Workshop presentation for the SPRING workshop on Decentralised Regional Development Planning, University of Dortmund, November 1998
Len Holmes, The Business School,
University of North London (l.holmes@unl.ac.uk)
http://www.unl.ac.uk/~holmesl/
Jeff Turner, Department of Planning,
University of Manchester (jeff.turner@man.ac.uk)
http://www.art.man.ac.uk/transres/
Margaret Grieco, The Business School,
University of North London (msgrieco@aol.com)
http://www.oocities.org/margaret_grieco
Introduction: gender, the missing dimension
Gender has been sorely neglected as a planning issue in Africa with very real and negative policy consequences in the region: African agriculture underperforms partly as a consequence of the neglect of gender issues in agricultural planning; currently the decentralisation of health provision has been promoted without appropriate analysis of gender issues being undertaken with the consequence that health centre use statistics are falling in a number of African locations.
Gender is critical to the effective decentralisation of regional policy and planning. Historically,
exercises in participation have ignored the mobility constraints of women and have failed to make
the appropriate arrangements to ensure that women's needs, use patterns and contributions are
taken into account in policy planning: an approach committed to decentralisation must certainly
embrace this issue. Furthermore the decentralisation of policy and planning to regional levels
increases the opportunities for women to take an active part in the decision making process. At
present, few organisations and few decision making bodies have the necessary protocols in place
to ensure that policy and planning processes are gender representative: this has been a major error
in traditional centralised planning processes and structures, it is important that as the policy
framework moves away from centralised public sector type planning towards more local,
public/private partnership planning that the old errors are not carried forward. Two elements
seem essential in ensuring that old habits die and new practices are encouraged to emerge:
The extent of variations within African countries generate a functional need for the decentralisation of policy and planning. The interaction of topographical variations combined with cultural variations (a measure of cultural variation can be readily gained by identifying the number of language groups existing within any particular country) and colonial history produces a pronounced pattern of local and regional variation which has been badly served by colonial and post colonial national planning. As with topography, culture and colonial history, the gender organisation of societies varies greatly. Across Africa there are major variations as between areas in gender arrangements which have consequences for agriculture, for health, for education and for the economy.
The organisation of gender - women carry the majority of the rural transport burden in rural Africa - has consequence for the maintenance of infrastructure, for food security and for the viability of planning decisions taken elsewhere. Bringing planning and policy decisions closer to the domains in which effectiveness is sought is a sensible and practical policy response to a geographical area which exhibits such substantial variation.
The extent of variations in Africa have been concealed from the external world and indeed from Africa itself by survey methods and data collection methods which impose outside models on a reality which they do not fit. A good example is the practice of the World Bank not to record the separate income and expenditure streams of males and females within the African household, this despite the fact that the anthropological evidence on the matter is clear. The Western mediaeval model of primogeniture has come to straight jacket African policy and planning data in a highly inappropriate fashion. Decisions taken closer to the arena of policy planning and change are more likely to be informed by local circumstance, especially given the extent to which expert distortion is present in the existing policy system, than remotely taken decisions.
New participatory social movements: a support for the functional pressure to decentralise
The development of
Times are changing and new literatures (http://www.oocities.org/margaret_grieco/voices/voices.html) which identify and document the demand for participation in planning by African women are beginning to emerge. There is a busy traffic in emails to organisations and agencies operating electronic bulletin boards such as the World Bank (http://www.globalknowledge.org) pushing for the fuller participation of women in decision making at all levels.
The pressure for the greater involvement of Africa's women in the planning of development operations is surfacing rapidly and with the advent of new technologies, it is now possible for local women to play an active part in international discussion about local agendas and opportunities: virtual contact enables the shifting of many of the old mobility constraints, as seniors in the USA have found out in large numbers with corresponding pressures for the decentralisation of power (grey power) (http://www.oocities.org/margaret_grieco/seniorse/senior.html).
The African women's movements have begun to operate at the level of the glocal - making contributions locally, regionally and internationally. Of course, this movement has not yet reached the level of mass necessary to make them an obvious and non refusable player in the global discussions on decentralisation which have accompanied technology change. But the evidence is that that mass is emerging. Discussions on rural development and gender are one location in which we begin to see the potential contribution of female participation in new decision making models
New technology, new approaches to outreach and planning
The advances in technology (see Time magazine, 23November, 1998 'Psion of the times) enable the more ready embrace of grassroots levels of outreach in planning information and planning decision, levels of outreach which were previously unthinkable. With the use of roving lap top technology, digital radio and solar power, new technologies are emerging which readily connect local views with the full range of international forums. Not only do the technologies enable organisational and decision making agencies to reach those in the field but they enable the very local to feed back in to the decision centres which affect local interests. Currently the World Bank is experimenting with a range of new outreach planning and participatory tools.
These new technical possibilities themselves create a functional pressure for a rethinking of previous participation protocols in the direction of the greater involvement of women. The recording capabilities and information transfer and information handling capabilities of the new technology enable relatively instant and transparent records of the political process. It is now easy to measure the ratio of male: female participation in the decision making over the life of an operational project.
And the technologies are developing fast. Furthermore meeting such as the recent Ghaclad meeting in Ghana demonstrate the demand for the use of information technologies as a participatory tool in decision making (http://www.ghaclad.org).
The new technologies are not simply creating a demand for gender representation at the global level though the global level is the level at which the new technology does indeed register the extent of demand but rather new technologies coupled with a new active social movement in which women's involvement in decision making is a key issue are generating demands for greater local involvement and control over resources. Paradoxically, access to global technologies enables local women to gain more detailed information on their local situation - much of the key statistical data and publication on Africa has historically been held outside Africa. New technology provides a tool with which to gain local transparency - transparency about the scale of donor budgets going into an area; transparency about the continuities in who gains access to and holds these resources: transparency about the quality of equipment delivered to the local site as compared with that available elsewehere in the world.
Tele-services: new ways of delivering rural needs
The global discussion of the present inefficiency of the public sector has been accompanied by research into and discussion of new ways of delivering services. A key area in which this discussion has been taking place is that of distance education and training.
The functional requirements to reduce the cost of the delivery of social services in Africa coupled with the advent of hand held low cost satellite communication technologies in areas with low levels of motorised penetration are likely over time to generate more localised patterns of service provision. New technologies can generate the virtual skilling of local personnel to provide services without the necessity of significant time being spent outside of the area of operation. Similarly, health information can be transmitted very effectively virtually.
Historically, training personnel outside of the rural areas of Africa has meant that very often rural personnel once trained was reluctant to return to the rural location but rather sought employment in urban locations. On site, on line training both keeps personnel in post whilst training takes place and can serve to reduce the flow of outmigrants. Developing decentralised planning requires consideration of the appropriate employment and personnel policies necessary to generate the planning and policy capacity in rural areas. Tele-training and tele-services are means by which this may be accomplished, with the appropriate level of physical back up, and future oriented discussions of decentralisation ignore the advent of these options at great risk.
Conclusion: gender, technology and a change towards popular planning.
This position statement has played out various logics of action between gender, new technology and the decentralisation of planning and policy as they can already be observed in development agency operational discussions.
The ability to access global information locally on health, education and governance and to input local information into the global domain create a new interaction between the global and local which provides a new type of opportunity for popular planning, an opportunity which if it is to be effectively seized must also explicitly embrace gender. The combination of social networks such as the African women's movement with technical networks such as the Internet and improved rural telecommunications (Time, Nov 23rd, 1998) provides the nexus for the progressive action which will require planning to take a less cenralised form in the very near future.
African Telecenters Pilot Projects, If you Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: A Guide to the Start-up of the African Multipurpose Community Telecentre Pilot Projects
Apt, N.A. and Grieco, M. Managing the time: Gender participation in education and the benefits of distance education information technologies. Presentation notes prepared for the Ghaclad conference on Computer Literacy and Distance Education, Accra, Ghana, May 1998
(http://www.oocities.org/margaret_grieco/elecedu/asynchro.html)
FAO, Women, Agriculture and Rural Development - Findings of an FAO Study in Africa , 1995
(http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/FAOINFO/SUSTDEV/WPdirect/WPan0002.htm)
Grieco, M. Gender and Transport: an African Policy Area on the Move -key issues for consideration in Malawi's gender and transport policies. 1998 Briefing notes prepared for discussion with Malawi Rural Travel and Transport Program (MRTTP), Ministry of Local Government, Malawi and the Ministry of Women, Community Services and Youth (Gender Policy and Program Development) on behalf of the Rural Travel and Transport Program (UNECA and World Bank).
(http://www.oocities.org/margaret_grieco/womenont/africa1.html)
Grieco, M. And Apt, N.A. Gender and Agriculture in Africa: the 'expert neglect of local practice. Paper delivered at the International Sociological association Conference, Montreal 1998.
(http://www.geocities/margaret_grieco/femalefa/genagri.html)
Technologies (UNU/INTECH) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) Gender and telecommunications: an agenda for policy.1998
(http://www.itu.int/ITU-D-UniversalAccess/wtdc98/gender.htm)
Turner, J., Apt, N., Kwakye, E., and Grieco, M. Users not losers: gender representation in transport design and operation.
Rural communications in Africa forum: World Bank
Len Holmes has expertise in training, the analysis of skill, popular planning and community organisation. He has published work in each of these fields.
Jeff Turner has expertise in gender and transport in developing countries, social organisation and transport use and provision in high income countries and the survival strategies of low income households. He has published work in each of these fields.
Margaret Grieco has expertise in organisation and development management with specific reference to gender and new information technologies. She has published work in these fields and acts as consultant to the World Bank in the field of gender and transport in Africa.
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