Gender, Households and Poverty: Tracking Mediations of Macro Adjustment Programmes

This paper provides a critical review of selected literature emerging from the African, Latin American, Caribbean and Asian countries that have adopted structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and throws light on the multidimensionality of effects the effects of SAPs at the household level and the cumulative gender implications. Major areas of concern revolve around examining household survival strategies as ways of coping with these impacts at the household level.

In particular, this paper attempts to capture significant areas of concern that emerge from the literature around: women’s work, poverty and structural adjustment; household survival strategies; and growing orthodoxy and the extant critique around gender, poverty, household headship and household survival strategies.

The author’s findings include:

• much of the literature reviewed does not explain sufficiently the demand side factors that provide, constrain or shape women’s work opportunities. Research in this area has to be strengthened with methodologically well-designed quantitative studies or qualitative studies that capture the nuances of experiencing implications of public policies in private lives
• the literature shows a broad consensus regarding the determinants of women’s work, increase in women’s public domain work as a strategy for survival of households
• most studies recorded the growth in the informal sector and specifically increase of women in this sector
• few studies have reported an increase in women’s negotiating power within the household. At the same time, loss of employment, lack of sufficient income, and increase in alcoholism were reported as causes for increased domestic violence, mental stress and the rise of suicides in some countries
• "women” as a resource for globalising capital, which simultaneously incorporates women’s work but undermines its significance, is apparent through the literature.

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PUBLISHER About: Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), India

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