Engendering Economic Policy in Africa

ABSTRACT

Despite Africa's relatively commendable growth performance since 2000, growth has not been accompanied by structural transformations. First, there has been little diversification from agriculture into industry, particularly manufacturing. Second, the poverty headcount and inequality remain high in many countries, even as African countries continue to rank lowest on the United Nations Development Programme's Gender Inequality Index. This contribution goes beyond the individualistic approach of supply-side policies and unveils deeper mechanisms that need to be tackled for the two transformations (diversification and inequality reduction) to occur. It demonstrates that gender inequality relies on unwritten but dominant social norms, hence, informal institutions. The removal of formal legislation that constrains women's agency, the enactment of formal laws, and the implementation of economic policies designed specifically to create incentives for behavior change are recommended.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural transformation
• gender inequality
• informal institutions
• Africa

JEL Codes:

• D63
• O55

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Abena D. Oduro is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics and Director of the Centre for Social Policy Studies, University of Ghana. She is co-author of Measuring the Gender Asset Gap in Ghana (University of Ghana and Woeli Publishing Services, 2011). Her current research interests are women and entrepreneurship and gender and asset ownership.

Irene van Staveren is Professor of Pluralist Development Economics at the Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She works on development economics as well as ethics and economics, and in both often takes a gender perspective, which has led her to focus on unpaid work and care and the integration of the ethics of care in economic thought. She recently published a pluralist introduction to economics in which feminist economics is integrated (Economics after the Crisis, Routledge, 2015).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This special issue was made possible by the generous support of a grant to Feminist Economics by the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC). This grant helped fund the whole process, including author workshops with expert discussants in Cape Town (South Africa) and Palo Alto (USA). All authors benefited greatly from the feedback and discussions. We are also grateful for the careful comments and criticism that we received on this introduction from the editors, Diana Strassmann and Günseli Berik, and for their support and that of the journal staff at all moments, from the conception to finalization of this special issue. Finally we also greatly acknowledge the support by the IAFFE (International Association for Feminist Economics) office for handling the financial support.

Notes

1 The focus of this special issue is on Sub-Saharan Africa. “Africa” and “Sub-Saharan Africa” will be used interchangeably.

2 East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East, and North Africa and South Asia.

3 http://zeropoverty2030.org/the-campaign/.

4 ACET is a think tank that conducts research on issues surrounding economic transformation. It provides advisory support to governments and undertakes advocacy work.

5 A study among married Igbo women in southeastern Nigeria arrives at similar conclusions (Joachim C. Omeje, Sarah N. Oshi, and Daniel C. Oshi 2011). Individual ownership of assets such as vehicles, farmland, milling machines, and televisions does not increase women's participation in reproductive decision making because husbands control how revenue generated from the assets is spent. The study, however, does not investigate whether the assets were acquired through inheritance or purchase.