The Contribution of African Women to Economic Growth and Development:

Historical Perspectives and Policy Implications

May 31, 2011

Emmanuel Akyeampong (Harvard University)Hippolyte Fofack (World Bank)

GAP DEVELOPMENT SEMINAR SERIES

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Outline Background and context; Rationale and objectives; Precolonial Africa: An Era of Gender Parity? Production, Reproduction, Accumulation: Kinship and

Exploitation; Gendered Production in Pottery and Textiles:

Women’s Work; State Formation, Slavery, Slave Trade and the Work

of Christian Missionaries; Colonial Policies, Colonial Economies: Gendered

Impact and implications; Conclusion. Africa on the Eve of Independence: the

Status of Women;

Background and context At the turn of the millennium, world leaders

converged on a set of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs);

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger (e.g. reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day);Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education (e.g. Ensure that by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete full course primary schooling); Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women (e.g. Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels of education no later than 2015); 3

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality (e.g. reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate);Goal 5: Improve maternal health (e.g. reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio; achieve by 2015 universal access to reproductive health);

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases (e.g. Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS; Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it);Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability;Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development; 4

Goal 1: Poverty reduction Persistence of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa in

the first decade of the millennium; The diverging development paths and widening

income gaps between Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions of the developing world have emerged as one of the main characteristics of the last few decades;

The challenges of meeting the first MDG may be exacerbated by the global economic and financial crisis;

Sub-Saharan Africa has emerged as the only region of the developing world that will miss MDG1; 5

Figure: per capita income in North and Sub-Saharan Africa

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Tracking progress toward halving poverty

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MDG3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women Promoting gender equality through elimination of

gender disparity in education is good for growth and economic development in both advanced and developing countries;

In the Bank’s framework, gender equality impact on growth operates through a number of channels, including: Increased women’s labor force participation,

productivity and earnings; Life expectancy; Improved children’s well-being;

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United Kingdom: Female Labor Force participation and income

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Schooling and Income in Africa (1970-2009)

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Assessment of Progress towards MDG3

The Sub-Saharan African Region continues to exhibit some of the worse gender-related indicators and large gender gaps: The highest maternal mortality ration; Large gender gaps in primary and

secondary enrollment rations; Gaps in female labor force participation;

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Maternal Mortality Ratio

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The context is also characterized by the increasingly strong commitment to MDG3 in the development community;

Development partners selected gender as a ―Special Theme‖ of the IDA 16 replenishment;

The next World Development Report—WDR 2012: Gender Equality and Development; focuses on the evolution of gender equality across the

world and strives to address gaps in knowledge on the gender and development nexus.

In particular, how and why gender equality matters for development, as well as how to best address gender inequality in the design of development strategies and policies.

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As a result of persistency of high poverty rates and gender disparities in Sub-Saharan Africa, most research on gender and development in the region have focused on: Widowhood and vulnerability; Gender-based violence; Gender gap in access to infrastructures; Gender, poverty and unemployment;

African women have been approached as victims and on compassionate ground;

This approach may not reveal the full potential and contribution of African women to economic development;

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Rationale and objectives Africa has a unique history where colonialism

has created added layers on existing norms and traditions, rendering the gender relations and dynamics more complex than in other regions;

The complexity of that relation requires that the gender and development nexus be studied from several prism—after all gender is a cross-cutting theme in the Bank;

The objectives of this research is to fill analytical gaps, drawing on history to improve understanding of gender relations and dynamics and in the process improve policy design and formulation in the region;

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In the last couple of decades increasing academic and policy interest in evaluating and enhancing the contribution of women to economic growth and development;

Recognition that women’s potential contribution to growth would be even more significant in the absence of household occupation constraints, often exacerbated by the poor state of infrastructure (Agenor, Canuto and Pereira daSilva, 2010), Agenor and Fofack, 2011);

Questions at the heart of emerging studies of gender and development in Africa: (i) how gender discrimination manifests itself; (ii) the persistence of gender discrimination;

(iii) the possible economic costs and welfare implications of gender discrimination;

(iv) how did gender-based discrimination actually originate in Africa;

(v) what triggered that process; (vi) what drives or sustains it; Social scientists and economists such as

Esther Boserup, Nils-Petter Lagerlof, Paul Collier, Chris Udry, William-Baah-Boatengand others have addressed the first three set of questions raised;

In particular, Udry’s insights on female land use in Akuapem, Ghana;

Last three questions require the intersection of economics with history and ethnography: (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2001); Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2011);

There is where we place our intervention; Capture of women’s labor within household

production; The nature of African social and political

institutions and developments that have perpetuated this;

Does it make a difference in terms of female accumulation and empowerment when they work outside the home?

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Precolonial Africa: An Era of Gender Parity?

Ivor Wilks (1993) on the 16th century in Akan history as the ―era of great ancestresses‖;

Akan oral traditions on women in leadership role in the age of migrations. The acquisition of Kumasi;

R. S. Rattray (1923) on the stools of chiefs and queen mothers in Asante;

Warfare and menstruation;

Matriliny does not translate into matriarchy;

Christine Saidi (2010) on matriarchy as a viable sociopolitical form in matrilineal societies in East-Central Africa between 100 BCE and 1900 CE;

Draws on linguistic and archaeological evidence to suggest women’s strong social and political authority across the region until warfare and political centralization elevated men;

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Production, Reproduction, Accumulation: Kinship and Exploitation Claude Meillassoux (1972, 1981) is one of the

first to draw attention in African studies to kinship as a social and economic system that manages economic production, the physical reproduction of human beings, and social reproduction at large through a comprehensive set of social institutions;

In his debate with Miers and Kopytoff (1977), Meillassoux (1991) would argue that Miers and Kopytoff had completely misunderstood the function of kinship in their slave-to-kinship continuum;

For Meillassoux the boundaries of kinship are rigid and exclusionary;

Iliffe (2007) on how Africans as pioneers have colonized a harsh continent on behalf of humanity: Soil and climate conditions in Africa; Old soils, thin top soils, acidic and leached;

Precolonial Africa and the context of abundant land and scarce labor;

Kopytoff (1987) internal and interstitial frontiers in Africa;

Institutional vacuums between settled societies;

Max Gluckman (1963) on the vagueness of succession rules in Africa;

This is the context of ―wealth-in-people.‖

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Production, Reproduction and Accumulation: Kinship and Exploitation - cont

This is the setting for production and reproduction in Africa, the struggle over labor and the urgency of demographic continuity;

Women are at the center of both; Kinship: an ideology that reckons relations of

adhesion; demarcates age, sex and functional categories related to productive activities;

Kinship also regulated the sexual unions that underpinned reproduction;

Boserup (1970), Goody (1976) on correlations between types of agriculture and lineage systems;

Planting vs cereal cultures and how they map onto matriliny (and polygyny) and patriliny (less polygyny and dowry);

The plough and gendered production; Women, the hoe and planting cultures in

Africa;

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Gendered Production in Pottery and Textiles: Women’s Work Pottery is essentially women’s work, but among

the Hausa, Mossi, in Bunyoro and Buganda men worked in pottery;

A. K. Quarcoo and M. Johnson (1968) on Shaipotters in Ghana;

Craft enmeshed in puberty rituals and effectively feminized;

Specialization for the market; 32 types of pots; Provided income for women; Women’s niche in a market economy only

obtained through aversion rituals?

Textiles. Mali (Roberts, 1996) and Northern Nigeria (Kriger, 1993, 2006). C19th Sokoto Caliphate;

Spinning vs weaving. Kano male weavers. H. Barth. Southern emirates of Ilorin and Bida.

Female weavers and managers: 40 types of textiles made by women; State strictures;

Slavery: Impact on self purchase. Images

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Male Weavers in Kano, 1921. Unilever Archives

Male Weaver. Postcard from Sierra Leone Protectorate, Ross Collection

State Formation, Slavery and Slave Trade, and the Work of Christian Missionaries

The importance of slave trade and slave production in precolonial Western Africa: Debate between Walter Rodney (1966)

and John Fage (1969); Scholarly consensus on relation between

internal slavery and slave exports; Meillassoux on warrior and mercantile slavery

in West Africa; Atlantic slave trade new lease to warriors;

From “wealth-in-people” to sale of people? Selling outsiders. Selling men. Women the majority of slaves in Africa (Robertson and Klein, 1983);

Their centrality to production and reproduction; Incorporating outsiders; Kinship the mechanism; ―Rights-in-persons‖: ―belonging to‖ and ―belonging in‖;

Manning (1990) that in Africa through the export slave trade, low productivity made the price Europeans offered for an African slave higher than the productive value of an African in Africa;

Abolition of export slave trade and the introduction of ―Legitimate trade‖; Expansion in plantation slavery within Africa; Women in the transition to cash cropping;

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States, Slave Trade, Slavery and Christian Missionaries - cont Abolition movement in the late C18th and

Christian circles in Europe; Formation of mission societies and the mission to

Africa; Strong baggage of European culture and the

impact on African institutions, culture and gender relations;

The church, the school, and residential patterns in ―Salems‖ or Christian quarters;

Championing nuclear families, and a different gendered approach to labor;

Women as wives and mothers, men as producers;

Missionaries introduce the plough to men in South Africa;

The market as a civilizing influence. Christian families and ―respectability;

―Middle Class‖ sensibilities among urban Christians;

In rural Africa female agricultural production remained important but rendered invisible;

Men mediated household relations with the colonial and capitalist infrastructure: paying taxes, receiving monies, delivering produce

to depots, buying supplies for the rural household; Images

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Female carriers of palm oil casks, Azumiri. Qua Ibo. Jonathan Green. Unilever Archives

Men in the formal colonial economy, Southern Nigeria. Unilever Archives

Colonial Policies, Colonial Economies: Gendered Impact and Implications Colonial abolition of slavery at the end of the

C19th and the paradox that few slaves left their masters;

The ―Protectorate‖ and ―Indian‖ models; Even the abolition of slavery failed to sever the

cord that subordinated women to men and held them captive in the domestic realm;

Settler, Concessionary and Peasant Economies;

Different labor dynamics but structure of colonial economy similar;

Albert Sarraut, Colonial Minister (1920-24, 1932-33) on the colonial economy;*

All colonial economies weighed heavily on women and the countryside in the unwillingness of capitalist interests to reproduce the labor force;

Meillassoux (1981) on how European companies drew labor from rural Africa, paid low wages to urban workers, and simultaneously prevented the penetration of capitalistic relations into the countryside to sustain the exodus of rural labor;

Patriarchal Alliances and Customary Law: the Invention of Custom;

Plural legal systems under British and French colonial rule;

Family law under custom: African native tribunals, Islamic courts.

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Ghana: Population employed in key occupations

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Colonial Policies, Colonial Economies: Albert Sarraut

Economically, a colonial possession means to the home country simply a privileged market whence it will draw the raw materials it needs, dumping its own manufactures in return;

Economic policy is reduced to rudimentary procedures of gathering crops and bartering them;

Moreover, by strictly imposing on its colonial ―dependency‖ the exclusive consumption of its manufactured products, the metropolis prevents any efforts to use or manufacture local raw materials on the spot, and any contact with the rest of the world;

The colony is forbidden to establish any industry, to improve itself by economic progress, to rise above the stage of producing raw materials, or to do business with the neighboring territories for its own enrichment across the customs barriers erected by the metropolitan power (Fetter, 1979: 109).

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Ghana: imports of key selected items (in 000s of GBP)

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Colonial Policies, Colonial Economies --cont. Education in Colonial Africa: Women Outmanned; Education is a key area, instrumental in colonial

understandings of the role of the colonial subject, and for independent governments the role of empowered citizens in developing nations;

Enormous influence of missionaries in British and Belgian colonies;

Mission education aimed at supplying teachers, catechists, and clerks for lower echelons of colonial bureaucracy;

French more independent of mission control, especially FWA;

French educational reforms after 1946 French Union (Hailey’s African Survey (1957));

Phelps Stokes Fund in British Africa (1920, 1923); Gendered education: women in domestic and

marriage training; men in industrial and agricultural training (Berman, 1971);

Low female enrollment rates in formal education. Case of Ghana, 1900-1960. Chart;

Reform in British colonies (1940s): Asquith and Elliot Commissions;

South Africa and the Bantu Education Act of 1953;

Women and the social reproduction of the Apartheid State, Inanda (Healy, 2011);

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Ghana: Enrollment in primary and middle schools

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Conclusion. Africa on the Eve of Independence: the Status of women MDG3: promote gender equality and empower women.

Upcoming WDR (2012) devoted to gender equality; How an understanding of the historical processes that have

captured women’s labor or confined them to informal sectors necessary to any effective policy intervention;

Agric base of African economies; excessive exposure to external shocks and recurrent BOP crises (Fofack, 2009). Gender inequality tends to be more pronounced in the primary and agric sector. Ghana exports vs. imports, 1900-60;

Manufacturing and service industries and the place of women; Women in urban Africa pushed into the informal sector, essentially a

service industry (Keith Hart); Dynamism of the urban informal sector – an escape from rural

kinship networks? Ghana key occupations, 1900-60; Africa and Asia in the 1950s, African optimism not misplaced.

Gunnar Myrdal (1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics);

Thank You.

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