Unintended Consequences of Gendered Development Initiatives

A couple weeks ago, I attended a “sharing session” where three Oxford students discussed experiences and insights about their diverse work in social intervention projects, both through non-profit work and social entrepreneurship. I was particularly intrigued by a student who spoke about working with women in developing nations on a range of projects from art therapy to rainwater collection. Her take-home message for all of us was that development initiatives that focus exclusively on women may not only ignore the intricacies of intrahousehold dynamics and the role of men in forming female beliefs and ideologies, but they can also place a high burden on women to “fix” a myriad of development problems, from high fertility rates to child malnutrition.

This last concept really struck me: do gendered development interventions risk placing too much responsibility on females to overcome poverty hurdles? Carney (1993) and Schroeder (1993) bring this to life in The Gambia, where irrigation and orchard projects inadvertently increased women’s labor burden and limited the returns to their agricultural work. Through my readings of these case studies in combination with Elmhirst’s (2011) introduction to “new” feminist political ecologies and Rocheleau’s (2010) description of mixed methods in the field, I wonder if feminist political ecology might be a lens through which we can analyze the developing world to avoid gendered interventions with dangerous unintended consequences for women.

In Carney’s detailed account in The Gambia, we first see how colonial projects of irrigation and swampland conversion for rice production led to men claiming newly productive land under the customary title of maruo. Because only women traditionally cultivate rice, while male heads of household control the product of maruo land, this change essentially increased the labor burden of women and decreased their labor rights. This impact was exacerbated by irrigation leading to demands for year-round female labor.

Although these consequences are important, it is even more enlightening to look at relatively recent NGO interventions in The Gambia that specifically target women through horticultural projects. Carney describes how projects in the 1980s focused on women’s vegetable gardens have led to increased female incomes and donor financing for well construction. However, these successes have created gender conflict as women’s incomes often surpass their husbands’, and men routinely impede female access to local land for vegetable production. Well construction has led to year-round cropping, and thus year-round demand for female labor, while female rights over their earnings have eroded as men shift financial burdens to their wives, as well as default on intrahousehold loans, as Schroeder describes. Moreover, men have begun to recapture garden areas by planting orchards that eventually shade out vegetable gardens, leading to even more direct gender conflict.

Both Schroeder and Carney show that the long-run result of the “women in development” projects in The Gambia was not the expected empowerment of women: “NGO improvement of inland swamps with wells has resulted in new avenues for income generation that sharply conflict with the WID objectives of NGOs” (Carney, 418), and “developers have a blind spot with respect to the fundamentally exploitative nature of many of the work processes into which women are being incorporated across the continent” (Schroeder, 362).

The Gambian example appears to support the hypothesis that the burden WID projects place on women may often be too high. Perhaps this is a result of a process Elmhirst highlights, where gender has lost its vitality inside development, becoming “institutionalized into a series of tools and techniques that are far removed from the transformatory potential of gender as a feminist concept” (Elmhirst, 130). However, I am inspired by Dianne Rocheleau’s work in the Dominican Republic, where she demonstrates the potential of gendered research to accurately and intricately reveal drivers of environmental change. By combining innovative qualitative methods with rigorous quantitative analysis, Rocheleau sets the stage for research that may allow us to redefine WID projects that are careful to avoid unintended consequences of gendered development programs of the past.

Works Cited:

Carney, J. 1993. Converting the wetlands, engendering the environment: the intersection of gender with agrarian change in the Gambia. Economic Geography: 329-348.

Elmhirst, Rebecca. 2011. Introducing new feminist political ecologies. Geoforum 42 (2):129-132.

Rocheleau, D. 1995. Maps, Numbers, Text, and Context: Mixing Methods in Feminist Political Ecology. The Professional geographer 47 (4):458-466.

Schroeder, RA. 1993. Shady practice: Gender and the political ecology of resource stabilization in Gambian garden/orchards. Economic Geography 69 (4):349-365.