B. Mo
International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada
The paper outlines the evolution of the gender dimension of research and development from women in development to gender and development, and the way the concept has been incorporated within the agro-ecosystem health approach to research and development for improving human welfare. The opportunities and approaches for addressing the gender issue within the agro-ecosystem health project in Ethiopia are also outlined. Key concepts and issues in gender analysis are briefly described in an appendix.
'Despite progress over the last two decades, the harsh reality is that women are nonetheless more likely to be under-nourished, under-educated, over-worked and under-paid than their male partners. They are also more likely to be poor: of the 1.3 billion people living on a dollar a day or less, 70 percent are women,' said James D. Wolfensohn, President of The World Bank in his address to the Fourth UN Conference on Women, Beijing, September 15, 1995.
These dismal statistics quoted above have compelled nations and international development organisations to reconsider the way they conceived programmes to improve women's status and well-being. Initially, international development programmes focused on men as primary actors, believing that the benefits of these projects would filter down from men to their families.
The purpose of this paper is to make suggestions for improving the health and well-being of people in Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, by including gender and social analysis into development research. It is hoped that such analysis will assist researchers, development organisations, and government to understand how to mobilise particular vulnerable and invisible groups such as the poor, women and children. The fact that the poor are largely women and children, who have been 'benignly' invisible in development research, justifies to an extent, the efforts that many researchers and development institutions have made to focus on their plight. However, development history demonstrates quite aptly that efforts to benefit women and children by creating separate programmes moves their issues away from the mainstream and dominant political agenda of development and thus in the end marginalises them and isolates those individuals and organisations who work on their issues. Probably the only exception to this is UNICEF, the UN organisation that focuses primarily on issues of women as mothers and children.
The paper is divided into four parts. The first section will be a brief history of efforts to include women in the development agenda which will also provide some background information on the situation at IDRC; second will be a brief description of the Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health Programme Initiative, and third the opportunities for social and gender analysis within that initiative; and finally some opportunities for this work within the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) will be discussed. The last section will draw on literature from the International Livestock Centre for Africa ( ILCA), which has been incorporated into ILRI in 1994.
An appendix is included at the end of the document, which includes definitions of key concepts and issues when conceptionalising or doing gender analysis.
In the 1970s, attempts were made to draw attention to females' participation by organising women in development (WID) programmes both in national governments in the South and in international aid agencies. WID policies and programmes attempted to integrate women into development planning by adding WID components to larger sectoral programmes and projects. This 'add women and stir' approach included women, as both staff and beneficiaries, into as many sectors and programmes as possible. This did not fundamentally alter the priorities of these programmes because these efforts focussed largely on women's reproductive roles, totally obscuring the fact that women also have essential productive and community enhancing roles1 (Boserup 1970; Moser 1993). There was little analysis of the disproportionate power relationships between men and women in society as well as the gendered division of labour. Separate programmes were developed targeting women only and these programmes often became marginalised as the men were still left to the 'real work of development'. WID was an approach preoccupied with issues of separate access to programmes, but did not emphasise an outcome in terms of expanding the power and autonomy of women in controlling their own lives and resources in the context of major development projects.
1. Reproductive roles refer to the bearing and rearing of children and labour within the household, while productive normally refers to income generating work. Community enhancing roles are those which promote social cohesion such as cooking or entertaining at communal events.
During most of this past decade, activists, policy makers and academics have argued for a new strategy which calls for gender equality in the opportunities of development and in decision-making processes as well as women's involvement in all spheres of life in the process of social and economic transformation. Many agencies changed the name of their programmes from WID to Gender and Development (GAD). They argued that while WID focussed primarily on women, a gender approach, focussing on the socially constructed roles of both men and women looks at people in the context of society and was better suited to cross-sectoral analysis (Rathgeber 1990; Moser 1993).
Within the International Development Research Centre, the 1995 Corporate Framework mandated that 'all research funded by IDRC must account for the differential impact that change will have on the lives of men and women'. The Expert and Advisory Services Fund instituted during that same year provided direct support to programmes to financing a range of activities including staff training and funding internships and consultants to support and promote these activities.
At the most fundamental level, IDRC's policy meant that all programme initiatives would incorporate gender issues and analysis into their respective projects. The least controversial and most basic type of analysis was the disaggregation of data into separate categories for males and females, which fitted into the classic scientific mold. The incorporation of gender analysis to provide practical needs such as improved living conditions, health care and employment enjoyed some success. However, the progression towards equity in terms of decision-making and empowerment, and thus control, largely remained elusive.
IDRC's new approach to human health, ecohealth for short, is a systems approach, which acknowledges the complex relationships that exist between the biological, physical and social environment. It recognises the synergistic relationship between human activities on the ecosystem, and just as importantly the impact of changes in the ecosystem on human health. This multi-disciplinary approach includes epidemiological research on risk and impact of ecosystem stressors on human health, but within a larger socio-political and economic context which includes employment options, income distribution, and access to and management of natural resources. This new approach to improving human health uses ecosystems as the contextual entry point for assessing and improving human health. In order to be effective and sustainable, interventions will focus on better management of both natural and human resources and thus not be reliant on the classic curative biomedical approach alone.
Within this programming climate, ecosystem approaches to human health attempts to pioneer a more inclusive and holistic, trans-disciplinary approach to development. This approach recognises that gender relationships, which often are unequal between women and men, is a subset of greater social inequities which also embraces issues such as class, ethnicity/tribe, caste and age. In order to incorporate these discrete and overlapping elements of equity imbalance, an evidence-based or knowledge based approach providing a holistic description of the relevant ecosystem is needed. This will provide a framework for the design of interventions, which need to progress at a pace synchronised with the local society. The systems approach is clearly also an adaptive approach, which takes into account the impact that progressive activities, even those at the assessment phase of a project, have on the local situation. This variation on the 'Hawthorne effect' (Webster 1993) is very relevant, but not often taken into account in development projects.
More importantly, by embracing change resulting from the adoption of new ways of thinking and problems solving based on clearly presented information, options and trade-offs, inertia is overcome. This may provide new entry points for incorporating 'difficult' areas of gender into the project design. These would focus on governance and power-brokering by women in such areas as financial decision-making and natural resources management.
Within the specific context of human health, by moving this sector into an ecological setting, the provision of improved 'facility-based healthcare' no longer has a monopoly. Thus preventative activities will dominate rather than curative measures which have human costs of suffering as well as purely economic costs. This approach is a vast improvement on uncontextualised studies of individual risk and behaviour change, which lean towards, 'victim blaming'. The approach should also incorporate a variety of immediate avenues for intervention to improve human health and the ecosystem at various ecological spheres; the individual, family, household, compound or homestead, village, district and nation. These options for immediate, short-term and not only for holistic, more complex and long term solutions are extremely important because the comprehensiveness of the ecosystem approach can leave people frustrated and overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of inter-related causal factors.
IDRC's innovative approach to human health looks at how reproductive/domestic, productive and community roles of women, men and children impact both on their health and that of the ecosystem. This is a major progression from studies that focus solely on women as actors in the domestic sphere and on men's involvement in the productive sphere. Such comprehensive studies will hopefully present a more complete picture of reality as well as opportunities for creative interventions, which will mobilise more human resources to productive activity for poverty alleviation, and the improvement of human health.
Achieving such a goal requires the active involvement of all segments of society in information gathering, sharing and analysis to understand the options and trade-offs. Issues of participation and governance should consider both traditional formal and informal leadership, and new forms such as a village, ward or district management committees which were instituted by decentralisation and social reform. These issues must be presented to the community in a variety of fora for consideration.
The interactions of women, men and children with each other and with different elements of the ecosystem must be grounded by field research utilising both qualitative and quantitative methods combining rapid and long term, ethnographic research. Ethnographies documenting the life of a community at a point in time are very useful characterisations of the interaction of humans, social and cultural organisation, as well as human interaction with their physical and biological environment (some relevant ethnographies about Ethiopia are by Shack 1966; Reminick 1973; Tsehai Berhane Selassie 1984; Hirut Terefe and Lakew Woldetekle 1986; Cassiers 1988; Pankhurst 1989; Pankhurst 1992).
ILRI, and its predecessor ILCA, has a distinguished history of research using a systems approach to agro-ecosystems that the present study can draw upon. A study conducted in the Borana Plateau of Southern Ethiopia during 1980–91 by an interdisciplinary team outlined both the strategies and tools of systems research and its limitations. It also included a major section on suggestions for specific development interventions in this lowland area. The report clearly stated the necessity for specific situation analysis which include social and cultural factors because of the great social, cultural and economic diversity of pastoralists living in one region of Ethiopia (Coppock 1994).
The system discussed in the report is a rather open one, which does not focus on just the lowland range, but also includes linkages with peri-urban parts of small and medium sized urban centres and with the highlands. The strategies for sustaining the Borana lowland range include the development of peri-urban infrastructure specifically for the Borana peoples. The development of markets in the highlands for small ruminant mammals to be sold or traded for grain is also recommended. This document with its broad and well described systems approach has an extensive and varied assortment of interventions to offer in terms of strategies for improved food security, poverty alleviation and ultimately human well-being. The approach is quite generic and the document would be a useful guide for the present project.
More recently the idea of using an ecosystem approach for sustainable development of the East African Highlands received encouragement in a paper from ILRI. In this document the author calls for an 'integrative science which employs a holistic view of the (anthropogenic and natural) multiple stresses and interactions' (Mohamed Saleem 1995, p.115). In the same document, he acknowledges the necessity for community participation in this planning process by citing the historic Ethiopian precedent for land-use management through local organisations, procedures and customary rules.
The literature on Ethiopia is replete with studies on men's lives and labour, but there remains a real paucity of studies on gender and women. Part of the reason for the absence of studies on women is that the agrarian economy of Ethiopia and the political instability have focussed research on agriculture and politics, which are not perceived as the domains of women. However, their invisibility does not mean that they are not important in agriculture as their work is essential to keeping draft animals fed and watered, care of smaller animals, collection of fuel and trade. Ethiopian women contribute only a third of the agricultural labour, while their counterparts in East and West Africa contribute about 50% to 60% of agricultural labour (Whalen 1984).
Pankhurst (1992) in her study of gender, development and identity in northern Shewa, 300 kilometres north of Addis Ababa, carefully describes the differential roles of men, women and children in farm labour. According to her study, men did the ploughing with oxen, but this activity also required co-operation of women to do the crop processing and the watering of the oxen. Women performed the more difficult and less sought after jobs in livestock husbandry and work such as spinning and fuel production. This arduous and low status work demonstrated the way women were marginalised, while also illuminating their vital role in the local economy.
Coppock (1994) confirm the findings of researchers that African women are over worked. Specifically he confirms previous findings that pastoralist married women work longer hours (65% of the time between 0530 and 2000 hrs) than married men ( 43% of the time). They are commonly responsible for running the households, herding and other aspects of livestock care (Dahl 1987; Fratkin 1989). Naturally, wealthier women and men work fewer hours2. The alleviation of women's labour burdens is cited as an important goal for development both in the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference Platform for Action and by Coppock.
2. At the March 1998 meeting at ILRI, I heard that in more well-to-do families, the children of relatives would often come to stay and perform many of these chores.
Gryseels and Goe (1983) writing about daily household chores and energy expenditure for Ethiopian women in the highlands indicated that the top four activities engaging women were cooking (183 hrs per month), fetching water (91 hrs per month), collecting firewood (61 hrs per month) and collecting, preparing and drying cow dung (44 hrs per month) . The fifth most time consuming activity was going to market (20–45 hrs).
Whalen (1984) in a study of Debre Zeit, 50 km from Addis Ababa, indicates that only six percent of the population has access to clean water. Women and girls walk 30–40 minutes to a water source and as water is collected at least twice daily, two hours a day is spent in this activity.
Pankhurst (1992) comments on the complexity of gender relations in her largely Orthodox Christian, Amhara communities, which has direct implications for household composition, labour and access to land, and eligibility for various development incentives. There are six types of marriage, each with different roles, responsibilities and obligations. Although there were monogamous relationships, there were also polygamous, extra-marital relationships and separation. Divorce and remarriage were common. Coppock concurs that the variety of household composition among the Borana suggests that the term 'household' without further characterisation into household types is not a useful category for data collection or interventions.
Additional attention will be spent on Whalen's study because it does deal with issues relevant to ecohealth, food security, poverty alleviation and general human well-being in a highland area of Ethiopia. She concludes that there is a need for more information on the impact of crossbred cows on women, but adds that intra-household and inter-household processes be examined, which would include research on men and children. In particular she focuses on the specific utilisation of increased income and the impact on women's labour of new innovations.
Whalen provides some interesting suggestions for further research, which this present project may consider
research on women's feelings about oxen as labour for making small water ponds to be used for human and animal consumption and for irrigation of home gardens
research on increased efficiencies and income in butter and cheese making for household consumption and sale
research to determine how increased income is spent and what kinds of health education are required for families to maximise income to improve human health
research on use of biogas produced from animal manure as fuel to alleviate women and children's burden in fuel production.
This type of research requires different strategies and staffing. Efforts need to be made to include women in group meetings convenient for them where they will be comfortable. This may involve sex segregated meetings in homes rather than in public places. The employment of females at all levels of the research from design to field staff is essential to provide a more comfortable and encouraging environment for rural women.
Zein Ahmed and Kloos (1988) edited a huge volume on the wide range of topics associated with ecology and disease in Ethiopia. The first edition is dated 1988 and a new issue was to be out in the mid 1990s. This would certainly be an essential reference for the present project.
IDRC, ILRI and those organisations represented in this workshop are embarking on a very exciting research endeavour which has the potential for improving the well-being of poor communities in Ethiopia and possibly in Africa. However the mere presence of data is not adequate to change bureaucratic systems that do not understand the vision. Safelios-Rothchild (1983) observes that there are adequate statistics in Sierra Leone on the status, needs and potential of women farmers but planners and implementers, who are largely men, ignore them.
There is an old Chinese proverb, which says, 'Women hold up half the sky'. We must all work to harness this valuable human resource for the health and welfare of Africans. A systems approach which incorporates participatory and gender sensitive analysis within a consideration of larger social equity with the participation of a variety of stakeholders including community, activists, academic researchers and government is a move in the right direction for sustaining development.
Boserup E. 1970. Women's role in economic development. Allen & Unwin, London, UK. 283 pp.
Cassiers A. 1988. Mercha: An Ethiopian woman speaks of her life. In: Romero P. (ed), Life histories of African women. Ashfield, London, UK. pp. 159–193.
Coppock D.L. 1994. The Borana plateau of southern Ethiopia: Synthesis of pastoral research, development and change, 1980–91. ILCA Systems Study 5. ILCA (International Livestock Centre for Africa), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 299 pp.
Dahl G. 1987. Women in pastoral production. Ethnos 52(1–2):246–279.
Fratkin E. 1989. Household variation and gender inequality in Ariaal pastoral production. American anthropologist 91:430–440.
Gryseels G. and Goe M. 1983. Energy flows on smallholder farms in the Ethiopian highlands. ILCA (International Livestock Centre for Africa), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (Mimeo). 38 pp.
Hirut Terefe and Lakew Woldetekle. 1986. Study of the situation of women in Ethiopia. Research Project 23. IDR (Institute of Development Research), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 103 pp.
Manderson L., Mark T. and Nicole W. 1996. Women's participation in health and development. World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. 40 pp.
Mohamed Saleem M.A. 1995. Fragile East African highlands: A development vision for smallholder farmers in the Ethiopian highlands. Outlook on agriculture 24(2):111–116.
Moser C. 1993. Gender planning and development: Theory, practice and training. Routledge, London, UK. 285 pp.
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). 1998. DAC source book on concepts and approaches linked to gender equality. OECD, Paris, France.
Pankhurst A. 1989. Settling for a new world—people and the state in an Ethiopian resettlement village. PhD thesis, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Pankhurst H. 1992. Gender, development and identity: An Ethiopian study. Zed Books, London, UK. 216 pp.
Rathgeber E. 1990. WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in research and practice. Journal of developing areas 24(4):489–502.
Reminick R. 1973. The Manze Amhara of Ethiopia: A study of authority, masculinity and sociality. PhD thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA. 370 pp.
Safelios-Rothschild C. 1983. The state of statistics on women in agriculture in the third world. Paper for the Expert Consultation on Women in Food Production, December 7–14. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), Rome, Italy. 28 pp.
Shack W. 1966. The Gurage, a people of the ensete culture. Oxford University Press, London, UK. 222 pp.
Tsehai Berhane-Selassie (ed). 1984. Gender issues in Ethiopia: Proceedings of the first university seminar on gender issues in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, December 24–26, 1989. Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Webster M. 1993. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Thomas Allen & Sons Limited, Markham, Ontario, Canada. 1460 pp.
Whalen I.T. 1984. ILCA's Ethiopian highland programme: Problems and perspectives in expanding the participation of women. Paper prepared for the Workshop on Women in Agriculture in West Africa, Ibadan, Nigeria, May 7–9 1984. ILCA (International Livestock Centre for Africa), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 24 pp.
WHO (World Health Organization). 1998. www.who.org/gender
Zein Ahmed Z. and Kloos H.1988. Ecology of health and disease in Ethiopia. Ministry of Health, Gondar, Ethiopia. 319 pp.
