Consolidation of Democracy in Africa: A View From the South by Hussein Solomon

Author:Hussein Solomon [Solomon, Hussein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781138726857
Google: woRHDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36871494
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Current Status of Women in Africa

Over the past four to five decades vast resources — technical and material — were pumped into developing states, but seemingly to little avail. The Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme show that levels of human suffering and insecurity are still exceptionally high in most states of the south and particularly in Africa where states with the lowest per capita income are located, where inequalities between race, class and gender abound and where little political freedom is found. Reasons for the lack of improvement in the material and physical well-being of the citizens of these states were sought in (amongst others) assumptions that underpin theories of development and underdevelopment, in the application of various theories in practice, in the strategies and methodologies used, in the nature of the African state, and in traditions and indigenous practices that supporters of modernisation theory argued were blocking development efforts.

Towards the mid-1970s development planners, theoreticians and practitioners started focusing on specific societal sectors that they thought would prove to be keys to unlock the inherent development potential of the south. One of these sectors was women. It was argued that women constitute more than half the world's population and that it was worth including them in any development effort simply because of their numbers and because of the multiplier effect increased welfare efforts towards women would have as a result of their reproductive role in society.1

Yet, despite more than two decades of professed concerted efforts and of targeting women as the new human resource and the new input in the development process, there is no denying that the statistical odds are still very much stacked against women as Torres and her co-authors show:

women perform 67 per cent of the world's working hours;

women earn 10 per cent of the world's income;

women are 2/3 of the world's illiterates;

women own less that 1 per cent of the world's property (Torres, Del Rosario and Pineda-Ofreneo, 1994, p. 2).

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