NEPAD, WOMEN & POVERTY

Wahu Kaara* argues that NEPAD is a market driven strategy to conquer the continent and will sacrifice the immediate interests of African women for some uncertain end in the distant future.

Introduction

Control and domination of Africans and their resources has been the strategy of the West from slavery till today. Political ideologies and economic paradigms have been developed to ensure that Africans never have a real say in their future. Since independence the continent has experienced the rule and divide mechanisms through the implementation of so-called ‘poverty reduction programs’. The results have been poverty, poverty and more poverty.

With the emergence of popular social movements in Africa, the West had no alternative but to reconsider their position. The masses had become more intelligent than neo-colonialist had expected. They had to be mollified! Thus comes NEPAD. A few darlings of the West got together and consulted the so called “experts of African Development” from the Bretton Woods institutions and came up with the finished product to guide Africa’s development plan. Where were we in this process? Where were the masses? Did we not fight to remove privatisation and other forms of market reforms from this continent?

NEPAD is nothing but a programme of the West being brought through the back door after our struggle to discredit it. Our leaders are being used to endorse NEPAD because it is politically fashionable to do so in the international political arena. It brings nothing new to the table for African women and has no strategy

of tackling the problems of African women. Instead, it seeks to further entrench the exploitation of African women at a continent level under the neoliberal agenda. This paper seeks to explore one of the programmes of NEPAD – privatisation – and analyse how it will impact on women.

Privatisation is the chief mechanism for excusing most governments in Africa from their responsibility of providing services to their people. Privatisation, by extension, burdens women with more social and economic responsibilities. The private sector is invading every sector of our economies and the result is evident – lower wages, poor services and increased poverty.

What NEPAD says about women

NEPAD was drafted by a few new-generation African leaders and has been endorsed by the African Union (AU). It was shaped and drafted in consultation with the IMF/World Bank and the G7. African leaders have pledged themselves into a partnership with the West to tackle poverty on the continent.

NEPAD seeks to comprehensively outline the problems of Africa and seeks to give some solutions to the problems. According to NEPAD, it is anchored on the determination of Africans to overcome the effects of underdevelopment and marginalisation in a globalised world.

NEPAD deals with issues of investment, market reforms, governance, and poverty alleviation. At the center of this is its emphasis on the participation of various stakeholders, including the youth and women. NEPAD has pledged itself to promoting the role of women in social and economic development by reinforcing their capacity in the domains of education and training; the development of revenue generating activities through facilitating access to credit; and by ensuring their participation in the political and economic life of African countries. Women are supposed to get enhanced credit access for agricultural production and the establishment of small-scale businesses, as well as improved access to education.

In its attempts to tackle poverty on the continent, NEPAD relies heavily on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PSRPs), which are developed with the assistance of foreigners, and are approved solely by the IMF and World Bank. The framework has no policies that can be implemented to tackle poverty on the continent. In its attempt to bring women into the picture, women’s problems are reduced to lack of access to credit and educational training. Issues of ownership, participation and involvement are still not considered.

The legacy of privatisation

The adoption of privatisation as the key programme should be critically examined. NEPAD has adopted rapid and extensive privatisation in various forms as a key strategy to offer investment opportunities, attract foreign investment, and develop infrastructure across the continent. It does this in a way that pretends to be unaware of the severe social consequences of such measures, especially in a context of lack of basic social services, highly indebted communities, widespread poverty and inequality. It largely follows the kinds of conditionalities that have been demanded by creditor and donor countries in the past, both in terms of governance and economic strategy

Despite the existing evidence over the failure of privatisation, NEPAD has embraced privatisation in its totality. It has not given any critique of it, and it hopes that the program will help lure private investors to the continent and eradicate poverty in our households. Many governments in Africa, however, continue with the programme of privatisation because donor aid and international debt relief remains conditional upon this. Privatisation is a major component of structural adjustment programmes sponsored by IMF and World Bank.

Up to this moment there is little evidence that privatisation has enhanced economic growth in these countries. And neither the IMF nor the World Bank have been able to demonstrate convincingly that privatisation has led to the better provision of basic social services to the poor. Instead, what African governments have had to contend with are increased budget deficits, high unemployment, and huge public debt – the burden of which all of us all, the citizens of these African countries, have to bear.

Women and privatisation under NEPAD

Major political conflicts and social instability across Africa has arisen because of widespread privatisation of social services and state assets. Rapid privatisation and restructuring has led to increasing joblessness and increased costs for basic services, with women bearing the brunt of it all.

One of the consequences of privatization has been to push many women from the formal sector to the informal sector of employment. The majority of women in the formal sector form part of the support staff and have frequently fallen victim to retrenchments. The result has been their increased numbers in the informal sector, with activities such as hawking and selling small-scale food items taking the centre stage. Most income earned is used to maintain declining finances in the family rather than to increase their ability to engage with the economic system.

The hardships caused by privatisation on women must be seen against the background of other barriers to women’s participation in the formal economy. Discrimination in access to credit facilities, product and labour markets, are some of the issues women have to contend with in this era of privatisation.

In Africa there exists some traditional divisions of labour in the rural economy. The men folk are usually responsible for cash crops while women grow the food. As less parcels of land are left for cultivation for food, women are increasingly unable to reap the benefits of cash crops as well as feed their families. Instead of seeking to address these problems, NEPAD attributes these problems to simply the of lack of credit facilities and schemes to boost women’s participation in agricultural production.

Water privatisation and women

A recently leaked European Union Commission (EC) document sent to African and other developing countries demanding the immediate privatisation of key service sectors, including water, gives an indication of the kind of development the G7 will promote in their “action areas” under NEPAD. The EC has demanded further trade liberalisation in the provision of basic services to communities across the continent. Essentially the request made by the EC is a demand to fast- track privatisation even if it undermines national sovereignty.

European companies who are keen to extend their economic interests in water privatisation around the world, for example, will be the primary beneficiaries. But the privatisation of water has a terrible track record. For many people in Africa, particularly minimum-waged and unemployed women, water bills have suddenly accounted for close to half their monthly income.

Even though health care and education are addressed in the document, this does not mean that additional resources for education and health care will be channeled through national budgets. Rather, resource mobilisation will happen through ‘public- private partnerships’, special global funds, and other unreliable measures – measure from which women have been completely sidelined.

NEPAD has failed to offer any alternative to the dominant market fundamentalist development model, and places unquestioning faith in uncontrolled privatisation and private sector led rapid economic growth. It sees the neoliberal framework as the answer to the problem of rampant poverty despite the evidence that this strategy in fact deepens poverty, increases unemployment, and widens inequality along the gender divide.

Africa cannot begin to develop unless the massive current social backlog is directly addressed as a first step. It must include, as a priority, additional programmes to deliver immediate and direct anti-poverty interventions that will lift women out of their current suffering. It must build strong safety nets to cushion the poor and, more specifically, women from even the smallest forms of privatisation. Credit access, education and training alone are not sufficient to alleviate the poverty of African women. Genuine and qualitative participation of women in all these processes is fundamental for it’s success.

Conclusion

NEPAD in its current form is a tool for the market- driven strategy to conquer the continent with the neoliberal agenda, effectively sacrificing the women for some uncertain end in the distant future. The endorsement of privatisation programmes and current PSRPs in various African countries will not only worsen the conditions of women in Africa, but will also make it harder for women activists and other progressive thinkers to campaign against it, as many African countries will seek to identify with NEPAD in order to attract donor funding.

As women of Africa, as mothers of the continent, we must rely on ourselves. We know we don’t have income grants, we have no subsidies for water and electricity, and we watch while our children and husbands die of AIDS because we cannot afford drugs. We must work towards changing all theses trends. In the agricultural sector we must work towards land reform policies that deal effectively with land ownership and land distribution. We must be able to produce enough for our families to eat and not only for foreigners to enjoy. Whether we want to pursue this agenda under NEPAD or outside it is a question we all have to grapple with today and in the days to come.

We must rely on our motherly instincts to save our motherland. This is not the right time to sit back and cry foul. NEPAD, or any other programme that is made for us, without us, is not ours. Let’s rise up and protect our families for there is no other than the African family.

Amandla!!!

* Wahu Kaara is an activist in the debt cancellation movement in Kenya and works for Kenya Debt Relief Network (KENDREN).