: Structural Adjustment and African Women Farmers . Christina H. Gladwin.

1992 ◽  
Vol 94 (4) ◽  
pp. 988-989
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Colson
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Women Farmers ◽  
African Women

Structural Adjustment and African Women Farmers

1992 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 220
Author(s):  
Gail M. Gerhart ◽  
Christina H. Gladwin
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Women Farmers ◽  
African Women

Structural Adjustment and African Women Farmers

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 148
Author(s):  
Eva M. Rathgeber ◽  
Christina H. Gladwin
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Women Farmers ◽  
African Women

Women and Post-Independence African Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretchen Bauer ◽  
Akosua Darkwah ◽  
Donna Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Early Years ◽  
African Women ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Women's Associations ◽  
Structural Adjustment Programs ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Political Office

Building upon their participation in anti-colonial struggles across Africa in the mid-20th century, African women have taken on many political roles in the post-independence period. While military rule and single-party rule precluded access to elected office in many countries in the early years after independence, female combatants fought alongside their male counterparts in ongoing struggles for national liberation in other parts of Africa, especially southern Africa, into the 1980s and 1990s. In many countries, national gender machineries established in the 1970s provided an institutional infrastructure for pursuing women’s rights even if they were often not fully implemented. State feminism, articulated through First Ladyism and state-led national women’s associations, sought to co-opt women’s struggles for political gain. In some instances, it did ameliorate women’s economic hardships and promote political participation. Women’s mobilization in the 1980s, in part a response to the severe impact of structural adjustment programs on devastated African economies, led to local-level organizing and eventually to a focus on women’s access to political office. Since the political transitions that swept the continent beginning in the early 1990s, women have accessed political office in all three branches of government in unprecedented numbers just as new forms of mobilization have emerged around issues like the rights of sexual minorities.

Women in Guinea-Bissau

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Capital City ◽  
African Women ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Development Indicators ◽  
Guinea Bissau

Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country, is home to a multiplicity of ethnic and religious groups with complicated historical entanglements along the Upper Guinea Coast and across European and Afro-Atlantic orbits. Generalizations about women’s lives, given both the longue durée of its precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history and the diversity of its social systems, are quite easily countered by contradictory—or at least more nuanced—renderings. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern some broad commonalities and continuities, especially in market-related roles and activities. Guinean women have been enterprising traders—sometimes gaining economic and political prominence—since precolonial times and throughout the prolonged Portuguese colonial presence in the region. In particular, Luso-African women, known as nharas, revolutionized and dominated trade in coastal settlements from the 17th to the 19th centuries, but their political and economic autonomy was ultimately curtailed by increasingly repressive colonial policies. Guinea-Bissau’s unique struggle for independence—spearheaded by the revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral and achieved through an 11-year military struggle against the Portuguese—opened up opportunities for women’s liberation from both Portuguese colonialism and customary patriarchal strictures. Although Guinean women participated in the Luta da Libertação in unprecedented ways, they struggled to maintain an active role in nation-building after formal independence in 1974. The Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde’s (PAIGC) rhetorical commitment to gender equality remains an unfulfilled promise in the postcolonial period, as chronic political instability, deleterious economic policies, and largely unfavorable structural adjustment programs have tended to worsen women’s overall conditions. Women have continued to carve out creative roles in an expanding neoliberal marketplace, often becoming intrepid—although always precarious—players in the informal sector. Although women have gained several protective legislative rights since independence—such as the prohibition of forced and child marriage, and easier access to divorce—these have been implemented unevenly. Guinea-Bissau’s human development indicators are among the lowest in the world, especially for women: life expectancy for women is 59 years, childbirth is the leading cause of women’s mortality, and literacy among women is at 44 percent. The failure of the postcolonial state to fulfill Cabral’s egalitarian vision has not only marginalized women’s political and economic status within the country, it may have contributed to the overall weakening of key state institutions, ultimately enticing international narco-traffickers to its shores in the early 21st century and entrenching a drug economy amidst the ruins of the country’s capital city. The gendered roots of Guinea-Bissau’s present woes cannot be ignored.

Women, Equality, and Citizenship in Contemporary Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robtel Neajai Pailey
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
African Women ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
The Public Sphere

Though deeply contested, citizenship has come to be defined in gender-inclusive terms both as a status anchored in law, with attendant rights and resources, and as agency manifested in active political participation and representation. Scholars have argued that gender often determines how citizenship rights are distributed at household, community, national, and institutional levels, thereby leaving women with many responsibilities but few resources and little representation. Citizenship laws in different parts of Africa explicitly discriminate based on ethnicity, race, gender and religion, with women bearing the brunt of these inequities. In particular, African women have faced structural, institutional, and cultural barriers to ensuring full citizenship in policy and praxis, with contestations in the post-independence era centering around the fulfillment of citizenship rights embedded in law, practice, and lived experience. While African women’s concerns about their subjective roles as equal citizens were often sidelined during nationalist liberation movements, the post-independence era has presented more meaningful opportunities for women in the continent to demand equality of access to citizenship rights, resources, and representation. In contemporary times, a number of local, national, continental, and transnational developments have shaped the contours of the battle for women’s citizenship equality, including the prominence of domestic women’s movements; national constitutional reviews and revisions processes; electoral quotas; female labor force participation; and feminism as a unifying principle of gender justice. African women have had to overcome constraints imposed on them not only by patriarchy, but also by histories of slavery, colonialism, structural adjustment, land dispossession, militarism, and neoliberalism. They have often been subordinated in the domestic or private sphere, with gendered values and norms then undermining their agency in the public sphere. Although African women have managed to secure some political, socio-economic, and cultural rights, resources, and representation, this has certainly not been the panacea for achieving full equality of citizenship or gender justice.

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