Discourses on Women s Empowerment in Ghana

Transcription

1 Development, 2010, 53(2), ( ) r 2010 Society for International Development /10 Local/Global Encounters Discourses on Women s Empowerment in Ghana NANA AKUA ANYIDOHO AND TAKYIWAA MANUH ABSTRACT Successive post-independence governments have embraced women s empowerment in one form or another, either because of their own ideological positioning, or because of demands by their donor friends/partners and/or organized domestic groups and NGOs. What has emerged is a varied landscape on women s rights and empowerment work comprising the state bureaucracy, multilateral and bilateral agencies, NGOs, and women s rights organizations, with their accompanying discourses. In the Ghanaian context, Nana Akua Anyidoho and Takyiwaa Manuh look at what the discourses of empowerment highlight, ignore or occlude, the convergences and divergences among them, and how they speak to or accord with the lived realities of the majority of Ghanaian women. Given that the policy landscape in Ghana is highly influenced by donors, they ask which discourses dominate, and how are they used for improving women s lives in ways that are meaningful to them. KEYWORDS gender policy; World Bank; NGOs; women s organizations; gender mainstreaming Introduction Following Apthorpe (1997, cited in Eyben, 2008), we understand discourses as not only the way that things, such as policy documents, are written or said, but also as the procedures and activities associated with words that shape whose knowledge counts and what alternatives are proposed and recognized as possible. Thus discourses and the changes they present or presage are ultimately an expression of the power of the contestants. In the Ghanaian context, discourses on women s rights owe as much to provisions in the Constitution and other positive statements in the law as they do to crossfertilizations with transnational and global discourses popularized by the UN and its agencies and international feminist movements. To the extent that many Ghanaian women activists are also members of continental and global networks such as AWID, to which they contribute as many ideas as they borrow, it may be difficult to separate the local from the global (Manuh, 2007). At the same time, the dominance that donor policies and ideas generally have assumed in Ghana s political economy ensures that the discourses these agencies espouse are more likely than others to find their way into policies and programmes for women. And while the concept of empowerment was about changing the relations of power between men and women and between social Development (2010) 53(2), doi: /dev

2 Development 53(2): Local/Global Encounters 268 classes through interventions that helped shift the sources of power (resources like land, labour and money) and transforming the institutions and ideologies that justify and perpetuate gender inequality (Kabeer, 1994; Batliwala, 2007), what has taken its place are more instrumental discourses around growth and social harmony. We analyze the discourses of three principal sets of organizational actors working on women s rights and empowerment in Ghana. They are (i) the Ghanaian state represented by the Ministry of Women and Children s Affairs (MOWAC); (ii) multilateral and bilateral agencies represented by the country offices of the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA); and (iii) selected NGOs ^ ActionAid International Ghana, Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT), the Ghana Congress on Evangelism (GHACOE) and Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLD- AF-Ghana). The organizations are chosen to represent broad categories of institutional actors which influence policy and thinking around women s empowerment. They reflect diversity in content of discourse and programming, which is in part a reflection of their size, funding, location as either local or international organizations, as well as ideological and historical positioning. The sampling allows insight into the variations and convergences in the discursive landscape in Ghana on the question of women s empowerment. The analysis of their discourses is based primarily on written documents and reports, supplemented with interviews with key persons within these organizations. MOWAC The Ministry of Women s and Children s Affairs (MOWAC) was set up in 2000 to replace the National Council on Women and Development (NCWD) as the national machinery for women in Ghana. The goal of the ministry is to strengthen the institutional foundations for promoting greater responsiveness to gender policy measures. MOWAC s main policy document is The National Gender and Children Policy which sets the agenda for the development of women and children within the framework of the national development agenda (Government of Ghana, n.d.: 1); and guides all relevant institutions on their role in that agenda. The guiding principle for MOWAC is gender mainstreaming which, according to the policy document, is the strategy for addressing gender equality, accepting and valuing equally the difference between women and men and the diverse roles they play in society (Government of Ghana, n.d.: 21). The concept of women s empowerment does not appear in the document, although it is mentioned in the companion Strategic Implementation Plan, but without any definition. However, one can surmise from a reading of the entire Plan that empowerment, gender equality and gender equity are used synonymously. Taken together, the two documents make the case that a major source of the disempowerment of women are the social constructions of womanhood centered on reproductive roles, which constructions restrict women s access to productive resources such as credit, land, training and education, and also to decision-making structures and processes. The solution to this, as has already been mentioned, is gender mainstreaming which will result in social and institutional changes that will ultimately result in equal benefits and status for men and women (i.e., gender equality ). The conceptual or theoretical framing of issues in the documents is unclear and borrows from various paradigms (e.g., Gender and Development and Women in Development) without clearly articulating these as sources of inspiration. However, the gender mainstreaming thrust is clearly in keeping with the dominant paradigm of global institutions, as is clear from a reading of World Bank and UNDP documents. Multilateral and bilateral institutions in Ghana The World Bank The global and local policy documents of the World Bank advocate women s empowerment in line with the third Millennium Development Goal and in line with the Bank s overriding goal of increased growth and reduced poverty. The country office of the World Bank does not have

3 Anyidoho and Manuh: Women s Empowerment in Ghana a gender unit, and so takes its cues from the center on this question. Gender mainstreaming appears in Bank documents; the Bank aims to institutionalize gender mainstreaming both in its own work and in policy discussions and strategies in client countries. Gender equality and gender mainstreaming are seen as a means to an end ^ a viable strategy but one that has to be made more operationally relevant and more focused on results (World Bank, 2006: 1, emphasis ours). Empowerment is very much tied to the World Bank s continued emphasis on economic growth and poverty reduction, so that women s economic empowerment is necessary in order to promote shared growth (World Bank, 2006). In sum, women s disempowerment is described as a lack of economic opportunity. The document recognizes gains for women in social areas (education and health primarily), but notes that women continue to be disadvantaged in regards to work, hence an increased attention to economic empowerment. The World Bank identifies four economic areas which, if opened up for women, will lead to their economic empowerment: labour markets, financial services, land, and agriculture. The Bank aims to make these areas more accessible to women by changing the structures of these markets through policy, and making women more capable of taking advantage of the opened access. Providing women opportunities in and access to the economic arena should empower them and, very importantly for the World Bank, have a spill over effect to families, communities and eventually to the country in terms of poverty reduction. In that way, there is a de-emphasis on empowerment as a right, and more on empowerment as the smart thing to do. CIDA The Canadian International Development Agency operates a country office in Ghana whose activities are guided by a Gender Equality Strategy (GES) which replaces gender equity (a term that was used in the past) with gender equality as a sieve, through which all programmes and projects are designed, resourced, implemented and evaluated (CIDA, 2008). Gender equity refers to actions to redress imbalance, and gender equality represents the achievement of comparable status between men and women. The discussion of women s empowerment features less often, but presumably is implied in the discussion on equality. Empowerment is described as the process by which women become aware of power differentials between the sexes, and are enabled to act to redress these. However, empowerment cannot be handed to women, but must come from their own initiative with support from institutions such as CIDA. The concept of gender equality (and, by extension, women s empowerment) is presented both as a question of rights, political and social participation (decisionmaking), and of increased power (access and control of resources). CIDA sees its support of gender equality in its work as an extension of the Canadian government s commitment to rights both nationally and internationally. The pursuit of gender equality is linked to the goal of poverty reduction and to development more generally, and to reducing inequalities that perpetuate poverty among women and girls. NGOS ActionAid International Ghana ActionAid International Ghana (AAIG) is part of the ActionAid International (AAI) group, and operates in seven of Ghana s ten regions. Its activities aim at protecting the rights of the poor and vulnerable to improve their access to services, while lobbying government to change policies and practices that affect their lives. The main gender policy and strategy documents of the AAIG are the Country Strategic Paper and a Gender Strategy. Both documents are informed first by the AAI s corporate strategy, titled Rights to End Poverty (2005^2010), which focuses on broad strategies to reduce and eradicate poverty in the world. The policies of the AAIG are also informed by the Corporate Gender Policy which is largely based on principles of social equity and justice, and aims to ensure that gender equality and 269

4 Development 53(2): Local/Global Encounters women s empowerment are central to AAI s programmes and organizational culture. Gender equality is one of three linked core thematic areas of AAIG s Country Strategy Paper (CSP), the other two being Education and Food Security/Agriculture. The CSP is informed by an analysis of Ghanaian economic performance that showed that girls and women are the most deprived with regards to access to agricultural input and fair pricing of agricultural products, and that lack of education for many women has deprived them of voice to speak and be heard in making decisions that affect their lives in the family and community. This is especially significant in view of the fact that women dominate in small-holder food crop agriculture where poverty levels are high (Government of Ghana, 2005b). AAIG uses the language of rights ( a rights-based approach ) to address issues of powerlessness of the vulnerable that has resulted in their lack of access to resources. AAI views securing women s rights as essential for sustainable development and poverty reduction. Thus, AAIG seeks to ensure that both men and women, but especially women, obtain appropriate access and control over productive resources such as credit, land, training, and education, by providing opportunities for women to gain power and assert their rights, and by providing training for its partners, collaborators and communities to be gender sensitive. The Ghana Congress on Evangelism The Ghana Congress on Evangelism (GHACOE) is a Christian faith-based non-governmental women s ministry established in The Ministry specializes in evangelism, building stable families and homes, and promoting individual fulfillment through Jesus Christ. GHACOE s strategies include leadership training, income-generation, capacitybuilding (including skills development and credit support), marriage counselling, business and home management training, as well as Christian teaching. GHACOE s core strategy of women s empowerment is to provide Biblical teaching, practical training, and financial support to women and 270 girls from all social backgrounds to be self reliant, although its strategic focus is on poor rural and urban women. This strategy has informed the institution of several economic, social and faith-based programmes throughout the country necessitated by deteriorating economic and social conditions for many people over the years, especially women and girls. GHACOE notes that women s empowerment does not only depend on the provision of work or livelihoods, but crucially on work that empowers women to challenge attitudes and systems that discriminate against them, break barriers, achieve recognition, enhance their bargaining power and exercise their rights in and outside the home. WiLDAF WiLDAF-Ghana has been active since 1993 and works to promote and protect respect for women s rights in Ghana. It operates throughout Ghana, with a national secretariat in Accra and offices offering legal services in two regions. The main thrust of the operations of WiLDAF-Ghana is to voice concern over policies, practices and cultural attitudes that are detrimental to women, to undertake legal aid for less privileged women, and to engage in legal awareness campaigns aimed at sensitizing target beneficiaries on women s legal rights. WiLDAF-Ghana also seeks to increase women s participation and influence at the community, national and international levels through initiating, promoting, and strengthening the links between law and development. WiLDAF pursues its goals through a combination of approaches, including advocacy, training, legal literacy, education and research in its two broad programme areas of women s access to justice and women s participation in democratic governance (WILDAF, 2005). In the first programme area, WiLDAF works to ensure the passage and implementation of international legal instruments protecting women s rights. In the second programme area, WiLDAF-Ghana considers the local level as an effective space to increase women s influence in decision-making. WiLDAF-Ghana sees itself as pursuing a rightsbased approach, which conceptualizes gender equality and empowerment as promoting respect

5 Anyidoho and Manuh: Women s Empowerment in Ghana for women s rights in the national development process through an effective legal environment. In addition to advocating the enforcement or reform of legislation, WiLDAF-Ghana s flagship is the Legal Awareness Programme (LAP) that trains leaders of grassroots organizations, social groups, churches, work place associations, government and non-government organizations as Legal Literacy Volunteers (LLVs) on legal rights and leadership skills. Sinapi Aba Trust Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT) is a local not-for-profit NGO established in 1994 by individuals and organizations with strong religious leanings and operates in all ten regions of Ghana. Its major objective is to provide micro-credit services and training to the economically active poor, and it frames its interventions in the language of targets and beneficiaries. Sinapi Aba has a draft gender policy which aims at mainstreaming gender in all its activities. SAT s Credit Policy encapsulates its key objectives and aspirations in relation to gender, some of which are summarized below: The selection process of target beneficiaries should not disadvantage women and priority is to be given to sectors dominated by women in terms of the size and number of loans. Repayment methods will take into consideration the nature of the bulk of females businesses/ projects. Findings of research on gender roles and responsibilities, and practical and strategic gender needs will be used to refine gender policy. An officer to be charged with handling women s affairs to have links with the National Council on Women and Development (NCWD, now the Department of Women within MOWAC) and to deal with the implementation of an affirmative action policy. In common with the view that see micro-financing is a tool for poverty reduction, SAT s mission is to provide financial assistance to economically active but poor people, to enhance and sustain their livelihoods. While both men and women are identified as poor, SAT is concerned about the higher proportions of poor women as a result of the overt disadvantaged status of women socially, economically and culturally. Operationalizing empowerment The most dominant programmatic theme across all the agencies is that of economic empowerment as a means of reducing poverty both for individual women and as a national strategy. Economic empowerment here means reducing constraints to women s access to resources and to employment in order to increase their incomes and their productivity. This can be read in the goals and strategies of MOWAC, the World Bank, CIDA, ActionAid, Sinapi Aba and GHACOE. What is missing is a serious questioning of structures that might impede access to resources and that might not help women s advancement even if they are given specific opportunities. This is illustrated in the case of women s involvement in agriculture, which is an area that receives attention from ActionAid, the World Bank, and MOWAC; it is obvious that one cannot discuss women s involvement in agriculture without dealing with issues of land tenure. While the generic economic empowerment approach would seek to increase women s access to credit, equipment or land, none of the agencies propose to tackle the larger issue of land reform, which implicates social relationships between men and women in households and communities; the divisions of labour within households and communities, and ownership and control of production are also not raised. Indeed the fact of power in interpersonal, national and global spaces is hardly mentioned or analyzed in the discourses. Related to the theme of economic empowerment is that of vulnerability which is a carry-over from the poorest of the poor or, in the language of the MOWAC documents, widows, children and extremely disadvantaged persons. The language of vulnerability is agent-less and puts women in the role of victims. The remedy for this is welfare which does not attempt to tackle structural and systemic factors at the root of victimhood. Again, the vulnerable is a totalizing identity that 271

6 Development 53(2): Local/Global Encounters 272 excludes other aspects of people s lives, including areas where they may have agency and/or power. Interestingly, vulnerability appears to be the flip side of economic empowerment, hence the common coupling of poor and vulnerable. Thus, because economic empowerment is writ so large, it fails to recognize or account for the fact that even economically advantaged women may be disempowered in some areas (Win, 2004). This explains why a lot of attention is directed to poor and rural women, who are assumed to be the worst off. Education is an area of programmatic concern for a number of the organizations profiled. The expectations seems to be that education will empower women with knowledge on which to act and which will, through the accompanying increased knowledge and self-esteem, make them better able to participate in social life, and particularly in decision-making. Beyond formal schooling, organizations such as WiLDAF and ActionAid focus on out-of-school education of people on their rights, again with the view that by providing people with information, they will be vocal and agentive about claiming their rights. However, such programmes do not make room for the fact that individual women or even whole communities, no matter how aware of their rights and what is right, may not be equipped to engage power structures effectively. Again, there is a focus on education, to the exclusion to other social rights, such as housing and water, which might also have implications for women s empowerment. Participation in decision-making at various levels appears on the agendas of some institutional actors. In our sample, MOWAC and WiLDAF are the two organizations that explicitly speak to the question of participation and representation in local and national politics. MOWAC s attention, in particular, is trained on political representation at the non-partisan district level, as part of its gender mainstreaming strategy, presumably because the national stage is fraught with the tensions that come with party politics. By contrast, WiLDAF targets women s increased participation at all levels of the political arena, motivated by a desire to increase women s voice in exercise of their rights. There is mixed evidence about the positive impact of these efforts ^ on the one hand, there is the fact that the proportion of female parliamentarians has not increased markedly from 1960, when they first entered parliament in Ghana. On the other hand, there was wide and vigorous public discussion about females being nominated as vice-presidential candidates during presidential elections in But it would appear that while women s economic empowerment is promoted and tolerated because of women s historical participation in markets and production in Ghana, sharing political power with them appears more threatening. Conclusion Overall, certain themes and orientations recur in the empowerment discourses of institutional actors in Ghana. First, as has been briefly discussed, the process of empowerment and disempowerment is generally decontextualized as there is no focused analysis of the social forces that may prevent certain processes and outcomes. Even where constraints and obstacles ^ lack of education, capital, skills, training, access to markets ^ are discussed, these are not famed in terms of power and inequalities in social relations. Because of this lack of context and critical analysis, while there is talk of women as a group or social category, there is little emphasis on collective action or on ensuring that women gain power to determine what it is that they want in several areas of their lives. Second, as Eyben and Napier-Moore (2008) observe, the discourse of empowerment has doubled back on itself so that now a pall of instrumentalism hangs over policy and programmes; this is equally true of empowerment discourses in Ghana. Thus while a few organizations such as WiLDAF use rights-based approaches, the dominant discourses on women s empowerment in Ghana are framed in terms of welfare/ basic needs and women in development (WID) approaches that either views women as victims to be taken care of, or marginalized groups to be integrated into development, mainly for the sake of the nation. This is evident in the policy texts of MOWAC and in the work of local NGOs such

7 Anyidoho and Manuh: Women s Empowerment in Ghana as GHACOE and Sinapi Aba, but can be read in the subtext of World Bank documents also. As with most developing countries, Ghana s preoccupation is with development, which has been often translated as economic growth with poverty reduction as a corollary. The empowerment discourse has therefore sat uneasily on top of these foundations. And while global influences are important in setting the tone, local sources add to this approach. Again, instrumentalism might also explain the narrow domain of issues that represent women s issues ^ economic activity (agriculture, trade and other employment), social sector (education) and vulnerabilities. None of these organizations mention women s leisure, or sexuality, for instance, as areas of empowerment. Even within the area of work, the focus is on agriculture and markets, and hardly on formal work or conducive work environments. In such circumstances, it is difficult to classify these as discourses on empowerment as they have little transformative potential to question or change power relationships, restructure institutions and confront stereotypical ideas and values. Rather, it is largely basic survival and anti poverty discourses that masquerade as empowerment discourses in Ghana, and it is necessary, following Batliwala (2007), to bring the power back in. References Apthorpe, Raymond (1997) Writing Development Policy and PolicyAnalysis Plain or Clear: On language, genre and power, in Cris Shore and Susan Wright (eds.) Anthropology of Policy: Critical perspectives on governance, pp42^58, London: Routledge. Batliwala, Srilatha (2007) Taking the Power out of Empowerment ^ An experiential account, Development in Practice 17(4^5): 557^65. Canadian International Development Agency [CIDA] (2008, December) Gender Equality Strategy ^ Ghana (Final Draft). Eyben, Rosalind (2008) Conceptualising Policy Practices in Researching Pathways of Women s Empowerment, PathwaysWorking Paper 1 (May). Eyben, Rosalind and Rebecca Napier-Moore (2008) Choosing Words with Care? Shifting meanings of women s empowerment in international development, Paper presented at a conference on Pathways of Women s Empowerment: What AreWe Learning?, Cairo, 20^24 January. Government of Ghana (2004) National Gender and Children Policy, Accra. Ministry of Women and Children s Affairs. Government of Ghana (2005a) Strategic Implementation Plan (2005^2008), Accra. Ministry of Women and Children s Affairs. Government of Ghana (2005b) Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS II) (2006^2009). Volume I. Policy Framework, Accra: National Development Planning Commission. Kabeer, Naila (1994) Reversed Realities- Gender Hierarchies in DevelopmentThought, London: Verso. Manuh,Takyiwaa (2007) Doing Gender Work in Ghana, in Catherine Cole,Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan Miescher (eds.) Africa after Gender? pp 125^49, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. WiLDAF (2005) Ghana Country Strategic Plan (CSP1) 2005^2010. Accra: WILDAF- Ghana. Win, Everjoice J. (2004) Not Very Poor, Powerless or Pregnant: The African woman forgotten by development, IDS Bulletin 35(4): 61^4. World Bank (2006) Gender Equality as Smart Economics. A World Bank Group Gender Action Plan, Washington D.C.: World Bank. 273