by Asmao Diallo In the wake of multiple crises, including economic instability, food shortage, energy crisis, and climate change, African farmers’ land relationships have under- gone remarkable changes in recent years. These changes in land relationships were initially brought about by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s imposed by theWorld Bank and the…
Category: Feature
Fishmeal Production and the Dispossession of Women in The Gambia
by Fatou H. Jobe This paper examines how large-scale fishmeal processing impacts women’s work in The Gambia. Fishmeal factories use bonga (Ethmalosa fimbriata), a staple fish inThe Gambia, to produce fishmeal for the global aquaculture industry.The Gambian government yearns for FDI in fishmeal factories to industrialise the fisheries sector, increase fisheries contribution to GDP and…
Women Farm Workers in Zimbabwe: The Social Policy Outcomes Two Decades after the Transformative Fast Track Land Reform
by Tom Tom and Resina Banda Women farm workers have so far received limited scholarly attention in Zimbabwe’s agrarian and labour policy literature. This is in a context where a conscious understanding of land reform as a social policy instrument is paltry. Taking women farm workers as the prime focus and using an empirical case…
“That Woman is a Farmer”: Gender and the Changing Character of Commercial Agriculture in Zimbabwe
by Newman Tekwa Female participation in commercial agriculture as part of women’s work in Zimbabwe remains inadequately documented and theorised. In a context of land reform and framed within the Transformative Social Policy framework, this paper seeks to highlight commercial agriculture as a new work role for women that challenges the existing gender system characterising…
Workplace Experiences of Infrastructure Sector Participants in South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme
by Ramona Baijnath The dominant narrative of Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) ben- eficiaries in South Africa has been largely documented through government communication channels under the titles of Beneficiary Stories and EPWP Changing LivesTestimonials.These stories indicate that PublicWorks Programme (PWP) beneficiaries are able to save or invest towards the realisation of short- term goals…
Continuity and Change:Women’s Work in the Kente Economy of Bonwire, Ghana
by Dede Amanor-Wilks Asante weaving traditions have survived relatively unchanged for more than 300 years.Yet the productive role that women once played as cotton growers and spinners has been eroded while a traditional ban on women entering the loom has proved difficult to overturn conclusively. Kente has been studied as an art form but rarely…
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…