ECONOMICS
IMPORTED STRATEGIES Women and Development by Chris Weiss Chris Weiss
works with the Ms. Foundation for Women, Economic Development/Technical
Assistance Project and is the Acting North American Coordinator for Women's
World Banking. She lives in West Virginia. In Chicago, the Women's Self-Employment
Project designed a loan program, making capital available to groups of
women who are starting self-employment projects. The Graumeen Bank is doing
the same thing with women in Bangladesh. Women in Jamaica and New Hampshire
are learning construction skills through the Jamaica Women's Collective
and Northeastern N.E. Women in the Trades. In West Virginia, a local affiliate
of Women's World Banking offers guaranteed loans for microenterprises (See
The Front, page 7). The Kenya Women's Finance Trust, a Women's World Banking
affiliate in Kenya has a similar program. Women from the United States
have been studying and adapting models that have worked in Africa and Asia.
The notion that "developed" countries teach "undeveloped" countries still
persists but some profound changes are taking place in the United States
where development practitioners are designing economic development programs
for low-income women. In developing these new programs and analyzing and
creating the new strategies, women's organizations in the United States
are beginning to pay attention to research, analysis and project development
that is already taking place in Third World countries. Kristin Timothy,
chief of the New York office of the United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV),
says that it is hard to trace the origins of development strategies around
the world. "It's a chicken and egg situation," she explains. But she adds,
"there has been a fair amount of cross-fertilization in developing techniques,
particularly at the grassroots level." Women's organizations are beginning
to move away from the developed/developing distinction, as they recognize
more cross- cultural parallels. Timothy says she is not sure if it is strategies
which have been transferred "so much as shared experiences and people exchanging
ideas about what to do." There is a growing consciousness on the part of
women working in economic development projects that unacceptable conditions
exist for women and their families regardless of national boundaries. In
Appalachia, on Native American reservations and in the urban ghettos of
some of the biggest U.S. cities, for example, women are realizing that
a Third World existence is possible anywhere in the world as long as women
lack economic choices. At the same time, such women are aware that there
are still major differences that cannot be ignored in the poverty, culture
and in public policy. Until recently, however, the idea that there was
any similarity at all between the work that women in the United States
and women in Africa or Latin America were doing to increase economic choices
for women would have been ridiculed. U.S. feminist, author and activist,
Gloria Steinem commented on the potential for an international perspective
in a preface to a recent book: "Women are a Third World wherever we are:
low on capital, low on technology, labor intensive and a source of raw
materials, maintenance and underpaid or unpaid production for the more
powerful." Many women agree. In recent years, individual women and women's
organizations in the United States have begun to explore new kinds of economic
interventions into the lives of low-income women, substituting economic
development projects for social service projects. This is a major change
for these organizations which have traditionally been involved with social
welfare programs or concerned with equity issues such as assuring women
equal rights under the law. This trend is a product of the considerable
frustration that institutions serving women have encountered while attempting
to address the economic restrictions U.S. women face. The staff of domestic
violence shelters note, for example, that a battered woman might return
to the abusive situation, because there simply is no viable way for her
to support herself independently. And finding a salaried job is not the
only problem. Many women in traditional "women's" jobs face the dilemma
of being forced to give up their work because the low pay they receive
is not sufficient to pay for adequate child care. Women's poverty was one
of the many issues debated at the 1985 United Nations (UN) Conference on
the International Decade for Women in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference was
attended by more than 3,000 women from the United States and much of the
discussion there was devoted to the economic realities facing women around
the world. Out of this discussion came a new acceptance of the idea that
solutions can come from anywhere, as long as they provide the answer to
a local need. One important solution which Timothy says emerged at the
Nairobi conference "was the idea of empowering women by giving them the
resources and skills to allow them to play a role in decision-making and
[to] channel resources toward goals that are meaningful to women." Twenty-six
percent of the workshops in Nairobi dealt with the theme of development,
one of the three major themes of the meeting (along with equality and peace).
One of the major plenaries and several workshops were led by representatives
of a group of researchers and practitioners from around the world called
Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN). DAWN's analysis
of the economic alternatives for women involved looking at global trends
in military spending, the pervasive influence of the religious right and
the economic discrimination that is practiced by governments against women
everywhere. DAWN argues that economic development starts with women. In
a later publication, it wrote "If the goals of development included improved
standards of living, removal of poverty, access to dignified employment
and reduction in societal inequity, then it is quite natural to start with
women. They constitute the majority of the poor, the underemployed and
the economically and socially disadvantaged in most societies. Furthermore,
women suffer from the additional burdens imposed by gender-based hierarchies
and subordination." DAWN recommended to project developers and funders
that, if they intended to see the greatest return on their money, they
needed to spend it on projects directly affecting women. Income- generating
projects which target women as their main constituency have been found
to bring greater wealth to a greater number of people. Women, this research
shows, spend more of any net increase in income on their families--on food,
fuel, shelter and clothing. Men tend to spend more of their income on consumer
items. Therefore, if development projects start with women, there is greater
net benefit to the community. DAWN made it clear in Nairobi and in subsequent
publications that although they considers theirs a "Third World" perspective,
it is more inclusive than that, encompassing people "from the South countries
[and] from oppressed and disadvantaged groups and sectors of the women's
movement within the North," among others. There were many in Nairobi who
took DAWN's vision back to the United States and other countries and began
to put it to work. They did not have to look far to find their constituency
in the United States. The ranks of the very poor in the United States are
increasingly being filled with women from Third World countries. Popular
myth has it that male workers make up the majority of the refugee population.
Increasingly, however, figures show that women are the predominant sex
among refugees in the United States. More than 62 percent of the refugees
from Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, Cuba, China (Mainland and Taiwan),
Vietnam, India, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, Italy
and Canada are women. They enter as refugees and immigrants, seeking a
better standard of living and a future for their children but they often
find themselves trapped in low-wage service jobs, barely making enough
money to subsist. In addition, they must cope with being in a foreign country
and being forced to speak an unfamiliar language. According to Annette
Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich, the authors of Women in the Global Factory,
"Ninety percent of the sweatshop workers in this country are female and
the majority of these are immigrants from the Caribbean, Central America
and Asia. Third World women are industry's best labor bargain, wherever
they are found." Refugee Women in Development is an organization that works
with refugee communities in Washington D.C. which is attempting to reverse
this trend. Currently, it is working with Afghani women and Cambodian women
in two separate enterprises to establish cooperatives, using the handcraft
skills that these women have brought with them. According to Director Sima
Wali, herself a refugee from Afghanistan, "Women bring their skills to
this country plus an emotional load of abuse. [The second] is a barrier
to economic transition." Wali sees similarities between the economic development
work done in villages in Third World countries and the work that she is
doing in the United States. There are other programs in the United States
that do similar work with other communities of people. The Association
of Farm Worker Opportunity Programs operates across the United States to
assist migrant farm workers to "settle out" into local communities, using
federal funds to place workers into local employment. The American Friends
Service Committee operates a border project between Matamoros, Mexico and
Brownsville, Texas to deal with the effects of the exploitation of Mexican
women who work in the subsidiaries of U.S.-owned assembly plants or maquiladoras
which have located there to take advantage of the cheap labor. Each of
these non-profit groups includes former refugees and immigrants as staff
and policy-makers responsible for creating new programs to address the
effects of displacement on newcomers. They use their own experience as
Third World women to create economic alternatives to the continued exploitation
of immigrant women and their families in the United States. Even as various
non-profits create these alternatives, the global assembly line in which
women take part--making clothing, assembling electronic parts--wherever
their labor can be obtained cheaply, continues. In "The Journey of a Blouse:
A Global Assembly Line," John Cavanaugh describes the creation of a blouse
from the cotton fields of El Salvador to the spinning mills of North Carolina,
back to the seamstresses in Haiti to the shops in North America. He says
"Workers across the United States are adversely affected by global assembly
lines, as corporations use the threat of cheap imports to push wages down.
Workers everywhere are the losers because they are played off against one
another by the same group of large corporations." In a publication of the
International Women's Tribune Centre, women discuss the ways that multinationals
benefit from the global and sexual division of labor and "the effect that
'The Journey of the Blouse' has on women in Third World countries and women
in the industrialized world." The quarterly publication is intended primarily
for use by women in the Third World but it has direct relevance for women
in industrialized countries too. The Women's Economic Justice Center in
Massachusetts is teaching economic literacy with the use of materials much
like those published by the Tribune. They teach the economic connections
between what happens to women in the United States and Third World countries
when multinationals exploit cheap, female labor. Their emphasis is on training
women who are already organized in women's organizations, labor unions
or trade associations. They also promote new initiatives to set labor standards
for U.S.- based companies that operate in the Third World and to condition
the international flow of capital. Many other new organizations are also
designing strategies to deal with the problems associated with the internationalization
of capital. But they lack resources and government support and their task
is complicated by economists and statisticians who fail to recognize the
work that women do outside a market economy. In a new book, If Women Counted,
economist Marilyn Waring stresses the need for a global reassessment of
the economic role of women. Waring describes the failure of the policy-makers
at the United Nations to "count" women's work. She offers two rationales
for the exclusion: "Reasons given by men for their failure to account for
women's work are (1) conceptual problems and (2) the practical difficulties
of collecting data." Waring goes on to assert that this failure undermines
the overall legitimacy of the analysis. "It does not seem to occur to [the
men] that if you have a conceptual problem about the activity of half the
human species, you then have a conceptual problem about the whole." She
also points out that statisticians have developed methods for estimating
the levels of illegal or black-market economic activity in various countries
(particularly drugs and prostitution) and asks why these male statisticians
cannot use similar methods to deal with the practical difficulties they
complain of in collecting statistics on women's work. Waring makes a very
persuasive argument for the importance of "counting" women's work, primarily
for the effect that it could have on decisions made by policy-makers and
the "direct political connection of the statistician with the economist
and policy-maker." As long as women are invisible workers whose labor is
seldom acknowledged, she argues, policy-makers will never develop policies
that can make women's labor more efficient and effective. Without such
a change in outlook, efforts to reduce poverty among women are severely
crippled. In the United States, the movement for women and economic development
projects has sparked new ways of thinking about women and the economy.
Alice Kessler Harris, a women's historian, says "New material conditions
have shifted the content of equity from a demand for equality with men
to a challenge to male structures. The altered terms of the debate no longer
ask how women can achieve equality in a predominantly male work world so
much as how to revalue the world of work and workers in a way that incorporates
female self-interest." Communication between women globally will help to
define and advance these new values. Shared experiences and borrowed strategies
have already established a basis for forging new links among women. The
new projects, based on an international perspective on women and development,
will help maintain existing connections as well as build new ones.