicity, place, age, and class) are due to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming, acutely erratic rainfall and aridity, as much as social norms.

For those who may not have access but are interested in reading the full article, the first 50 downloads are freely available [link here]. Or you can just contact me for further detail.

With the unprecedented feminization of agriculture globally, literature has emerged over the past decade suggesting that gender equality in agriculture could be advanced if gaps in access to farm resources between women and men are reduced. This paper examines gendered farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana. Based mainly on six months of immersive qualitative research, this case study draws from and contributes to feminist political ecology scholarship (FPE) on smallholder farming and agricultural development. The analysis describes some of the intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities (e.g., gender and ethnicity) of land access related to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming. Gender disparities in access to agricultural extension, chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, high yielding seed varieties, tractor services, credit packages and marketing contracts supported by the state, donors and NGOs are also found. FPE is useful for revealing how these gendered resource disparities are related to agricultural commercialization and increasingly erratic rainfall and aridity, making smallholders more vulnerable to land dispossession. Women’s dependence on men to farm while operating under these changing economic and environmental conditions, coupled with their weaker entitlement rights to resources, threatens to push many, particularly ethnic minority women, out of farming altogether. The ways that intersecting identities shape access to land also complicates understandings of the role of community outsiders who are both the dispossessors of land and those who are intensely vulnerable to dispossession. While rural development studies generally consider women’s farm resources compared to men’s, this does little to explain the intensifying intersectional vulnerabilities.

The new US nutrition aid strategy undermines Africa’s hungriest

Check out our latest OpEd in Aljazeera published here.

The new US foreign assistance strategy for nutrition makes little room for vulnerable smallholder farmers who have been the foundation of Africa’s food systems to date.

Instead of focusing “on households” by helping smallholders grow nutritious food, more resources will go to “large-scale fortification”- a technical term for the funneling of low-nutrition crops to factories that can blend them with vitamins and minerals.

US’s new nutrition plan continues the Green Revolution in Africa. While they announce their intent to help the most vulnerable like smallholder farmers, they build a highly mechanised, capital-intensive, agro-industrial economy, leaving little room for smallholders who are also the main providers of nutritious and diverse foods on the continent.

In the way the US’s agriculture plans have encouraged farmers to rely on factory-synthesized chemicals to add nutrients to African land, its new nutrition plan promotes a reliance on factory-synthesized vitamins to add nutrients to African food.

Activists and scholars need to continue to hold USAID and others accountable for their promises to support smallholder farmers, who should be at the centre of efforts to end malnutrition.

Smallholders are already well suited to produce the most biologically and environmentally diverse and culturally appropriate food, not processors looking to profit from manufacturing nutrition on their behalf.

Gender-climate change nexus in Africa – Systematic review of scholarship

Excited to share our latest publication in Ambio on gender-climate change nexus. Are critical gender analyses intersecting with climate change research in Africa? Despite the calls for it. Not really. A systematic review of 260 articles 

This systematic search and review analyzes all 260 studies published in the Web of Science on gender and climate change in Africa.

While there is no strong methodological bias overall in this literature, comparative case studies and sex disaggregated analyses at individual and household levels predominate, mainly from Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa.

A high number of articles covered the agrarian sector by  comparing women’s and men’s on-farm vulnerability to a changing climate based on their perceptions, assets and adaptation behaviours.

Though this literature recognizes women’s important conservation, farming, and food responsibilities, it oftentimes generalized these contributions without evidence.

A number of themes covered were surprisingly minimal given their focus in wider literature, including studies of coastal areas, conflict, education, energy, migration, urban areas, and water.

Overall, more justice-oriented research is needed into the power relations and socioeconomic structures that intersect with other social categories to make certain people, places, and institutions more vulnerable to climate change.

Investigations into the power dynamics between (social) scientists and African institutions and communities are also needed as 80 percent of the articles reviewed stem from North America and Europe, and 59 percent are locked beyond paywalls.

African agriculture without African farmers

I want to share our latest Op-Ed that we published in Aljazeera where we argue that,

The mass dispossession of smallholder farmers is not a side effect of the ‘African Green Revolution’ it is the whole point.

Please check out the full article here.

Don’t forget to comment and share widely.

Intensifying Work Burdens for Women Under COVID-19 and the Need for a Universal Care System

According to the International Labour Organization (2018, xxix; hereafter ILO), women perform three-quarters of unpaid care work globally. Women who work in full time paid employment still do considerably more unpaid care work than men who work in full time paid employment. This disparity translates to a long-established double work burden for women, which includes the unpaid care work of reproduction, such as the caring for children, elderly, sick, and the severely disabled, cooking, cleaning, and other household tasks, alongside the work of production or for pay (Elson 2000). While there has been an increase in women’s participation in the labour market and men’s contributions to unpaid care work globally, the gender gap in unpaid care only declined by seven minutes across 23 countries between 1997 and 2012 (ILO 2018, xxx). The little progress in reducing the gender divide in unpaid care responsibilities calls into question the effectiveness of existing policy and services to address these disparities. There are obvious moral imperatives for policymakers to reduce this gender gap, but there are also economic incentives and potential tax contributions.

If women’s unpaid care work were translated to an hourly minimum wage, it would amount to 9% of global Gross Domestic Product or US$11 trillion (ILO 2018, xxix).

Through the feminist theoretical framing of a public ethics of care, this post briefly points to the ways that different types of  care work largely performed by women is being grossly impacted by the pandemic. A summary of evidence from the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK) and Canada is provided because of the availability of new data. This post proposes a universal care system to respond to the global pandemic, reduce women’s care work burdens and promote gender justice in the longer term.

Public ethics of care

The term ‘unpaid care work’ is often used synonymously with ‘social reproduction’ or ‘non-market work’ (Folbre 2006). Unpaid care work includes a highly varied set of activities. Some literature defines care work based on activities that involve personal interactions. Others define unpaid care work based on the site of reproduction within the home (Folbre 2006). Yet, care work also exists within the paid economy, particularly employment that involves care provided within other people’s homes.

The feminist framings of care work come into conflict with liberal ideas underlying policy that are premised on individual rights and autonomous choices. Historically, mainstream political theory cast care work as the responsibility of individual women and not the public because of stereotypes that define women as ‘naturally caring’ (Leavy 2005). While there is no universal standard of care, there is the underlying understanding that individuals do not make autonomous choices but live in a web of interdependent relations that require care (Greenswag 2019).

A public ethics of care framing helps to centre care work in policy by disrupting the commonly held divides between public and private roles and by pointing to our interdependencies. This framing is overtly political, requiring that we advocate for changes by demonstrating the underlying structures that contribute to intersectional inequality, exploitation and injustice to promote non-exploitative care relations (Greenswag 2019). This political commitment requires context specific-responses and flexible, open ended policies. Sometimes responses require eliminating social differences so that individuals can equally make free choices. Other times responses require respecting and responding to these differences (Greenswag 2019; Leavy 2005). Overall, policy needs to enable good forms of diverse, care relations and remove the structures that lead to the perpetuation of harmful or exploitative ones (Greenswag 2019).

A need for a public ethics of care in policy is increasingly coming into focus under the global COVID-19 pandemic. With many people living at home under varying degrees of lockdown measures, this translates to less measurable paid work and economic activities. Yet, many of these activities, such as food preparation, childcare and education, among others are being transferred to the home, mainly to women for no compensation.

Care work under the global pandemic

With childcare facilities and schools closed, in addition to work from home orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19, many women have seen their double work burdens intensify. A recent study published by Adams-Prassl et al. (2020, 20) finds that during the pandemic from March to April 2020, women across the UK and US who were pursuing their paid employment from home, saw their care work increase, spending about one hour more on childcare and home schooling than men. Socially isolated single mothers who make up the majority of single parent families are likely in even more stressful situations because they are unable to access their community support.

Alongside gender stereotypes, women are generally taking on more childcare and homeschooling responsibilities than men in the pandemic because women are more likely to give up their paid work to fulfill unpaid care needs (Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan 2015). More women than men have also lost their paid work in the pandemic because of the precariousness of their employment. This career break phenomenon for women is a major underlying cause of the gender wage gap (Pelletier and Patterson 2019). With increasing demands on time due to childcare and homeschooling needs in a lockdown, men’s more secure and better compensated paid labour is often prioritized within heterosexual couples (Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan 2015). Leaving women to handle the reproductive tasks, which exacerbates the gender wage gap and unpaid labour burdens for women further. Care labour requires high amounts of time and mental energy, which are taxing for women and a frequent source of conflict amongst heterosexual couples (Daminger 2019). This conflict can translate to violence against women, which has also increased in the global pandemic.

While the gender divide in reproductive labour is highest in high-income earning households (Adams-Prassl et al. 2020), women who work in lower paying jobs, particularly women of colour and migrants, also face unique care work burdens and threats in the pandemic. COVID-19 has disrupted the perceived divide between paid and unpaid care work. Many of the economic activities performed disproportionally by migrants have been lost in the pandemic, such as in domestic care, accommodation and food retail sectors. For example, in Canada, employment for recent immigrants fell much more sharply from February to April 2020 (23.2%), than those who were born in Canada (14%). This employment loss is largely being transferred mainly to women in the home for no compensation.

Paid care work is performed largely by women and people of colour who are operating on the front lines of the pandemic, putting them at greatest risk of contracting the virus. Boniol et al. (2019) shows that women make up 67% of the health care workforce across 104 countries. One third of deaths related to COVID-19 in the US and 81% in Canada have been those in nursing or long-term care home residents and workers (Yourish et al. 2020). Workers in Canadian long-term care homes are predominantly women and and those who speak English as a second language (Song et al. 2020). In the UK, 61% of the total deaths due to COVID-19 are those from black and Asian backgrounds who work in long term and health care sectors (Marsh and McIntyre 2020; Williamson 2020) and at least half were not born in the UK (Cook, Kursumovic, and Lennane 2020; Rimmer 2020).

It is also worth noting that the LGBTQI community face unique care circumstances that have not been captured in current COVID-19 reporting. This community tends to rely more on their friendships and wider networks for care and support because of their experiences of discrimination and harassment by care service providers (Shiu, Muraco, and Fredriksen-Goldsen 2015; Willis, Ward, and Fish 2011). These interdependent relationships of care are also likely being disrupted due to lockdown measures. Yet, there is no reporting of these figures, so it is impossible to tell how and to what extent their care is compromised.

We need an inclusive universal care system

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has publicly revealed the essential but poorly protected and compensated care work largely carried out by women and minorities, this is a unique moment to advocate for a public ethics of care in policy. A care system should be universal and treated as a public good because there is a collective social responsibility to keep all people healthy, safe and cared for during vulnerable times in their lives, which everyone experiences to varying degrees. A universal care system could include health, child, elder and wider family care, including care for those with severe illnesses and disabilities. Care systems could also include social work, counselling and psychological services among others. As we see in public health, long term and daycare systems in Canada, greater government involvement in care service funding, provisioning and monitoring would provide better quality and more cost-efficient care to a greater number of people than private or mixed public-private systems (Baker, Gruber and Millian 2019; Kane and Kane 1985). Universal care also leads to more women earning income, which has obvious benefits for families, as well as the economy and tax contributions that would pay for a large proportion of care costs in the long run (Scarborough et al. 2020; Yates 2009).

Canada has had an expanded universal health care system that includes long term care for decades. Long term care is offered regardless of a person’s income in residential, nursing and community settings through mainly for-profit systems that are publicly subsidized. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a catastrophe in Canada’s long-term care homes where there have been the highest numbers of deaths, particularly of women (Yourish et al. 2020). This catastrophe is due to weak enforcement of service standards associated with a largely for-profit system. Low wages, precarious employment and high levels of workplace violence, injury, poor sanitation and protection have made the Canadian long-term care system at greater risk of the pandemic (Mialkowski 2020). Instilling a fully public, decentralized system would be more efficient in maintaining higher quality care for long term needs and likely not lead to such catastrophic outcomes in a pandemic.

In the 1990s, the province of Quebec in Canada also established a universal $5 a day (now $7.30) child-care program (ages zero to four), which has led to a more widely accessible and better-quality child care service. The government of Quebec provides services regardless of a family’s income levels, including within mainly non-profit centres (for older children), as well as home-based care staffed by regulated providers (for younger children) (Brennan and Mahon 2011). This program led to a rise in the number of childcare centres, stricter requirements of formal qualifications for all caregivers and higher wage policies. The program also led to a very large increase in the use of these services, which reflects the reduced reliance on extended family and community networks (Baker, Gruber, and Milligan 2008) that tends to predominantly involve women carers for little compensation. It is also found that the care provided in this program is better than the quality of care in for-profit or unregulated care facilities in Quebec (Baker, Gruber, and Milligan 2019). The greatest benefits of the program over the long term, have been for children in low income and single parent families, as well as those in the bottom quintiles of test score distribution (Baker, Gruber, and Milligan 2019). Yet, there have also been some negative behavioural outcomes for children, as well as stress for families. Studies conclude that if this program could improve some of these negative impacts, it could lead to long term progressive outcomes for families and children. For example, Glass, Simon, and Anderson (2016) finds that across 22 OECD countries, paid time off and childcare subsidies are associated with fewer disparities in levels of happiness between parents with children and non-parents.

Even the most progressive policies and universal care systems available, however, have not necessarily led to equitable divisions of care work between women and men. There needs to be a greater incentive for men to take up care responsibilities, such as through the hiring of male employees in some of these care facilities.

A universal care system should also be more accommodating to a wider network of care relationships beyond the nuclear family that tends to predominate, which would be more inclusive of those in LGBTQI and immigrant communities (Shiu, Muraco, and Fredriksen-Goldsen 2015; Willis, Ward, and Fish 2011).

COVID-19 has brought to the front and centre women and minorities’ poorly compensated and protected contributions to essential paid and unpaid care work that is making them disproportionally vulnerable in the pandemic. Adhering to a feminist conceptualization of an ethics of care, there is a collective responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to safe, secure and adequate care at different stages of their lives that do not depend on exploiting women and minorities’ labour. A universal care system is one critical step towards realizing these goals both to cope with a pandemic, as well as in the longer term for transformative justice.

References

Adams-Prassl, Abi Adams, Teodora Boneva, Marta Golin, and Christopher Rauh. 2020. “Inequality in the Impact of the Coronavirus Shock: Evidence from Real Time Surveys.” Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3594297.

Baker, Michael, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan. 2019. “The long-run impacts of a universal child care program.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 11(3): 1-26.

Baker, Michael, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan. 2008. “Universal child care, maternal labor supply, and family well-being.” Journal of Political Economy 116(4): 709-745.

Bertrand, Marianne, Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan. 2015. “Gender identity and relative income within households.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 130(2): 571-614.

Boniol, Mathieu, Michelle McIsaac, Lihui Xu, Tana Wuliji, Khassoum Diallo, and Jim Campbell. 2019. “Gender equity in the health workforce: Analysis of 104 countries.” World Health Organization. Retrieved from https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311314/WHO-HIS-HWF-Gender-WP1-2019.1-eng.pdf.

Brennan, Deborah, and Rianne Mahon. 2011. “State structures and the politics of chil care.” Politics & Gender 7(2): 286-293.

Cook, Tim, Emira Kursumovic, and Simon Lennane. 2020. “Exclusive: deaths of NHS staff from COVID-19 analysed”. Health Service Journal 22.

Daminger, Allison. 2019. “The cognitive dimension of household labour.” American Sociological Review 84(4): 609-633.

Elson, Diane. 2000. Progress of the world’s women. UNIFEM Biennial Report, United Nations Development Fund for Women: New York.

Folbre, Nancy. 2006. “Measuring care: Gender, empowerment, and the care economy.” Journal of Human Development 7(2): 183-199.

Glass, Jennifer, Robin W. Simon, and Matthew A. Andersson. 2016. “Parenthood and happiness: Effects of work-family reconciliation policies in 22 OECD countries.” American Journal of Sociology 122(3): 886-929.

Greenswag, Kari. 2019. “Care Ethics and Public Policy: A Holistic, Transformative Approach.” Politics & Gender 15(4): 912-940.

International Labour Organization. 2018. “Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work.” Retrieved from https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—publ/documents/publication/wcms_633135.pdf.

Kane, Rosalie A, and Robert L Kane. 1985. “The Feasibility of Universal Long-Term–Care Benefits: Ideas from Canada.” New England Journal of Medicine 312(21): 1357-1364.

Leavy, Traci M. 2005. “At the Intersection of Intimacy and Care: Redefining “Family” through the Lens of a Public Ethic of Care.” Politics & Gender 1(1): 65-95.

Marsh, Sarah, and Niamh McIntyre. 2020. “Six in 10 UK health workers killed by COVID-19 are BAME.” The Guardian, May 25, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/25/six-in-10-uk-health-workers-killed-by-covid-19-are-bame.

Mialkowski, C. J. J. 2020. “Long term care facilities in Ontario. 4th Canadian Joint Task Force.” Retrieved from https://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/JTFC-Observations-in-LTCF-in-ON.pdf.

Pelletier, Rachelle, and Martha Patterson. 2015. “The gender wage gap in Canada: 1998-2018. Labour Statistics: Research papers.” Statistics Canada. Retrieved from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-004-m/75-004-m2019004-eng.htm.

Rimmer, Abi. 2020. “Covid-19: Disproportionate impact on ethnic minority healthcare workers will be explored by government.” The British Medical Journal  doi:10.1136/bmj.m1562 pmid:32303494

Scarborough, William, Caitlyn Collins, Leah Ruppanner, and Liana Christin Landivar. 2020. “COVID-19 and the Care Crisis: An Evidence-Based Policy Recommendation for Supporting Families.” DOI:10.31235/osf.io/zgbkr.

Shiu, Chengshi, Anna Muraco, and Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen. 2016. “Invisible care: Friend and partner care among older lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adults.” Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research 7(3): 527-546.

Song, Yuting, Matthias Hoben, Peter Norton, and Carole A. Estabrooks. 2020. “Association of work environment with missed and rushed care tasks among care aides in nursing homes.” JAMA Network Open 3(1): e1920092-e1920092.

Williamson, Elizabeth, Alex J. Walker, Krishnan J. Bhaskaran, Seb Bacon, Chris Bates, Caroline E. Morton, Helen J. Curtis. 2020. “OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients”. medRxiv. Retrieved from https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1.full

Willis, Paul, Nicki Ward, and Julie Fish. 2011. “Searching for LGBT carers: Mapping a research agenda in social work and social care.” British Journal of Social Work 41(7): 1304-1320.

Yates, Rob. 2009. “Universal health care and the removal of user fees.” The Lancet 373(9680): 2078-2081.

Yourish, Karen, K. K. Rebecca Lai, Danielle Ivory, and Mitch Smith. 2020. “One-third of all US coronavirus deaths are nursing home residents or workers.” The New York Times, May 11, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/09/us/coronavirus-cases-nursing-homes-us.html.

Development interventions in northern Ghana are deepening gender inequality in farming and household food responsibilities

In my latest study, published here in the Journal of Rural Studies I find that,

  • There are major repercussions of official donor assistance or development projects and interventions that are misaligned with context-specific gender norms.
  • Food responsibilities are destabilizing due to environmental change like acutely erratic rainfall and aridity.
  • Support by development interventions for women’s subsistence production risk adding to their household food responsibilities.
  • Support to women only also risks alienating men, potentially causing conflict.
  • I advocate for interventions to be context-specific and account for how the environmental, social and political economic contexts are changing.

Development policy narratives about gender in African agriculture have often emphasized that women tend to farm more for subsistence while men tend to farm more for cash. This gender division of labor is an important aspect of social inequality and food insecurity. However, gender divisions of labour are neither fixed nor universal.

Drawing upon qualitative, ethnographic research conducted in northern Ghana and the main concerns of feminist political ecologists, feminist geographers and feminist food studies scholars, this article examines assumptions underlying development policy and practice about the gender relations of farming and food.

This study argues that gender norms in the case do not neatly align with the prevailing conceptions that have shaped interventions. Male smallholders described their primary farming objective as being to produce enough food to feed their family, while women smallholders tended to describe their farming largely in terms of cash generation.

This article also considers some of the negative consequences of this misalignment between projects and gender norms. In particular, projects geared at female farmers to support their subsistence production risk adding to their household responsibilities. Support to women only also risks alienating men, potentially causing conflict around the use of project support because women are not autonomous agents. Women rely on and negotiate their labour, harvests and family landholdings, as well as that of others. This negotiation can be disrupted due to interventions and wider environmental and agrarian changes.

In short, programs that differentiate support based on misconceptions of context-specific gender relations can have unanticipated negative consequences. This study suggests these consequences can persist even in practice that rectifies the tendency of practice to exclude women.

Ultimately, development practice should be context-specific and consider how gendered agriculture and food relations may be changing.

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