WID, WAD, GAD:

The work from Boserup considered as the "first investigation ever undertaken into what happens to women in the process of economic and social growth throughout the Third World".

WAD uses "AND" instead of "IN', reflects that it focuses on the relationship between women and development processes rather than purely on strategies for the integration of women into development. Its point of departure is that women always have been important economic actors in their societies and that the work they do both inside and outside the household is central to the maintenance of those societies, but that this integration serves pri- marily to sustain existing international structures of inequality.

Women And Development

Introduction

Women In Development

Expectation

Emerged in second half of 1970s.

Offers a more critical view of women's position than does WID, but it fails to undertake a full-scale analysis of the relationship between patriarchy, differing modes of production, and women's subordination and oppression.

Position of women amid development agenda has been debated among scholars and policy makers.

Gives little analytical attention to the social relations of gender within classes.

WID came to use in 1970's, after the publication of Ester Boserup's "Women's Role in Economic Development".

Reality

Discourages a strict analytical focus on the problems of women independent of those of men, since both sexes are seen to be disadvantaged within oppressive global structures based on class and capital.

Grew out of a concern with the explanatory limitations of modernization theory.

"Women In Decelopment" assumed as mainstream perspective.

The use of "IN" in WID is to emphasize that women rarely, if ever, were considered as a separate unit of analysis in the modernization literature of this period. It was assumed that the norm of the male experience was generalizable to females and that all would benefit equally as societies increasingly became modernized.

The term "WID" was initially used by the Women's Committee of the Washington.

Dr. Rathgeber is a consultant in international development. She spent many years with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and was founder and director of IDRC’s Gender and Development Program. work closely with many international organizations including FAO, IFAD, IAEA, UNESCO, ICIMOD, the African Virtual University, and the CGIAR system.

It draws some of its theoretical base from dependency theory, as well as neo-Marxist approach.

WID is solidly influenced by traditional modernization theory.

It also began to be articulated by American liberal feminists.

Focused only on how women could better be integrated into ongoing development initiatives rather than examine why women had fared less well from development strategies.

Focus exclusively on the productive aspects, ignoring or minimizing the reproductive side.

But actually there are at least two other perspectives, Women And Development and Gender And Development, respectively with varying set of underlying assumptions and has led to the formulation of different strategies for the participation of women in development processes.

"Integrating women into development" was linked to the economic dependency of Third World on industrialized countries

The WID perspective was closely linked with the modernization paradigm that dominated mainstream thinking on international development at that time.

ILO

GAD uses the term "GENDER" insetad of "WOMEN", reflects that this approach welcomes the potential contributions of men who share a concern for issues of equity and social justice.

In 1976 the International Labor Orga- nization (ILO) articulated a Basic Needs Approach (BNA) designed to enable women to provide more effectively for their families' most fun- damental human needs.

Gender And Development

In Practice

It does not focus singularly on productive or reproductive aspects of women's (and men's) lives to the exclusion of the other. It analyzes the nature of women's contribution within the context of work done both inside and outside the household, including noncommodity production, and rejects the public/private dichotomy that commonly has been used as a mechanism to undervalue family and household maintenance work performed by women.

It did not challenge existing patterns of inequality. It did not focus on issues of redistribution of land or wealth within societies, nor did it question the sexual division of labor within households.

USAID

While each USAID policy paper must have a "woman impact" statement, such statements are usu- ally no more than a paragraph and are often recycled from one document to another.

Emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to the earlier WID focus.

Despite efforts to increase the number of women benefiting from USAID grants, in the early 1980s the number of USAID-supported international trainees who were women was just 13 percent, up 4 percent from 1974, but only equal to what the number had been in the early 1960s.

The general notion of focusing on women separate from men in at least some projects has been accepted by a considerable number of Third World governments, national and international development agencies, and many nongovernmental organizations.

World Bank

A major focus of the expanded office during the late 1980s was on "Safe Motherhood," based on the argument that "improving maternal health helps involve women more effectively in development."

GAD approach goes further than WID or WAD in questioning the underlying assumptions of current social, economic, and political structures.

It can be argued that such initiatives, while of obvious and crucial importance, are based within a traditional view of women's roles.

The GAD approach does not easily lend itself to integration into ongoing development strategies and programs. It demands a degree of commitment to structural change and power shifts that is unlikely to be found either in national or in international agencies.

Adopts socialist feminism as theoretical roots and has bridged the gap left by the modernization theorists by linking the relations of pro- duction to the relations of reproduction and taling into account all aspects of women lives.

Projects that take women into account from the very beginning, i.e., at the design stage, have a higher efficiency level and are more likely to succeed.

While the rhetoric of "integrating women into development" has been accepted by many insti- tutions, the actual process of ensuring equity for women even within those same institutions is still far from complete.

The primary focus : examination of why women systematically have been assigned to inferior and/or secondary roles.

A project in Ghana is examining the impact of tech- nological change on women farmers and analyzing alternative methods of income generation developed by female farmers after part of their land.

Toward Implementation of GAD

A project in Burkina Faso is considering the impact of fuelwood shortages on women's agricultural practices and on family nutritional intakes. The researchers have discov- ered that as women are forced to spend longer periods of time searching for firewood, they have less time for agriculture.

Questions

It is difficult to find examples of development proj- ects that have been designed from a GAD perspective.

Is motherhood an inferior role? Is Domestic work secondary?

Can mainstream institutions embrace alternative tasks to elevate women position?

GAD projects would examine not only the sexual division of labor, but also the sexual division of responsibility, and recognize that the burden carried by women is one not only of physical labor but also of psychological stress, for example, in being solely accountable for many aspects of family maintenance.

WID, WAD, GAD:

Trends in Research and Practice

Eva M. Rathgeber