Third World
policy ap-
proaches to
women in de-
velopment
SOC 5279: Gender & Rural Development
Presented By: MURP 230403,
230412
Introduction
• Throughout the third world, particularly in the past fifteen years, there has been a
proliferation of policies, programmes and projects designed to assist low-income women.
• Since the 1950s many different interventions have been formulated. These reflect
changes in macro-level economic and social policy approaches to third world
development, as well as in state policy towards women
• The shift in policy approaches towards women has mirrored general trends in third world
development policies, from modernization policies of accelerated growth, through basic
needs strategies associated with redistribution, to the more recent compensatory
measures associated with structural adjustment policies.
• So the policy approaches are related to sex or gender to WID or GAD, social
awareness to planning practice, and planning and the organization of
implementation
Third World policy approaches to
women in development
The Welfare Approach Pre-WID
The Equity Approach
The Anti-poverty Approach WID
The Efficiency Approach
The Empowerment Approach
The Welfare Approach
• Introduced in the 1950s and 1960s, Welfare is the earliest policy approach
concerned with women in developing countries.
• Its purpose is to bring women into development as better mothers. Women
are seen as passive beneficiaries of development.
• The reproductive role of women is recognized and policy seeks to meet
practical gender needs through that role by top-down handouts of food aid,
measures against malnutrition and family planning.
• Welfare programmes is family physical survival, through the direct provision
of food aid.
• It is non challenging and therefore still widely popular.
Criticism
• welfare programmes tends to create dependency rather than assisting
women to become more independent.
• their major concern has been with meeting practical gender needs relating to
women’s reproductive role.
• Results in the exclusion of women from development programmes operated
by the mainstream development agencies
THE EQUITY APPROACH
• Equity is the original ‘WID’ approach, introduced within the
1976–85 UN Women’s Decade.
• Its purpose is to gain equity for women in the
development process. Women are seen as active
participants in development.
• It recognizes women’s triple role and seeks to meet
strategic gender needs through direct state intervention,
giving political and economic autonomy to women, and
reducing inequality with men.
• Although the approach emphasized ‘top-down’ legislative
and other measures as the means to ensure equity but
had been the consequence of the bottom-up confrontation
of feminist women’s organizations.
Criticism
• It challenges women’s subordinate position has been criticized as Western
feminism, is considered threatening and is unpopular with governments.
• Many Third World activists felt that to take ‘feminism to a woman who has
no water, no food and no home is to talk nonsense’. Conceived as negative
impact of modernization on women
• India’s Six Year Plan indicated India’s constitutional commitment to equality
of opportunity. Such constitutional inclusions, however, in no way ensured
practical changes.
Difference between Policy
Approaches to Third
World Women
THE ANTI-POVERTY APPROACH
Second WID approach, the ‘toned down’ version of equity, introduced
from the 1970s onwards.
Purpose is to ensure that poor women increase their productivity
Recognizes the productive role of women, and seeks to meet practical
gender needs to earn an income, particularly through small-scale in-
come-generating projects
Most popular with NGOs.
Women’s poverty is seen as the problem of underdevelopment, not of
subordination
THE ANTI-POVERTY APPROACH
Emphasis thus shifts from reducing inequality between men and
women, to reducing income inequality
focuses mainly on women productive role, on the basis that poverty al-
leviation and the promotion of balanced economic growth requires the
increased productivity of women in low-income households
the origins of women’s poverty and inequality with men are attribut-
able to their lack of access to private ownership of land and capital,
and to sexual discrimination in the labour market
aims to increase the employment and income-generating options of
low-income women through better access to productive resources
THE EFFICIENCY APPROACH
the third, and now predominant WID approach, particularly since the
1980s debt crisis
purpose is to ensure that development is more efficient and effective
through women’s economic contribution.
It seeks to meet practical gender needs while relying on all of
women’s three roles and an elastic concept of women’s time.
It is very popular as an approach
THE EFFICIENCY APPROACH
Problems such as lack of education and under-productive technolo-
gies have also been identified as the predominant constraints affect-
ing women’s participation.
In it the emphasis has shifted away from women and towards devel-
opment, on the assumption that increased economic participation for
Third World women is automatically linked with increased equity
THE EMPOWERMENT APPROACH
The most recent approach, articulated by Third World women
It is still neither widely recognized as an ‘approach’ nor documented as
such, although its origins are by no means recent
Purpose is to empower women through greater self-reliance
Women’s subordination is seen not only as the problem of men but also
of colonial and neo-colonial oppression
Acknowledges inequalities between men and women, and the origins of
women’s subordination in the family
It also emphasizes the fact that women experience oppression differ-
ently according to their race, class, colonial history and current position
in the international economic order
THE EMPOWERMENT APPROACH
Places far less emphasis than the equity approach on increasing women’s
‘status’ relative to men. It thus seeks to empower women through the redis-
tribution of power within, as well as between, societies
Recognizes women’s triple role, and seeks to meet strategic gender needs
indirectly through bottom-up mobilization around practical gender needs
It is potentially challenging, although it avoids the criticism of being west-
ern-inspired feminism
Unpopular except with third world women’s NGOs and their supporters
Personal Opinion
In the Third world families women have a triple role as reproducers,
producers and community managers, while men have a dual role in
productive work and community politics. It highlights the problems
experienced by women in balancing their triple role, especially those of
women who head households. It also reveals the extent to which, within
households, men and women unequally share resources
Thanks !
