James - Response Paper - Livelihood

Carly James
M. Marouan
February 25, 2011

Response Paper

Weeks 4-6, Livelihood

Admittedly, I entered the discussions these past few weeks under the assumption that female livelihood in the developing world was a topic with which I was fairly familiar and understood from many angles. The variety of topics we discussed in terms of livelihood and subsistence, however, really challenged the ideas I had about my own understandings thereof. The first week, we discussed microfinance as providing the means for women to explore options of financial independence and entrepreneurship that formal institutions do not typically provide. Microfinance is so often heralded as being an outlet for women to make their own money, support their families, and exercise the skills they already possess. This seems to be true overall, but it is important that we do not overlook the challenges and downfalls of microfinance. For instance, we discussed in class, on a theoretical level, the explicit preference for women typical of microfinancial institutions modeled off of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Why is it that women are considered more responsible (financially and otherwise) than men? What is their obligation to the family that is distinct from that of men? Also, considering the fact that many microfinance institutions target women and openly advertise with a priority towards lending to women, should microfinance institutions actually exclude men from their clientele? Furthermore, as we consider the challenges to microfinance in the face of all of its benefits to women, we must also be aware of some of the unintended downfalls of it. We briefly discussed the social pressures involved in sharing money in a group-type setting. These pressures can be so pronounced that they can drive some women to suicide, which has been seen on too many occasions in India.
By far the most interesting discussions for me over the past several weeks have been those related to prostitution. It seems that there are many different impetuses for women to become prostitutes, whether such a transition is voluntary or involuntary. Perhaps it is a way for them to be financially independent, albeit a last resort of a profession. Some women are forced into prostitution rings and sex slavery out of her family’s need for additional income, because her father may be manipulated into believing that it will bring respect or additional income to the family (when in fact it, in many times, results in a permanently severed relationship between father and daughter). In Half the Sky, readers learn about prostitution in Cambodia as being a “natural” choice because girls have to “abandon their dreams because they’re unaffordable.” Here, we understand prostitution as some sort of inevitability because women and girls do not have the skills, experience, and education level that would make them attractive in the job market. Naturally, we pose the question, why? Why are women barred from these kinds of opportunities? Is it related to extreme poverty or does gender play some sort of indisputable, socially disadvantaging part in all of this? With the title of this course in mind, this must be the frame of our inquiries. How do we parse through gender and poverty? What is the interplay between social constructs of gender and the causes of extreme poverty? Contained within the cultural systems of the developing world, are there prejudices against women? Does being a woman pose certain institutional obstacles? What are the mechanisms, if any, which promote and perpetuate these discriminatory notions? And furthermore, to extrapolate this to the realm of development work, assuming that this discrimination is unfair, are we obligated to help? Obviously, this last question is not compatible with the nature of this class, but all of the other questions highly relate to our study and help us understand the way in which we view these problems as females, as students, as Americans, and as fellow human beings.
With that in mind, our discussion on discrimination and exoticism was quite stimulating for me. We posed questions about the desirability of ethnically exotic women and how this somehow distanced men from the moral undertones involved in paying for sex. In Senegal, gender roles are fairly prominent and distinct culturally. Women’s work is primarily centered around the house, the household, and the family. Most women are not employed in the formal sense of the word, but do chores around the household such as cooking, tilling/working the fields, tending to the children, etc. Some women do sell goods in the urban markets, which is a fairly common occupation for women across the West African subregion. If women in Senegal do work as market women, then they can sometimes become involved in microfinance schemes. There are indigenous practices of savings and credit sharing (les tontines) which can be seen widely among female entrepreneurs in the informal sector. These are means of social networking among females, which encourages a sort of solidarity. In the past, husbands often prohibited their wives from working. This cultural nuance has changed in recent times, and the government has supported such a transition. Senegal is thus on the cusp of promoting women’s work as a means of gaining financial independence, even though there is a paradoxical subscript of women who have been sharing money and socially networking for many years.