By Mihe Gaomab II
The term “Women are the Future” is more pronounced in Namibia than ever before. The recent 50/50 quota does strengthen the need for highlighting the role of women after 21 March 2015 in the economic, social and political sphere.
There are well-documented evidence-based facts such as the High Level Panel that advocates for a Post Development Agenda 2015, and attest the intricacies and manifestations of what women went through over the past three decades to get them where they are today in the world.
In the 1970s, research on African farmers noted that, far from being gender neutral, development was gender blind and could harm women. Out of this realisation emerged the Women in Development (WID) approach, which construed the problem of development, as being women’s exclusion from a benign process.
Women’s subordination was seen as having its roots in their exclusion from the market sphere and their limited access to, and control over, resources. The key was then to place women ‘in’ development by legislatively trying to limit discrimination, and by promoting their involvement in education and employment.
The WID approach led to resources being targeted at women and made particularly women’s significant productive or income-generating contribution more visible. A notable key initiative and deeper implementation of the Women In Development in Namibia must be put squarely on Veronica de Klerk [executive director of Women’s Action for Development] who pioneered women development in Namibia as a result of this approach.
While WID advocated for greater gender equality, it did not tackle the real structural problem: the unequal gender roles and relations that are the basis of gender subordination and women’s exclusion. This approach also focussed on what have been termed practical gender needs, such as providing better access to water, health and social service provision, which would reduce the amount of time women and girls must spend in domestic activities and thus allow them more time for education or employment.
In the 1980s, the Gender and Development (GAD) approach arose out of the critique of WID. GAD recognised that gender roles and relations are key to improving women’s lives, with the term ‘gender’ suggesting that a focus on both women and men is needed. As the Namibian Women Summit advocated tirelessly over the past five years in Namibia, the need to understand how gender intersects with other characteristics such as age, ethnicity and sexuality has been noted. The GAD approach recognises that it is not sufficient to add women and girls into existing processes of development but there is also a need to problematise why they are excluded, advocating that the focus should be on addressing the imbalances of power at the basis of that exclusion.
GAD also questions the notion of ‘development’ and its benign nature, implying a need to shift from a narrow understanding of development as economic growth, to a more social or human-centred development.
However, women’s ‘rights’, particularly sexual and reproductive health rights, are not universally accepted as rights, and violence against women remains prevalent across the globe, and women still lack full and equal participation in economic and political life.
The most influential evidence on the importance of women to economic development has come from research used to support the World Bank’s ‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategy’ launched in 2001. This research highlighted that societies that discriminate by gender tend to experience less rapid economic growth and poverty reduction than societies that treat males and females more equally, and that social gender disparities produce economically inefficient outcomes.
Identification of women as being a reliable, productive and cheap labour force makes them the preferred workforce for textiles and electronic transnational corporations as evident from the employment of young women in specialised technology firms producing blue chips for computers in East Asia. Perception of women as ‘good with money’, including being better at paying back loans, has led them to be targeted in microfinance programmes as evident with Grameen Bank. Recognition of women as more efficient distributors of goods and services within the household has led to them being targeted with resources aimed at alleviating poverty, such as cash transfer programmes as with the e-wallet or Mobipay solutions in rural areas of Namibia.
Critics suggest this instrumentalist approach to engendering development, while bringing economic growth gains, will not fundamentally change the position and situation of women. It is important to note that while gender equality will help bring economic growth, economic growth will not necessarily bring gender equality. Advancing gender equality requires strengthening different dimensions of women’s autonomy: economic and political autonomy, full citizenship and freedom from all forms of violence, and sexual and reproductive autonomy.
The notion is that women in the development world are actually likely more empowered than those in the developed economies. This is because they are empowered at subsistence level as been female-headed households and empowered to take charge of the “caring economy” through raising children and to ensure that needs are met constantly and immediately.
Women in Namibia, especially in rural and informal settlements, are empowered by circumstances to do good by doing something.
But this does not mean that women are advanced as a result. Compared to their female peers in the developed world that are faced by acute male chauvinism and social pressures in the work and home place through “glass ceiling” and “sexual harassment” women in developing economies such as Namibia face the problem of “standing up for their rights” for economic advancement.
While political culture is important for bringing change, women continue to have limited voice at local and national levels, and women are not able to fully participate in formal systems of power.
Hence, the support to 50/50 to ensure that political discourse on quota allocations translates into real economic advancement for women in the work place as well as in the overall sphere of the Namibian economy.
*Mihe Gaomab II is the CEO of the Namibian Competition Commission. The article is based on a speech presented at the Namibian Women Summit on 13 August 2014.