WUNRN
WIDE +: European Network around Women’s Rights & Development
Globalization of Structural Adjustment Programmes – Lessons from Feminists & Women in the Global South
Posted – February 10, 2015 - In their recently launched magazine ’European Women’s Voice: Women’s Economic Independence in
Times of Austerity’, the European Women’s Lobby has included an
article by WIDE+ members Patricia Muñoz Cabrera and Virginia López Calvo. The
piece is available on page 35, and we reproduce it below in full.
As has been demonstrated, structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed
by international financial institutions (IFIs) on Global South economies and
governments’ development agendas have been implemented for more than five
decades, with a devastating impact on women and men on the ground.
Feminists activists and scholars of the global South have also noted that
the growth-driven conditionality characterising the new wave of SAPs is leading
to a disempowering shift in global governance. This disempowering shift has
resulted in a weakening of governments’ ability to enforce labour rights,
implement policies to promote social and gender equity, and environmental
sustainability, and redistribute wealth in an equitable way. Other policies
pushed through SAPs, such as privatisation of social services and charging fees
for public services like primary education and health care have tended to hit
women hardest (Mutume, 2001).
In this context, the new wave of SAPs must be understood as another
mechanism through which neoliberal capitalism is attempting to maximise profit
by all means and regardless of the social and environmental impact. For
example, most recently, Jamaica, Ghana and the Ivory Coast have been imposed
austerity measures as a condition of financial support, with most of the cuts
taking place between 2010-2012 (Lethbridge 2012:5).
Worryingly, conditionality-driven austerity is expanding throughout the
global South. In the so-called Arab Spring countries, the new generation of
SAPs has led to wage cuts and to the reduction of public spending in social
services. There, the shrinking of the State has affected women in particular.
Their vulnerable position in labour markets (a considerable number of women are
found in highly informal, casual low-skilled and poorly paid jobs) has led to
enhanced precariousness for them. Women have been also bearing the burden of
conditionality-driven austerity packages: prices for food and fuel have
increased, along with reliance on family networks for social protection. Due to
women’s socially assigned role as care giver, their household workload has also
increased.
Similarly, in Ghana, two generations of SAPs, from Poverty Reduction
programs during the 1980s and 1990s (PRSPs) to what is (locally known as the
Economic Recovery ProgrammeERP) have meant the imposition of flat consumption
taxes such as VAT, and changes in the patterns and levels of state expenditure.
Ghana’s ERP achieved some measure of economic growth, infrastructural rehabilitation
and some institutional reforms. However, the reforms have been accompanied by
labour retrenchment, the informalisation of work (where women are usually
overrepresented), the removal of subsidies and the institution of user fees in
basic services including water, electricity, education and health (Lethbridge
2012:5).
In Honduras, the new wave of structural adjustment policies in the past
four years has brought about additional reductions in subsidies, wage cuts and
pension reforms. Honduran academics had already described these measures as of ‘little
Honduran character’ back in the 90s, in the first wave of adjustment programmes
negotiated with the World Bank (Noé Pino, n.d.). These adjustment packages led
to reforms in national legislation, which aimed at promoting exports and
foreign direct investment, the new engines of growth in the country (as opposed
to stimulating internal markets). The implementation of austerity packages
resulting from SAPs required the restriction of trade union activity. Forced
devaluation of the Honduran currency made imports more expensive, thus
increasing inflation, which, Honduran academics argue, clearly favoured
economic elites (business class, and particularly the exports sector).
In addition to legal and economic reforms, SAPs have also reshaped the
political and policy landscape in the global South. In recent years, the
Honduran Congress has implemented various decrees which contravene
international labour standards, abolishing rights including minimum wage,
maternity rights, payment of bonuses and certain entitlements to social
security. Currently, the government is discussing a new Social Security bill
which will privatise social services. Honduran women groups are concerned that
this will affect gains made by workers on incapacity benefits and pensions.
Despite abundant evidence that SAPs run counter to women’s rights and are
detrimental to the achievement of gender-just sustainable development goals,
governments have not reviewed their macro-economic policies in the light of
rigorous gender and intersectional analysis (of multiple discriminations
against women) resulting from the impact of external conditionality.
At the micro level, evidence shows that external conditionality can
exacerbate gender tensions between men and women, in particular in countries
undergoing systemic transformation, as is the case with Small Pacific Island
Countries (SPICs).
In this region, SAPs-led policies have failed to consider the transition
from bartering to cash based economies and the role of customary laws and
traditions on gender interactions between men and women. In Melanesia
countries in particular, self-sufficiency is ensured by barter rather than
cash-based transactions. In rural and some urban contexts, cash incomes are not
the main means to sustain families and communities. As the International
Women’s Development Agency (IWDA, a women’s network based in Australia, points
out “subsistence agriculture, gifting, barter and voluntary activities underpin
economies in Melanesia.”
In SPIC countries, SAPs have overlooked the important fact that cultural
norms affect women and men’s status in the economy, determining who has access
to and control over productive assets, whose voice will be heard in political
and policy decision-making processes, and who will benefit from the promised
economic prosperity and who will not. Moreover customary laws deny women access
to land tenure. In some countries, patrilineal inheritance has even been given
legislative status (Waring 2010:4), overlooking the fact that in the “traditional
land ownership model, women could own and cultivate the land” (Hakena 2014:
62).
Pacific women have warned against the devastating impact of structural
adjustment during the 1980s and 1990s, which led to public sector rationalisation
measures, marketisation of social services such as health and education, and
governments’ retreat to create space for private sector investment in these
areas. For Pacific women this meant additional burdens, as they had to assume
the responsibility of caring for the aged and infirm. This increased domestic
pressure within families and placed additional labour and economic burdens upon
women (George et al, n/d: 1). They have also warned that given the region’s
high level of indebtedness and dependency on foreign markets, the development
paradigm promoted by SAPs in the small Pacific Islands will not respond to the
region’s urgent needs for gender-just sustainable development, all of which
require long term public investment.
In the Global South, the new wave of SAPs has also contributed to the
expansion of corporate-led trade and investment in particular, in the area of
extractive industries. Evidence from the field shows that the expansion of
extractivism in the global South has exacerbated social conflict and
contributed to new forms of violence against women and girls on the ground. One
of these forms of violence is the loss of ownership and control over resources,
such as fertile land, water and energy. These resources are key for women to
ensure sustainable livelihoods for themselves and their families and their loss
cannot be replaced or compensated for financially (GAIA, 2014: 10).
To women, the threats resulting from corporate-driven extraction of natural
resources range from destruction of the local environment, and sexual and
economic violence, to serious consequences for human health, including their
reproductive health. Dangers have been amply noted, as is the case with the
gold extraction in the highlands of Guatemala, extraction of natural resources
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Philippines, in Colombia and Papua
New Guinea. In these countries and many more, extractivism has been fuelled by
projects and programmes promoted by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, and has contributed to increasing violence and legal
impunity. Even when extractivism produces economic growth for a specific
region, as the expansion of the mega-mining industry in the North of Chile
shows, it is often done to feed a development model that is over-consumerist,
highly depredatory of ecosystems, and extremely dangerous to human health (Aedo
et al., 2004: 17-17).
WoMin, an African network working to empower women miners, has demonstrated
that extractivism is inherently violent; and the violence it produces is most
palpably registered by poor women who are often pushed to mining sites in an
attempt to escape poverty and unemployment. In sub-Saharan Africa, the impact
of growth-driven extractivism is disproportionately borne by peasant women, who
are responsible for domestic food and water production, in addition to
providing care for their households, families and communities (WoMin, 2013).
Responses
by women and feminists in the Global South: what is the transformative
potential of their proposals?
When structural adjustment policies were imposed, many women in the global
South were already living in conditions of poverty and multiple
discriminations, and under political regimes with limited civil and political
liberties which increased their disempowerment. Despite multiple constraints,
they are building and implementing alternatives for economic and gender justice
on the ground. As the following section shows, their struggles to resist
austerity and to propose alternatives are not only commendable but, most
importantly, worth learning from.
The transformative potential of women’s proposals to SAPs vary in scope and
nature. Some experiences focus on achieving alternative economic empowerment
within the current neoliberal economic model; others seek to ensure that the
current growth model also delivers sustainability and protects human rights. A
third strand proposes anti-systemic economic alternatives with a clear
rejection of the current model of capital accumulation.
Women organising to defend lost rights
A common strategy to address the loss of bargaining and purchasing power of
women workers in a wider context of deepened gender disparities caused by SAPs,
are women-led trade unions.
Sikhula Sonke in South Africa is a case in point. It grew out of the Women
on Farms Project that has been educating and mobilising women agricultural
workers in the Western Cape since the early 1990s. Adjustment measures in South
Africa have meant poor or non-existent provision of basic services such as
electricity services, housing and piped water facilities for millions.
Following the introduction of cost-recovery policies for public services and
the massive job losses caused by trade liberalisation, Sikhula Sonke and other
civil society organisations initiated the ‘No Land! No Vote!‘ campaign
to express a vote of no confidence in the range of political parties on offer
in the 2004 general elections. Sikhula Sonke’s role has been crucial in
bringing the voices and views of women farm workers to this coalition and more
generally to South African social movements, and to position high in their
agenda issues such as violence against women at work and elsewhere.
Like Sikhula Sonke, the Collective of Honduran Women (CODEMUH), has
mobilised thousands of women workers in maquila (textile) factories that
flourished following the establishment of Export Processing Zones. CODEMUH has
stood up to the various negative effects old and new SAPs have had over the
population, and particularly over women, since 1989. Their coordination of
efforts of women workers has been successful in achieving recognition amongst maquila
factory owners and policy-makers of widespread occupational health problems in
the industry and has achieved hundreds of job relocations for affected women. However,
challenges ahead are ever-growing as trade is increasingly liberalised: a
recent shift in working patterns has been imposed in the maquila industry
that now obliges workers to do 4 consecutive shifts of 12 hours, followed by 4
days of rest, is illustrative of such challenges.
Women organising to visibilize women’s agendas for a gender just economy
In Nicaragua, feminists weren’t caught by surprise by the latest wave of
SAPs as women have endured such measures since the early 90s. Between 2005 and
2008 a broad coalition of 14 women’s organisations working on economic rights
came together to reflect, dialogue and propose concrete solutions to the lack
of gender mainstreaming in the country’s economic policies. The result was a
study: ‘Nicaraguan Women’s Economic Agenda’, a tool for collective
advocacy that seeks to shed light on women’s role in economic growth as well as
on the policies required for their integration in the labour market and for the
realisation of their economic rights and of gender equality in the economy.
Gender discrimination, it is argued in the Agenda, is at the core of the
different impacts that so-called ‘stabilizing’ macro-economic policies
(including SAPs) have on women and men.
More recently a similar effort has been carried out at regional scale.
Fourteen women’s organisations across the Central American region and two mixed
trade unions have come together in 2014 to pool their expertise of resisting
adjustment measures, such as the flexibilization of the labour market, that
deepen gender discrimination as women are overrepresented in flexible, highly
precarious work. The final report, ‘Women’s Agenda for the Rights of Maquila
Workers’ argues that sustainable economic growth is only possible if the
gender gap in labour market is bridged. It also denounces sexual harassment and
violence against women at the workplace and demands that maternity leave
subsidies are provided.
Women proposing a gender just and caring economy
Some feminist groups and scholars are demanding a radical change that
brings about a new economy, one that not only applies gender analysis and
integrates women, but that is also aligned to the principles of a just, and
caring economy. Magdalena León, from the Latin-American Network ‘Women
Transforming the Economy’ sees an attempt to commercialize with the care
economy behind the International Monetary Fund claims that the State should
take the responsibility for it (Dossier IV Congreso Economia Feminista, 2013).
To them, a gender just caring economy means an economy which puts people
first; an economy which is not only about full employment, but also examines
the root causes of women’s subordinated status in markets (labour, financial,
agricultural); an economy that understands the interrelation between production
and reproduction, and incorporates women’s contribution to both on equal terms
with men, and without any form of discrimination. Put shortly, women from the
global South are implementing grounded alternatives for a gender just economy
that highlight values such as reciprocity, complementarity and solidarity; all
this within a broader canvas that embraces caring for nature and preserving our
global commons.
In Guatemala, grassroots women have responded to the burden originating
from SAPs through two effective strategies: a women’s defined use and
management of water and a Politics School of Women. These strategies were
urgently needed after SAPs-led water privatisation deprived women of their
right to adequate water for production and social reproduction needs. For
example, San Pedro Carchá, a bountiful, tropical land with rainfall through 9
to 10 months a year, saw its river, the Cahabón, walled up following its
privatization. As a result, the Q’eqchie women had to walk up to 4 hours a day
to fetch 2,5 litres of water from a deep well they have to climb down to,
putting their lives at risk. A Politics School of Women has been organised
there, where women become educated and leaders of their own communities. The
School has managed the construction of 500 cisterns (8000 litres) for
households to harvest rainwater using eco-friendly materials. This initiative
does not only save women the walk, the risk and the time to collect water – thus
freeing them to carry out other activities; it has also politically empowered
hundreds who now lead various aspects of community management and even advocacy
work. Their initiative also speaks to various environmental justice principles
such as circular economy and demonstrates that gender just alternatives to SAPs
driven economic development are feasible (WIDE, 2011).
Sharing and caring: women’s vision of a transformative economy
As a response to the impact of SAPs, women have been working and mobilising
to transform local economies in ways that are empowering to women, contribute
to community well-being and to environmental protection.
In Colombia, community enterprises were set up to strengthen rural
economies following alternative models to that of micro-entrepreneurship. Women
in community enterprises such as ‘An agrarian future for Circasia’ or ‘Ulloa
Women’, saw, harvest and produce foodstuffs both for consumption in their
households, for selling at the local market or for bartering. Members of the
enterprise are very committed to the process and seek also the best quality of
life for their partners as well as community development. Moreover, women have
been sensitized and their capacity built to be involved in the development
process and to secure their own spaces. These endeavors spam not just
agrarian economy activity, but others like mining and textiles too. Their
activities go beyond income-generation and economic empowerment for women,
aiming also at improving and strengthening community’s social fabric and
economic relations, thus weaving an alternative to individualism and
consumerism. In addition, locally and regionally there have been changes in
discriminatory practices and attitudes towards women, with men’s ideas and
attitudes about masculinities shifting towards more equality-based ones.
Clearly, they are achieving transformational shifts both locally, regionally
and nationally.
Similarly, in the Pacific region, indigenous women have organised around an
initiative called the “women’s savings clubs”, an alternative micro-model that challenges
the idea of consumerist, individualistic micro-finance schemes promoted by
SAPs, and promotes a practice of collective savings for women’s needs as well
as for the well-being of their families and community. This model is inspired
in their community culture and collective values such as solidarity (caring for
oneself and for others’ needs), equity in distribution of produce and surplus,
investing in environmentally-friendly technology (such as solar panels), and
empowering women through leadership programmes, economic and legal literacy.
Their initiative is transformative in the sense that it emphasises women’s
agency in local economies as defined by poor women themselves, and not by
external financial agents. They also want to push forward community-based
economic systems that promote collective participation, equitable distribution
of productive assets, and protection of environmental resources (Brisbane
2013).
Relocating grassroots women as transformative agents of knowledge
At the micro level, women in the global
South are responding to the serious consequences of structural adjustments, and
in particular, to the disenfranchising impact of corporate-led trade
liberalisation through several strategies. One strategy is to develop the
skills of their grassroots members so that they can document abuses by
transnational companies on women and the environment, and from there make
policy recommendations for gender just development that can be scaled up by
local authorities. Their research methodologies are participatory, build on
women’s empirical knowledge of social, economic and cultural exclusion and
empowerment, and are inspired by feminist and social justice principles. Overall,
they seek to relocate grassroots women as key agents of knowledge in
transformative gender just community development.
For example, two women’s grassroots organisations, the Leitana Women’s
Development Agency in Papua New Guinea, and the Cordillera Women’s Education
Action Research Center in The Philippines have joined forces with a regional
network, the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD). Their
strategic goal is to document and scale up grassroots women’s proposals on
feminist development justice. To achieve this, they are implementing a feminist
participatory action research methodology whose main objectives are to develop
women’s capacity and skills to foster knowledge, data, tools and resources for
women’s movements; secure space for advocacy to change laws, policies and
practices; and create movements and collective pressure for structural change.
Conclusions
From ‘for women, by women’ responses to alleviate and fight back the
erosion of women’s labour rights, to the generation of collective, grassroots
advocacy tools to push forward women’s views on economic policy from a gender
and intersectional perspective, all the way to proposals that seek to transform
the economic system, women and feminists in the Global South are treading paths
forward in the face of harsh structural adjustment policies and programmes.
The globalization of structural adjustment programmes requires that
feminists and women allies further develop and deepen our global solidarity but
also that we coordinate our strategies, that we actively reach out for each
other, and understand the common, globalized patterns of the attacks on women’s
rights arising from the intersection of patriarchy, racism and capitalism.
Sources cited
Agenda Económica Concertada desde las Mujeres Nicaragüenses, 2010
http://sidoc.puntos.org.ni/isis_sidoc/documentos/13131/13131_00.pdf
Brislane, Jo, 2013, Solomon Islands women are investing in equality, http://www.iwda.org.au/2013/05/16/solomon-islands-women-are-investing-in-equality/
Central America Women’s Network, 2012, Winter Newsletter http://www.cawn.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CAWN-Winter-2012-13-Newsletter1.pdf
Dossier IV Congreso Economía Feminista, 2013, Universidad Pablo de Olavide
http://riemann.upo.es/personal-wp/congreso-economia-feminista/files/2014/02/Dossier-congreso.pdf
GAIA 2014, UnderMining Agriculture: How the Extractives Industries Threaten
our Food System, http://www.gaiafoundation.org/UnderMiningAgriculture
George, Nicole et al, n/d, Gender and Free Trade in the Pacific: Cause
for Concern? https://www.dfat.gov.au/fta/pacer/submissions/MsNicoleGeorgeandtheFijiWomen’sRightsMovement.pdf
Hakena, Helen, 2014, Strengthening the Community and Building an Equal
and Peaceful Society, in Muñoz Cabrera et al. eds., ACP Women: Actors of
Development, EC/ACP Secretariat: Brussels, pp. 62-63. http://capacity4dev.ec.europa.eu/public-gender/document/
euacp-publication-women-actors-development
Lethbridge J., 2012, How women are being affected by the global economic
crisis and austerity measures, http://congress.world-psi.org/sites/default/files/upload/event/EN_PSI_Crisis_Impact_
Austerity_on_Women.pdf
Mutume, Gumisai, 2001, Gender Discrimination not Good for Growth, http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/gender.htm
Noé Pino, Hugo, n.d., El Ajuste Estructural en Honduras, Nueva
Suyapa Institute, Public Education Ministry, http://www.slideshare.net/osorioroque/elajuste-estructuralenhonduras
Ortiz I. & Cummins M., 2013, Austerity Measures in Developing
Countries: Public Expenditure Trends and the Risks to Children and Women
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13545701.2013.791027
Red Centroamericana en Solidaridad con las Trabajadoras de la Maquila,
2014, Agenda de los Derechos Laborales de Mujeres Trabajadoras de la
Industria Maquiladora en Centroamérica
http://www.es.maquilasolidarity.org/sites/es.maquilasolidarity.org/files/2014-Agenda.pdf
Waring, Marilyn, 2103, Economic Crisis and Unpaid Care Work in the Pacific,
UNDP: Port Vila, Solomon Islands.
War on Want, 2004, No Land! No House! No Vote! http://www.waronwant.org/component/content/article/16523
Women in Development Europe- WIDE, 2011, Alternativas Económicas para la
Justicia Social y de Género. Voces y Visiones desde América Latina
https://wideplusnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ec-alt-span2011thirdspanish.pdf
WoMin, 2013, Paper 4: Women’s Unseen Contribution to the Extractives
Industries: Their Unpaid Labour, http://www.womin.org.za/papers.html