Akua Britwum speaks with Rizwana Waraich of Pakistan virtually, on Tuesday the 4th of May 2021. Rizwana is a board member of the Lok Sanjh Foundation, an NGO based in rural Pakistan, and also works as a freelance consultant. In this interview, she reveals the struggles with contradictions within state support structures that are supposed…
Category: Archive
Gendered Tensions in Rural Livelihoods and Development Interventions
By Akua Opokua Britwum 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…
Feminist Africa, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2022): African Women’s Lives in the Time of a Pandemic
This issue of Feminist Africa reflects on both the impact of COVID-19 on African women and African women’s responses to the pandemic. As a continent, Africa has endured decades of economic, political and social crises. Since the colonial period, the continent has been a primary commodity producer, supplying the world with both mineral resources such…
African Women’s Lives in the Time of a Pandemic
By Akosua K. Darkwah This issue of Feminist Africa reflects on both the impact of COVID-19 on African women and African women’s responses to the pandemic. As a continent, Africa has endured decades of economic, political and social crises. Since the colonial period, the continent has been a primary commodity producer, supplying the world with…
Extractivism, Resistance, Alternatives
By Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata This issue of Feminist Africa marks the successful transition of the journal from its birthplace, the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, across the continent to the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Accra. After a three-year gap, Feminist Africa has…
Feminist Africa, Volume 2, Issue 1 (2021): Extractivism, Resistance, Alternatives
By Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata This issue of Feminist Africa marks the successful transition of the journal from its birthplace, the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, across the continent to the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Accra. After a three-year gap, Feminist Africa has…
Negotiating Gender Equity in the Global South: The Politics of Domestic Violence Policy by Sohela Nazneen, Sam Hickey, Eleni Sifaki, eds.
By Shireen Hassim Three decades have passed since dramatic changes in authoritarian societies – the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of one-party and military regimes in Africa and Latin America – generated feminist interest in formal political institutions.A substantial body of literature in the social sciences began to seriously address the question of…
Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses by Hilary Matfess
By Títílope F. Ajàyí Women and the War on Boko Haram is a bold and coherent effort to decolonise victim narratives about women’s roles in, and experiences of, the conflict in Nigeria’s northeast. Before this book, although there had been a growing focuson women as perpetrators and enablers of violence by scholars like Freedom Onuoha,…
Contextualising Extractivism in Africa
By Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata AbstractThis article contextualises the phenomenon of extractivism in Africa, exploring the extent to which the different meanings of extractivism in the literature contribute to an understanding of its gendered character. We argue that extractivism is embedded in the changing dynamics of contemporary capitalism and configured differently in diverse social…
Reclaiming Our Land and Labour: Women’s Resistance to Extractivist Agriculture in South-eastern Ghana
By Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey AbstractNeoliberal development projects have invaded multiple spaces. In rural areas, women’s livelihood activities are targets for interventions in the name of poverty reduction and this is often conveyed through commercial agricultural production schemes. These initiatives have become the source of tension between householdbased production and capitalist production systems. This qualitative research…