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Social relations of gender or gender relations encompass all relationships in which gender sub- jectivities play a role, including those among people, and between people and the institutions, systems, and processes of development. The chapter describes three features of gender relations that are generally consistent across societies – gender ideologies and myths; gendered division of labor; and unequal power relation- ships – and discusses their implications for development. The chapter further explains the centrality of gender to the development enterprise and discusses various approaches to integrating gender analysis in development processes. Keywords Gender · Gender equality · Women’s empowerment · Development · Africa N. A. Anyidoho (*) University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana e-mail: anyidoho@ug.edu.gh © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Yacob-Haliso, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77030-7_63-1 1 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-3-319-77030-7_63-1&domain=pdf mailto:anyidoho@ug.edu.gh https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77030-7_63-1 Introduction Gender is a social construct that is related to, but not bound by, biological sex. Gender denotes the social prescriptions associated with biological sex, covering all aspects of lived experienced, including one’s roles, behavior, appearance, cognition, and emotion. When a child is born, the observed biological sex of the newborn is used as a reference point for socialization of the child into a particular gender. That is to say, socially acceptable ways of being and thinking as a girl or boy, a woman or man, are conveyed to the child through explicit instructions or less directly through conditioning and modeling. Within any society, there are individual variations in the extent to which these normative ways of being are internalized and are supported by biological predispositions and abilities. In this sense, gendered characteristics and identities are the interaction of biology, socialization, and self-regulation (Wood and Eagly 2012) that can result in a person having a gendered subjectivity that conforms to or is in conflict with gendered expectations in their social context. Individuals interact with the world around them as gendered individuals and thus social relations of gender or gender relations encompass all relationships in which gender subjectivities play a role. While the term “gender relations” most commonly calls to mind relationships between men and women, it subsumes other forms of interaction among women, among men, and between people and institutions, sys- tems, and processes. While gender is a social construct, there are a few commonalities in the concep- tions and manifestations of gender in different contexts. I highlight three dimensions of gender relations that are fairly consistent across human societies: gender ideolo- gies and myths, gendered division of labor, and unequal power relationships. Gender ideologies are beliefs about the characteristics and capabilities of women and men that are often believed to be natural, self-evident, and unchanging. Some gender ideologies are exaggerations of biological differences; for instance, the fact that men tend to be physically stronger than women is extrapolated to the belief that women are physically and psychologically weaker than men. Other gender ideolo- gies have unproven bases, such as the belief that men are better suited to leadership than women. These ideologies become normalized and are reflected in social structures. For instance, the myth that women are naturally maternal – in effect, that the qualities that make a “good”mother are innate rather than learned – becomes the basis for the cultural expectation that women should be primarily or even exclusively responsible for care work. It must be pointed out that some females, as a result of socialization, may subscribe to and perpetuate gendered ideologies to the detriment of themselves and other women, which behaviors are then used to support another common myth: “Women are their own worst enemies.” The second observable feature of gender relations in many cultures is a division of labor that derives from gender ideologies and reinforces power inequalities between men and women. Generally, the gendered division of labor across societies is based on a dichotomy between “reproductive” and “productive” roles and between the “private” and “public” spheres. Reproduction goes beyond biological ability to encompass the social reproduction of society through “the daily regeneration of the 2 N. A. Anyidoho wage labor force” (Chant 1989, p. 10). Thus, women’s ability to bear children is extrapolated into primary responsibility for both biological and social reproductive functions (Wood and Eagly 2012). Even when women have other achievements or aspirations, these are often subordinated to reproductive tasks (ibid.) so that women’s most salient roles or identities are as mothers, wives, daughters, and homemakers. Indeed, women’s paid activities in developing countries are often extensions or variations of care work (Kabeer et al. 2013). By contrast, men dominate income-generating activities in the “public sphere,” accruing higher social and material benefits in their “productive” roles as breadwinners, employers, and employees (Chant 1989). That women’s roles have lower social and economic value is evident in the fact that most of women’s reproductive labor is unpaid work that is unaccounted for in the gross domestic product, a conventional measure of national wealth (Marçal 2016; Waring 1988). Gendered divisions of labor are further evidenced in the segregation and seg- mentation of the labor market. Gender segregation is illustrated by the congregation of males and females in different spaces in the economy, with women over- represented in occupations that have an element of care work, such as food produc- tion, teaching, nursing, and customer service. Women are also disproportionately represented in the informal economy (Heintz and Valodia 2008; International Labour Organization (ILO) 2018) which has lower barriers to entry than the formal economy and is more accommodating of women’s domestic responsibilities but which, at the same time, is less secure and rewarding (Chen et al. 2005). Gender segmentation in the labor market is the differential positions of men and women within the same industries. For instance, in the medical field, a greater proportion of women relative to men enter the occupation of nursing while medical doctors are predominantly male. Moreover, even when men and women perform the same work, women are often paid less than men. In the informal economies of African countries, where women tend to congregate, women earn less and are more likely than men to be employees or unpaid contributing family workers as opposed to employers (Chen 2016). Even in West Africa, where women are most identified with retail in the informal sector (with records of female traders going as far back as the mid-1800s), there is gender segmentation with, for instance, women selling consumer items such as kitchen items, toys, textiles, and clothing, and men selling more expensive items such as electronics and auto parts (Darkwah 2007). The features of gendered relations so far discussed result in demonstrable power imbalances between men and women with regard to access to resources and oppor- tunities. This inequality of power underlies patriarchy, a social system organized around male control, authority, and privilege which is institutionalized into political, legal, and economic systems and processes. Patriarchy is built on the assumed differences between males and females and projects men as being more worthy or capable of holding power. Patriarchy thus implies the subordination of females and also younger males. The foregoing is an introduction to gender and related concepts as they manifest in contemporary human society. However, these generalizations must be balanced by the recognition that conceptual understandings and lived experiences of gender do Women, Gender, and Development in Africa 3 vary across sociocultural and historical contexts. This is especially important given the tendency for Western theoretical and methodological frames – borne of feminist concerns, struggles, and research in specific contexts – to be unhelpfully universal- ized. In her seminal book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oyewumi (1997) queries the assumption of female subordination as a universal feature of gender relations, pointing to the inherent contradiction of Western feminist theory which has accepted gender as a social construction and therefore mutable and yet assumes that the construction of gender will be similar across social milieus. Making specific reference to African social and historical contexts, she goes further to question the privileging of gender as the starting point of analysis of inequalities, oppressions, and other forms of social injustice. While Oyewumi’s work has been critiqued for essentializing and roman- ticizing gender relations in pre-colonial Africa (Apusigah 2006; Bakare-Yusuf 2004), her work is useful for urging a historical perspective of gender in order to understand how time, and specifically the period of colonial rule, has reconfigured gender relations. A strand of the literature argues that gender relations in precolonial African societies were flexible, allowing women and men to inhabit similar roles (Amadiume 1987), while another suggests that women and men did have differen- tiated roles but that these were equal and complementary (Aidoo 1985; Sudarkasa 1986). Evidently, there is a need for a better conceptualization of gender in order to inform an approach to development that is context-specific. Specifically, gender equality and women’s empowerment must be anchored in “space, history, politics and location” (Cornwall and Anyidoho 2010, p. 146; see also Kabeer et al. 2008). In the remainder of the chapter, an argument is made for the centrality of gender to the development enterprise, and various approaches to integrating gender analysis in development processes are presented. The chapter further describes the ways in which women themselves have acted to advance gender equality and concludes with a discussion of what is required to attain gender equality as a key development goal. Why Gender Matters in/for Development Kwesi Prah (2001) has aptly identified development as an “obsession” of African countries, defining it as “the improvement and upliftment of the quality of life of people, that they are able. . .to attain their potential, build and acquire self-confi- dence, and manage to live lives of reasonable accomplishment and dignity” (p. 91). This human desire for individual and social progress is then institutionalized in development policies, projects, and plans. This chapter focuses on gender inequality as a development imperative inscribed into both the Millennium (2000–2015) and Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030), which can be considered a global consensus on the goals and strate- gies of development. Amartya Sen’s (1999) useful definition of development as “a process of expanding real freedoms that people enjoy” (p. 3) makes it easy to recognize gender inequalities as sources of “unfreedom” and, therefore, obstacles to development. Unfreedoms exist in social structures such as the family, in 4 N. A. Anyidoho economic structures including the labor market, and in institutions of traditional and modern governance. Broadly speaking, the project of development is an attempt to change people’s lives at the individual and collective level. Given that all aspects of life are gendered – including family roles, work and livelihoods, sexuality and so on – development must necessarily involve a change in social relations of gender. Secondly, gender matters in development because every development intervention – every policy, program, or project – is gendered in nature (in regard to its assump- tions, goals, and implementation processes) and in its impact (in the differential ways it affects men and women). The foregoing makes critical the task of placing gender in context. Specifically, more understanding is needed of the ways in which gender is conceived of and deployed (Razavi and Miller 1995), especially in development interventions in Africa. Critiques of the global development project contend that African woman- hood has been pathologized in service of development practice (Lewis 2005; Oyewumi 1997). As Everjoice Win (2004) argues in her article, “Not very poor, powerless or pregnant: the African woman forgotten by development,” the stereo- typical construction of the “beneficiary” of development as a poor, rural woman, burdened by motherhood and domestic chores, does not allow for the range and complexity of African women’s realities. It also does not allow for a recognition of the many dimensions on which a woman may simultaneously be empowered and disempowered, including income, class, ethnicity, nationality, location, and sexual- ity, among other subjectivities. These critiques serve as a caution about the ways in which gender is employed in development: while gender and related concepts (gender equality, gender equity, and gender mainstreaming) are ubiquitous in devel- opment discourse, they are also subject to misunderstanding and misuse. There are other important reasons for the disconnect between research on gender and the ways in which gender is deployed in development discourse and practice. The two disciplines that have been most prolific and influential in research on Africa are anthropology and history, and these have lent their biases and inaccuracies to development discourse (Lewis 2005). The first written histories and anthropological studies on Africa were produced by Europeans – government officials, missionaries, adventurers – who invented, reinterpreted, or reinforced social relations of gender, influenced both by their own gender ideologies and by their colonizing or “civiliz- ing” agendas (Beoku-Betts 1976; Sudarkasa 1986). Histories written after this period have not done much better in their representation of women; the most influential historical research on Africa – authored by both African and non-African males – make scant mention of women (Zeleza 2005). Anthropology as a discipline has also tended to create static representations that do not adequately recognize tensions, ruptures, and inconsistencies within African societies (Lewis 2005). Colonial poli- cies reflected and perpetuated these distortions of gender relations by designing interventions in education, formal employment, and commercial agriculture, for instance, around the idea of men, and not women, as economic agents and bread- winners. Other policies sought to restrict women’s physical, social, and economic mobility (see Akyeampong and Agyei-Mensah 2006; Allman 1996; Kinyanjui 2014). There were even attempts to proscribe women’s sexualities through laws Women, Gender, and Development in Africa 5 and policies around women’s fertility, marriage, and dress, actions that can be read as attempts at social and economic control (Nyanzi 2011; see also Allman 1996). Secondly, a “hegemony of developmentalism”may lead policymakers and devel- opment practitioners “to sever scholarship from the agendas and priorities facing African women and to delimit issues of development narrowly to economic and donor-related concerns” (Lewis 2005, p. 387). The developmentalism that Lewis (2005) describes would readily recognize fertility, AIDS, and child malnutrition as “gender issues” but not trade policy, sexuality, or “the everyday, the ordinary and the seemingly insignificant” details of women’s lives (p. 381). Feminist research has done much to (re)present women’s whole lives. However, an neo-liberal economic paradigm of development works hand in hand with other ideologies to hinder the uptake of research in ways that could be transformative of women’s lives. Finally, the disconnect between development policy and research persists because the devel- opment industry values policymaking and policy activism over intellectual activism (Tsikata 1997; also Lewis 2005). The Evolution of Discourse and Practice on Gender and Development The effort to integrate gender into development discourse in African countries has had an uneven history. The first clear articulation of such a model was Ester Boserup’s Women’s Role in Economic Development which became the basis for the Women in Development (WID) approach that came to prominence in the 1970s. Reception to Boserup’s seminal work, and the further research and advocacy it inspired, must be understood in the context of the women’s movements in Western Europe and North America, the fulcrums of which were the right to work, to fair remuneration for work, and to reproductive rights. Boserup took as a starting point the modernization paradigm which theorized a normative transformation of devel- opment societies from agrarian to industrialized economies. She was, therefore, concerned about the disenfranchisement of women from “productive” work outside the home and, by extension, from the process of development. Boserup made the argument that women had unacknowledged and untapped productive potential and that their purposeful integration into development programming would benefit the process of development. At the 1975 world conference on women in Mexico, the UN declared 1976–1985 the Decade for Women and called on governments to promote the integration of women in national development processes. The conference also recommended that governments establish “national machineries” (i.e., women’s divisions within gov- ernments) that would spearhead the process of bringing women into development. The women’s national machineries operationalized the WID approach, making popular the income-generating or “economic empowerment” programs that became synonymous with the approach. These interventions premised women’s disadvan- tages on cultural customs and expectations that socialized women into subordinate social roles and economic activities. Thus, status and power differentials between 6 N. A. Anyidoho men and women were assumed to be a reflection of their positions in the relations of production (Moore 1988). By their incorporation into the “productive” sphere through access to resources such as financial and physical capital, women would at once make contributions to development and improve their social status in relation to men (Tinker 1990). In particular, the household, where gender relations operate at micro level, was a target for women’s empowerment projects. The WID approach aimed to modify societal structures of gender inequality, one empowered woman and one transformed household at a time. The WID paradigm made a significant contribution to development discourse by making obvious the connection between women’s status and women’s work or livelihoods (Rai 2011). This is important as women’s work continues to be undervalued and underestimated, particularly in subsistence production, and in informal, domestic, and volunteer work (Benería 2011). There has been some recog- nition of the importance of these forms of work and attempts to measure and integrate them into development planning, though with varying levels of commit- ment and success (ibid.) Women’s informal work, in particular, merits increased attention because of its centrality to the economies of African countries. The International Labour Organi- zation (ILO) estimates that 86% of employment in Africa is informal, with a greater proportion of women (90%) in this form of work relative to men (82%) (ILO 2018). The fact of women’s over-representation in the informal economy, where they experience the most vulnerable and least remunerative work, has implications for important development questions such as poverty, social protection and gender inequality (Chen 2008, 2016; Tsikata 2008). Since Keith Hart (1973) brought attention to the existence and nature of the informal economy in the 1970s, a debate has been generated as to whether it will persist and how it should be approached in development policy. The answer to the first question seems clear: informalization has continued to expand as employment in the formal sector contracts and the conditions of formal jobs become less defined and secure. Economic liberalization has contributed to this trend (Heintz and Pollin 2003); the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that many developing countries underwent from the 1980s under the direction of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) resulted in increasing informalization (through a contraction of employment in the formal sector, expansion of the informal sector, and deterio- ration of work conditions in both) that had a negative impact on women’s ability to obtain secure and well-remunerative livelihoods (Mkandawire and Soludo 1998; Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network [SAPRIN] 2002; Tsikata 2008). Subsequently, policymaking informed by an ideology of economic liberalization has kept African economies on the same trajectory as structural adjustment and has all but guaranteed that the informal economy will not only persist but grow (Chen 2016; Tsikata 2008). There is, therefore, a need for interven- tions that support the informal economy as a matter of women’s economic rights. Despite its contributions to thinking on the place of women in development, the WID approach, together with its derivative programs and projects, has been subject to criticism for its underlying assumptions about gender and women’s lives. First, the Women, Gender, and Development in Africa 7 WID approach assumes that women had not been contributing to development (Sen and Grown 1987). The discounting of much of women’s work may be due to a privileging of “productive” endeavors relative to women’s “reproductive” work and of wage employment over informal work. The consequent stress on cash income simplistically equates money with economic empowerment and assumes that eco- nomic empowerment will translate into other forms of power. The paradigm does not acknowledge the culturally specific ways in which status is derived, and leaves unexplored the range of social roles and systems in which women are involved, including relations of cooperation and exchange with men and other household members (Razavi and Miller 1995). Moreover, the theory of change behind the WID approach ignores the deep and entrenched structures that undergird gender inequality such that individual economic power does not automatically translate into social transformation. Moreover, the WID approach emphasizes only one dimension of empowerment – individual economic power – to the neglect of other forms of power, including an internal sense of self-efficacy as well as the power of the collective (see Rowlands 1995). Also concerning is the instrumental use of gender equality. This is illustrated by the World Bank’s proclamation of “gender equality as smart economics,”which essentially presents gender equality not as important in and of itself but as a means to the end of “development.” Finally, the notion of “bringing women into development” presumes their “empowerment” by outside agents such as development workers or male authority figures. Efforts at redistribution of power that are initiated and controlled by outside agents cannot lead to empowerment of women as it does not essentially change power relations. The second half of the 1970s saw the advent of the Women and Development (WAD) paradigm as a counter to the WID approach. Proponents of the WAD paradigm contended that WID over-privileged gender as the basis for the social and economic constraints that women experienced. Drawing inspiration from depen- dency theory, they pointed to other structures – colonialism, neo-colonialism, and unequal global relationships – as sources of oppression of both women and men in the South (Johnson-Odim 1991; Steady 1981). The following quote captures the central argument of WAD: [I]t is not just a question of internal redistribution of resources, but of their generation and control; not just equal opportunity between men and women, but the creation of opportunity itself; not only the position of women in society, but the position of the societies in which Third World women find themselves (Johnson-Odim 1991, p. 320). From the perspective of WAD, the problem was not that women in the South had been excluded from development, as proposed by the WID approach; the problem was that women had always been part of the development processes through their labor but that the benefit of their participation had accrued to women and men in the global North (Rathgeber 1989). While in some parts of the world, women’s partic- ipation in formal work outside the home might signal progress and liberation, women in many parts of Africa had always worked outside the home. Thus, the right to work was not as important a cause as the right to decent work and to the 8 N. A. Anyidoho fair rewards of work. Despite this important critique of WID, the prescription proffered by WAD proponents – to increase women’s share in resources including land, employment and income –was similar to that offered by the WID approach and therefore fell short of addressing the global inequalities it brought to the fore. Again, while the WAD approach brought needed attention to geopolitics, it neglected the role of gender relations as a source of oppression: since dependency theory argues that both men and women are oppressed within international structures, it provides little justification for focusing on women’s oppression in particular (Rathgeber 1989). The 1980s saw a further evolution of the integration of gender into development with the Gender and Development (GAD) approach which developed “gender” as an analytical concept in development. Drawing on socialist feminism, the approach rightly recognized “the social construction of production and reproduction as the basis for women’s oppression” (Rathgeber 1989, p. 11); it acknowledged that gender relations were at the heart of the oppression of women and recommended that social relations of gender should be recognized and “mainstreamed” into development interventions. The intent of gender mainstreaming is to “imbue all systems, struc- tures and institutionalized cultures with awareness of gender-based biases and injustices, and to remove them” (Woodford-Berger 2004, p. 65). In other words, rather than only creating interventions targeted at women, gender mainstreaming is “intended to improve the effectiveness of mainline policies by making visible the gendered nature of assumptions, processes and outcomes” (Walby 2005, p. 321). Gender mainstreaming as a key policy intervention for gender equality was adopted at the Fourth World Conference onWomen in Beijing in 1995, which was significant for African women because of the broader representation of civil society organiza- tions and also the sense by women and groups in the global South that their voices and concerns were being recognized in ways not evident at previous conferences (Manuh and Anyidoho 2015). However, feminists have critiqued gender mainstreaming as a strategy for attaining gender equality, arguing that gender mainstreaming has become synonymous with a technocratic set of tools within the processes and institutions of development that does not translate into actual trans- formation of social institutions (Molyneux 2004; Woodford-Berger 2004). Women’s Organizing Around Gender and Development The preceding overview of interventions to address gender inequality foregrounds global governance and development organizations, notably the United Nations. However, it is important to also highlight the ways in which practitioners and activists working at national levels have influenced the progression of discourse and practice around women, gender, and development and to recognize the cross- currents of ideas that flow between the local and global. Women’s organizing in Africa – its histories, challenges, successes, and failures – has been chronicled and analyzed by researchers (e.g., Fallon 2008; Hassim 2006; Steady 2006; Tripp et al. 2009; Tsikata 2009) who show that the goals of women’s Women, Gender, and Development in Africa 9 organizing are contextual, as are the causes adopted and the strategies used. There are also variations in the extent to which such local struggles are explicitly linked to global feminist movements. Women in the global South, in particular, face the dilemma of having their struggles delegitimized by their association with “main- stream” (i.e., Western-based) feminist activism. As Dzodzi Tsikata explains, Gender activists are accepted as long as they focus on programs such as credit for women, income-generation projects and girls’ education, and couch their struggles in terms of welfare or national development. Once they broach questions of power relations or injus- tices, they are accused of being elitist and influenced by foreign ideas that are alien to African culture (In Conversation 2005, p. 130). Some activists in Africa who, to all intents and purposes, are engaged in promot- ing gender equality choose not to couch their work in these terms to avoid the challenge Tsikata describes (Anyidoho 2018). There are others who do “gender work” but do not perceive gender inequality as systemic but instead as a question of individual access and agency, and consequently employ the WID approach whether implicitly or explicitly (ibid.). They might be described as having a focus on women’s “practical” rather than “strategic” needs – the former referring to immedi- ate, usually material, needs while “strategic” needs refer to the structural problems of which practical needs are only a symptom. While feminists researchers tend to regard strategic needs as a more important focus than practical needs, others critique this dichotomy and the implied diminishing of “practical” needs as less feminist, more localized and therefore less important, arguing that this does not take account of context, and of “how power operates at multiple levels” (Flew et al. 1999, p. 402). Yet a third group of women’s rights advocates and development practitioners explicitly locate themselves within a global feminist movement while also situating their struggles within the peculiar histories of the continent. The African Feminist Forum articulates such a position in affirming their right to “theorize. . .strategize. . .and speak” for themselves as “African feminists” (African Feminist Forum n.d.). Despite their important role in promoting development, civil society movements that advance women’s rights are marginalized in the policy process. Indeed, women in general tend to be absent from policymaking (Tsikata and Kerr 2000a). However, there are instances of women’s movements working with the state to advocate specific legislations or policies with regard to poverty reduction, paid and unpaid work, reproductive rights, and political representation. In particular, legislation against gender-based violence has exercised activists (see Adomako Ampofo 2008; Htun and Weldon 2012; Medie 2015; Tripp et al. 2009). However, there are limits to this partnership between civil society and the state. Importantly, such alliances are not as effective in the implementation stage as in the formulation stage of legislation and policies (Anyidoho et al. 2020). If the goal of gender equality is to be realized, more purposeful collaboration is needed between a range of activists, including individuals inside the state who self-identify as feminist techno- crats or “femocrats” (see Eyben and Turquet 2013). Better partnerships also need to 10 N. A. Anyidoho develop between academics and activists. As Tsikata and Kerr (2000b) point out, without the backing of reliable research evidence, “women’s demands for policy change are easy to dismiss. . .[but] without effective advocacy, gender equality in policymaking processes and outcomes will never to be achieved” (p. 2). Indeed, a report based on the Gender and Economic Reforms program, for which Tsikata and Kerr (2000a) served as editors, showcase exactly this complement of rigorous research and advocacy, with (mainly) African female academics producing research that was used as the basis for advocacy for the participation of women in design- ing and implementing interventions that served their interests. The synthesis of research, activism, practice, and policymaking is demonstrated in approach of other regional, Southern-based, and global organizations, notably the Association of African Women in Research and Development (AAWORD), Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), Development Alternatives with Women for a new Era (DAWN), and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). Conclusion The history of gender and development as outlined in this chapter reveals a techno- cratic bent both in the articulation of the problem and in the actors involved in the search for solutions. While the integration of gender into development praxis can be partly attributed to feminist critiques of mainstream development, there is a tendency for these once radical feminist ideas to be de-politicized once assimilated into conventional development institutions and processes (Batliwala 2007; Cornwall and Brock 2005). Women’s empowerment is one such coopted idea. It is preferred in development discourse to the “harder” concept of gender equality because, as Cornwall and Anyidoho (2010) argue, empowerment has been deracinated from the feminist goal of challenging and changing gendered dynamics of power. What we currently see in development is “empowerment with the power taken out,” one in which “a gender agenda that began with demands for radical and collective trans- formation of economic, political and societal relations. . .has ended up with the idea that. . .‘raising chicks can change patriarchy’” (p. 145). A second important conclusion is that the paradigms discussed in this chapter, including gender mainstreaming, have not mounted a significant challenge to the predominant neoliberal economic model of development (Tsikata and Kerr 2000b). This makes even more urgent the caution that gender equality and women’s rights should not be merely a means to the end of development, but an end in themselves. There is danger in allowing an instrumentalist view to coopt gender research into “pragmatic,” “hands-on” donor-driven and state-initiated agendas that cannot be put to the service of gender equality in its broadest, most liberating sense (Lewis 2005). Development is a “disputed and politicized question in the face of the visions of ‘the good society’, and of women’s place within it” (Molyneux and Razavi 2006, p. 3). Thus, gender equality as a goal of development will necessarily be gradual because of the pervasive, political, and personal nature of these inequalities. Gender Women, Gender, and Development in Africa 11 equality as a development goal requires the effective partnership and sustained effort of differently located actors. References Adomako Ampofo, A. (2008). Collective activism: The Domestic Violence Bill becoming law in Ghana. African and Asian Studies, 7(4), 395–421. https://doi.org/10.1163/156921008X359597. African Feminist Forum. (n.d.). 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(2005). Gender biases in African historiography. In O. Oyewumi (Ed.), African gender studies: A reader (pp. 207–232). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Women, Gender, and Development in Africa 15 View publication stats https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2009.8 https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxi018 https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxi018 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-394281-4.00002-7 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339658111 Women, Gender, and Development in Africa Introduction Why Gender Matters in/for Development The Evolution of Discourse and Practice on Gender and Development Women´s Organizing Around Gender and Development Conclusion