Women And Development In Africa

Kevane explores gender issues in Africa in the context of the continent's poor economic performance.

This handbook presents an extensive new overview of African development - past, present and future. It addresses key core themes and topics that are pertinent to the continent's development - including sections on history, health and food, politics, economics, rural and urban development, and development policy and practice. The volume draws on the expertise of over 60 of the world's leading scholars to provide a detailed and up-to-date analysis of the key opportunities and challenges that confront Africa, and how such issues are being addressed. Arranged by key themes, the handbook provides not only a historical understanding of the past, but also political perspectives on the future. The chapters provide critically informed analyses of their topics by drawing upon the latest conceptual viewpoints and applied experiences in Africa in the form of case studies to offer a comprehensive examination of the opportunities, challenges, key debates and future prospects. This handbook is an invaluable state-of-the-art overview and reference concerning many different aspects of Africa's development, which will be of interest to academics in all fields of African studies, and also academics and students working in cognate disciplines such as development studies, geography, history, politics and economics.

This book investigates women’s political participation in Africa. Going beyond the formal institutions of electoral politics, it explores a range of spaces where everyday politics take place, at national and at local levels. In recent years there have been significant improvements in the number of women elected to parliament in Africa. However, there is little indication that this is translating into better developmental outcomes, and indeed there is mounting evidence that it could in fact help to bolster some authoritarian regimes. Starting from the premise that politics is a far broader project than securing a seat in national or local legislatures alone, this book explores the opportunities for women’s political participation across a number of informal spaces where women and men gather, organise and interact in a more regular and systematic manner. Combining insights from political science, sociology and feminist theory and drawing on detailed cases from the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, it examines how power in its multiple dimensions circulates across a range of everyday political spaces, while drawing attention to the links between domestic gender inequalities and the global political economy. Inviting scholars, practitioners and activists to broaden their focus beyond formal electoral institutions if they want to support women to become more politically active, this book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of African studies, development studies, gender and development, democratisation, and international relations.

This book considers how the establishment and/or improvement of gender equality impacts on the social, economic, religious, cultural, environmental and political developments of human societies in Africa and its Diaspora. An interdisciplinary team of contributors examine the role of gender in development against the background of Africa’s convoluted and arduous history of state formation, slavery, colonialism, post-independence, nation-building and poverty. Each chapter highlights and stimulates further discussion on the struggles that many African and African Diaspora societies grapple with in the perplexing issue of gender and development - concentrating on gains that have been made and the challenges yet to be surmounted.

This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

This book adds significantly to the discourse surrounding the progress made in empowering women in Africa over the last decade, providing strong research evidence on diverse and timely gender issues in varied African countries. Topics covered include climate change and environmental degradation, agriculture and land rights, access to – and quality of – education, maternal and reproductive health, unpaid care and women’s labor market participation, financial inclusion and women’s political participation. Cross cutting issues such as migration, masculinities and social norms are also addressed in this volume, which is aimed at policy makers, academics, and indeed anyone else interested in the UN Sustainable Development Goal of the empowerment of women and girls.

This book examines women’s participation in social, economic and political development in West Africa. The book looks at women from the premise of being active agents in the development processes within their communities, thereby subverting the dominate narrative of women as passive recipients of development.

This book investigates the barriers to women’s economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality. Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women’s economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women’s care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such as the school-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy. With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.