This issue of Feminist Africa revisits rural women and agricultural livelihoods, focusing on the persistence of contexts that compromise their ability to benefit from development interventions. An accumulation of studies over the years have set out to unravel the hindering factors. Some such studies, premised on the economic efficiency argument, push for greater attention to…
Category: Archive
A Magnifying Glass and A Fine-Tooth Comb: Understanding Girls’ and Young Women’s Sexual Vulnerability, by Mzikazi Nduna. Pretoria: CSA&G Press, Centre for Sexualities, AIDS and Gender, University of Pretoria, 2020.
by Jamela Robertson While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and choices…
Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, by Oluwakemi M. Balogun. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
by Sharon Adetutu Omotoso While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and…
Working with Rural Women to Secure Resource Access – Akua O. Britwum speaks with Fati Abigail Abdulai
Akua Britwum spoke to Fati Abigail Abdulai from Ghana, in a virtual interview on Sunday the 2nd of May, 2021. Fati Abdulai is the Director of Widows and Orphans Movement (WOM) of Ghana. She has held her position since 2013, when Fati’s mother, the founder of the WOM, retired. Fati had been supporting her mother…
Improving Rural Women’s Access to Productive Resources: Are the Low Hanging Fruits Too Low to Make a Difference?
by Faustina Obeng Adomaa The percentage contribution of rural deprivation to national poverty is high. In Ghana, it is above 70%, and rises to about 90% in the northern parts of the country (FAO and ECOWAS, 2018). Poverty is a rural phenomenon and women in rural areas are the face of poverty, especially less resource-endowed…
Gendered Terms of Incorporation and Exclusion in Rural Mozambique: Unpacking Pre-existing Inequalities and Mechanisms of Compensation
by Natacha Bruna Existing literature focuses primarily on the general impacts of land grabbing and their compensation mechanisms. However, pre-existing structures of inequality heavily condition and differentiate the outcomes of land expropriation and compensation mechanisms. With this in mind, this article addresses the differen- tiated impacts of such mechanisms on diverse segments of the rural…
Women and Land Ownership in Zimbabwe: A Review of the Land Reforms with Particular Focus on the Fast Track Land Reform Programme
by Petronella Munemo, Joseph Manzvera, and Innocent Agbelie Mainstream scholarly debates on land ownership in Zimbabwe have long focused on racial and political divides, highlighting, in particular, the injustice and marginalisation of the black majority Zimbabweans against the white minority. For an equally long period, women’s rights to land ownership were limited by the land…
Challenging Gender Orders? Small Ruminant Husbandry Interventions in Ghana’s Upper West Region
by Patricia Abena Tawiah Aboe, Akua Opokua Britwum, and Ernest L. Okorley The popularity of development interventions as a tool for women’s empower- ment, notwithstanding their ability to achieve targeted goals, has come under scrutiny. Some researchers point out that interventions targeting empowerment tend to address women’s practical rather than their strategic needs, resulting in…
Bridging Development Interventions and Women’s Empowerment in Ghana. Reflections from Radical Feminist Perspectives
by Loretta Baidoo The popularity of development interventions as a tool for women’s empower- ment, notwithstanding their ability to achieve targeted goals, has come under scrutiny. Some researchers point out that interventions targeting empowerment tend to address women’s practical rather than their strategic needs, resulting in such interventions falling short in their attempts to transform…
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon
by Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and…