FEMALE PARTICIPATION IN THE FORMAL SECTOR AND DEVELOPMENT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Journal of Third World Studies, Fall 2003 by Njoh, Ambe J, Rigos, Platon N

The WID strategy can be criticized on several scores. For instance, the strategy made no effort to encourage women to take up non-traditional roles in the modern economy. Rather, it was focused almost exclusively on efforts to acknowledge the presence of women and their traditional role of reproduction and nurturing. This orientation required more to be done by way of accounting for women's contributions to the development process. Boserup's work (see above) and the works of other liberal feminists such as Marilyn Waring, were designed to draw attention to what they consider the hitherto "invisible" work of women in LDCs.18 Another criticism of the WID strategy has to do with the fact that it was oblivious to extant discriminatory labor market practices that ensured the exclusion of women from the formal sector of the economy. Njiro echoes this criticism when she contends that the WID approach did not question existing structures so as to find out why women fared badly in the formal economic sector.19 In the same light, the approach did not consider the exploitation of women as a component of the capitalist mode of production. Instead, as Nyamu20 notes, it took extant structures as fixed and made no effort to increase the participation of women in mainstream economy.

Women and Development (WAD). Disillusionment with the WID strategy led to the launching of the Women and Development (WAD) strategy. This strategy owes its existence to Marxist thought. The thrust of WAD dealt with the issue of gender-based inequities within the broader framework of class-based inequalities. Inspired by dependency theory, WAD subsumed gender-based inequalities under the rubric of larger imbalances that are themselves a function of the unequal division of labor characteristic of both the global and national economies.

Although unlike WID, the WAD strategy offered a more critical view of the socio-economic status of women in LDCs, it can also be criticized on several grounds. For instance, it failed to pay adequate attention to "the relationship between patriarchy, different modes of production, and women's subordination and oppression."21 Also, it does not specifically focus on the issue of gender-based inequities in the mainstream economies of developing countries per se. Instead, the issue is seen as no more than a small part of class-based global inequalities. In effect, WAD gives the impression that gender-based inequities in the formal labor market will evaporate once class or global inequalities have been eliminated. Proactive policies such as affirmative action designed to eliminate gender-based inequities in the mainstream economies of developing countries therefore have no place within the WAD framework.

Gender and Development (GAD). This strategy is an upshot of the increased emphasis on the social relations of gender that occurred in the 1980s. The strategy is critical of the social system that assigns roles to women that are different from those of their male counterparts.22 The biggest hurdle to the socio-economic development of women, GAD scholars contend, are the social, political and economic institutions that assign and shape societal roles along gender lines. Therefore, efforts to eradicate discrimination against women in the labor market requires that power relations and structures within society be revamped. This is, of course, a very tall order, particularly because such revamping efforts, if they are to be implemented, will conflict sharply with efforts to protect tradition in developing societies.