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…
Category: Feature
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…
COVID-19 Recovery and Beyond: An African Feminist Vision for Macroeconomic System Change
by Wangari Kinoti and Fatimah Kelleher This article provides an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of women in Africa and the extent to which government policies designed to respond to the social and economic shocks caused by the pandemic have addressed wider, persistent gender inequalities. We argue that while there have…
Negotiating Spaces, Exercising Agency, and Managing Multiple Roles: The Lived Experiences of University of Ghana Women Academics under COVID-19
by Mjiba Frehiwot, Deborah Atobrah and Irene Appeaning-Addo This article interrogates the lived experiences of women academics at the University of Ghana (UG) between March 2020 and March 2021. It highlights their emotions and care decisions as they navigated through the multiple spheres of their lives – physical, emotional, and financial – while meeting the…
Gender Blind Spots in COVID-19 Containment and Mitigation Measures in Burkina Faso and Ghana
by Akosua K. Darkwah, Dorte Thorsen and Madeleine Wayack Pambè AbstractThis article unpacks the gendered impacts of the containment and mitigation measures adopted in many countries to deal with the pandemic. Based on detailed data on the inclusivity of measures taken to contain the outbreak of COVID-19 in Burkina Faso and Ghana and the mitigation…
“How to Save the World from Aliens, Yet Keep Their Infrastructure”: Repurposing the “Master’s House” in The Wormwood Trilogy
By Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante AbstractIn this essay, we examine the figure of Oyin Da in Tade Thompson’s The Wormwood Trilogy to demonstrate how Africanfuturism uses colonial infrastructure—or “the master’s house”—in queer ways to resist neocolonialism and produce decolonial contexts of queer and feminist African life. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s often cited quote,…