Sarah Doyle
ED 2 -- Bugesera District, Southern Province
Note: This academic paper was originally published on SOMA -- the quarterly journal of PC/Rwanda -- in August 2011. Sarah also wrote her UG thesis on Rwanda in Gender Studies at JHU.
Introduction
The issue of gender is extremely important to the study of
international development today. In the past the issues of gender and
development were considered separately, but as we developed from ‘women in
development’ (WID) to ‘gender and development’ (GAD), the two have been
considered as interconnected pieces to the puzzle of development and social,
economic, and political change. As the Northern hemisphere has become less
vocal in the international gender debate, the South has stepped up and has
changed the gender and development approach to one based on the acquisition of
rights. This change to a ‘rights-based’ approach has allowed for significant
mobilization and change in transnational movements, the State, and productive
work.
In the case of women in Rwanda, they have experienced unique
and unforeseen gains in the three aforementioned areas of debate (transnational
movements, State, and productive work) that both support and depart from the
beliefs of scholars in the field of gender and development. Though they still
are not equal to men, Rwandan women have improved their position in all public
sectors of society, which is more of an exception than the rule when discussing
the success of women’s transnational movements, presence in government, and
progress in productive work. Though Rwandan women are still expected to
maintain their gendered roles in the private sphere, the home, they have been
afforded the opportunity to challenge gender roles and responsibilities in the
public sphere, notably in government and business.
Rwandan Women and
post-genocide development
The
Rwandan genocide of 1994 killed twenty percent of the population, the majority of
which were men who stayed in Rwanda to fight or to protect their households,
while the women fled to neighboring countries to protect their children.
Following the war, Rwanda had a population that was seventy percent female,
which challenged the traditional patriarchal organization of society. There
were not enough men to fill what were traditionally ‘male’ roles in society,
where women were primarily housewives growing food for their family and raising
the children.
The
women did not just recognize that they might have to assume a new role in
society, but they demanded it. The women lobbied for a place at the peace talks
and in the formation of the new Constitution. Paul Kagame also recognized that
with a seventy-percent female population he could not ignore their needs and
demands. He decided that it would be better for all if the women were included
in the formation of a new Rwanda, as well as participate actively in all
sectors of society.
The
women actively participated in the peace talks and were able to contribute to
the formulation of a new Constitution. The new Constitution stipulates that
women must fill thirty-percent of all parliament seats. What is interesting
though is that in the first election society responded and elected a parliament
that was fifty-six-percent female. In 2010, one third of President Paul
Kagame’s cabinet was also female. Additionally, women have started mobilizing
in other sectors outside government, taking on more economic responsibility and
filling jobs and roles that were left vacant by men. Today, thirty-percent of
households are female-headed, which is surprising considering the patriarchal
tendencies of Rwandan culture.
Despite
the fact that women have gained a lot of rights and have solidified their
strong presence in society, there is still some resistance. Rwanda is a
patriarchal society that has always believed that a woman’s place is in the
home. Thanks to their mobilization and majority presence, women have been able
to gain a lot, but there is still a subtle social resistance, especially by the
elders who are used to the traditional way of doing things. Even though women
have gained a lot politically and economically, their social gains have been
less noteworthy. As PCVs, we have been given the opportunity to see this clash
between progress and tradition in regards to GAD. Women can be directors of
health centers, headmistresses, teachers, nurses, and shopkeepers, but they are
still expected to be the primary caregivers of their husbands and children.
Rwandan Women and the
gender and development debate
Rwandan
women’s use of and roles in transnational movements, the State, and productive
work provide an excellent example of what a successful rights-based approach to
gender and development can do.
Women and Transnational
Movements
The
Rwandan women used transnational organizations to help them fight for their
seat at the peace talks and later for a spot in government and in the
productive sector. Tripp discusses how women unite behind an agenda based on
the basic concerns of women – women’s health, reproductive rights, peace, human
rights, poverty, prostitution, and violence against women (Tripp 2006). In
Rwanda they used this rights-based approach to organize along with other
women’s groups and international organizations in the region to help them
recover from the genocide.
The
Federation of African Women’s Peace Networks (FERFAP), based in Kigali, played
a very important role in helping women organize post-genocide. The organization
is a coalition of peace movements and networks from sixteen countries with its
main goal “to contribute to the coordination, rationalization, and development
of activities that support women’s full and effective participation in conflict
prevention, management resolution in Africa” (Dirasse 2000). This organization
did not just help Rwandans organize a peace movement and demand a seat at the
peace talks, but it helped them to put aside their ethnic identities that
fanned the flames of civil war and to put their interests as women at the
forefront of their movement. The experiences of the other fifteen national
peace movements provided the guidance needed to provide for real change. The
women of all the other regional peace movements helped the Rwandan women
organize and mobilize based on their own experiences.
Following
this initial mobilization for peace following the genocide, Rwandan women
continued to stay involved in the regional peace movements. A decade after the
genocide, they participated in the Great Lakes Regional Women’s Meeting, which
produced the Kigali Declaration. The Declaration was a departure from women’s
regional movements; it not only outlined the Great Lakes feminist agenda, but
also took a gender-neutral political stand on arms proliferation,
demobilization, and democracy – three major issues of Rwanda and other
countries in the region. This represented a departure from a simple
rights-based approach to the formation of a political identity of women working
for the betterment of all. Ethnic tensions in the region made it very difficult
for women to organize, they were the ‘unorganizable’ that Swider writes about,
but because their movements became transmovement and transnational through the
shared experiences of conflict, they were able to create “opportunities to work
in such broader coalitions, draw upon larger constituencies, and operate in
different arenas” (2006: 129). FERFAP was successful because it appealed to
gender as universal, while still addressing the shared values and goals through
differences. The Kigali Declaration does a similar thing, addressing the shared
values of the region, but also departs from the feminist social movements and
shows that women have the capacity to act as political representatives
independent of their personal identities.
Women and the State
Rwandan
women have experienced a lot of progress in government since the end of the
genocide in 1994. Through their use of transnational movements and
international organizations like the United Nations, they were able to gain a
seat at the peace talks and in the reconstruction of the Constitution.
Furthermore, they were lucky to have a respected leader that independently
recognized the need for a new role for women in Rwanda. Kagame knew that the
government could not ignore the needs and abilities of seventy-percent of the
population; he knew they had to be involved in government, which then
translated into the thirty-percent quota for female representatives in
parliament. He also demonstrated his commitment to women’s political role by
nominating females to his cabinet when he became president.
Rwanda is an exception to most of
the arguments presented by scholars when discussing the role of gender and the
State. Chowdhury presents the argument that men are more able to be active in
politics than women, which is not the case in Rwanda. Though the Constitution
only requires thirty percent of seats to be filled by women, the public has
voluntarily elected a fifty-six percent female Parliament providing women with
a greater presence than men. In the executive and judicial branches of
government, men still hold the majority of positions, but women hold a majority
in the legislature. Despite some instances when the female legislators have
voiced feelings of not being treated as equals by their male colleagues, they
have been able to adopt legislation against the patriarchal standards of
society. Rwanda is moving towards a society in which “male domination is
rejected and sex-gender differences are believed to be small, [which changes]
gender ideology toward equal or equivalent treatment”.
Female parliament members have successfully lobbied for and
adopted legislation to abolish many patriarchal laws that still exist in most
African countries. They have made it so women can inherit land and recover land
that belonged to their family before the war. This has allowed women to have
more of a role in the productive sphere, which will be discussed in the next
section. Parliament members, along with local women’s organizations, also
successfully lobbied for legislation to destroy a statue of a woman holding a
child on her hip and a jug of water on her head. In its place they commissioned
a statue of a strong woman standing alone holding the hand of a young boy (this
is the statue in the center of the roundabout at the convention center on the
way to the Peace Corps office). This is a strong representation of the shifting
opinion of women as reproductive workers to strong, powerful women who can
stand alone and nurture their children at the same time. The fact that women
can work in and through government to push their agenda is certainly an
exception; Okonjo argues that women’s progress depends on indirect approaches
through social movements because of their inability to permeate the barriers of
government. Rwandan women have done the opposite; they have achieved parliamentary
representation, while government and social movements work together to
formulate legislation.
Women and Productive
Work
Because
so many men were killed during the genocide, women have been forced to take
over a large number of ‘male’ jobs that they were previously excluded from.
Thanks to the legislation from Parliament, women can now own land and can take
over family agricultural businesses that were previously managed by fathers,
brothers, and husbands. The most influential member of one coffee cooperative
is a woman who has taken over for the men in her family who were killed; all of
the people who sell her coffee are men, which represents a reversal of roles in
the patron-client subcontracting argument put forth by Beneria which states
that men usually assume managerial positions because women are believed to be
uneducated and unable to supervise. Thanks to training provided by UNICEF and
other international NGOs who recognized the importance of women in the
post-genocide Rwanda, women have received the business and financial training
necessary to manage businesses that the men were previously responsible for.
“People never used to think that women were able business women or able
business managers. We have proved that women can be and perhaps can even do it
better than men,” said Janet Nkibana, the co-founder of Gahaya Links, a basket
weaving cooperative that exports up to 50,000 baskets annually.
Women are
now balancing their reproductive and productive roles in society. The change of
the statue in Kigali represents this perfectly. Women are no longer solely
reproductive beings; they still hold the hand of and guide their children, but
they also stand alone and function in a more independent role as productive
members of society. As in most developing countries, women were responsible for
growing the food their family ate, while today women are working in industries
that allow them to have the buying power of men and to provide health care,
food, and education to their children. As Beneria counsels in her conclusion, a
feminist approach to the differences in productive work can help eliminate
gender inequalities and develop a more equal labor force (Beneria 2004).
"After the genocide, the widows decided to
get together…We thought about getting lodging and getting houses… A group of
four or five would build for one, then go to another to build a shelter for
her…In Rwanda women are not allowed to go on the roof. That is the man's job.
At first we'd go out at night to repair our houses, so no one would see us. But
then someone found out and gave us pants to wear. Then we decided it did not
matter if anyone laughed. We went out during the day” (Anonymous 1997). Women in
Rwanda have been able to overcome the stereotypical gender roles and take over
roles that no longer have men to fill them. Though there is still some social
resistance, the previous quote shows that for the most part women are receiving
enough support to assume the vacant male roles; the widows no longer had to
work at night once a man stepped up and gave them pants to work in during the
day. GAD scholars note the importance of social movements in helping women in
the workplace, but in Rwanda they have the support of the government which
combined with women’s organizations has put pressure from above and below on
the Rwandan labor market to provide women with equal access to employment.
Conclusion
The success of women in Rwanda certainly provides interesting
insight into the politics and study of gender and development. Though Rwanda
has gone against the general trend in its strong support for women in all
sectors, one has to question why this happened. Is it because a popular leader
and liberator voiced his overwhelming support for women or because women
represent the large majority of the population? Would fifty-six percent of the
parliament been female if women did not represent seventy percent of the
population or if the quota did not exist? It is difficult to say one way or
another what exactly has led to the
successes in Rwanda, but I would argue that having an abnormally large
population of women certainly helped, especially considering that a large
portion of the male population was killed in the war and women were left to
fill their shoes. But with so many women in government, in the workplace, and
mobilizing society, one has to wonder what the future holds for men and whether
they will become the discriminated sex in the future.
There
is great concern that because of the attention given to gender balance,
educating girls, and an increased presence of women in government and
leadership positions, there will be a reversed gender problem in the future.
Unfortunately, due to the emphasis by the government and NGOs to educate girls
and provide them with greater opportunities when families used to send their
sons to school and keep the girls home, the opposite is now happening. Girls
are going to school and families are choosing to keep their sons at home because
they cannot afford for them to attend secondary school and the small school
fees that come with it. It will be important to really emphasize gender balance
and giving equal opportunities to boys and girls and men and women because if
one gender receives too much support, while the other is left to maintain the
status quo, progress might appear to have been achieved, while in a reality it
has just been a reversal of gendered circumstances.
Sources:
Beneria, Lourdes and Marta Roldan. 1987. The Crossroads of Class and
Gender: Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. (Chapter 3: “Subcontracting links and the dynamics
of women’s employment”)
Momsen, Janel Henshall. Gender and Development. Oxon: Routledge,
2004
Okonjo, Kamene. 1994. “Reversing the Marginalization of the Invisible
and Silent Majority: Women in Politics in Nigeria.” Women and Politics
Worldwide. New Haven.
Swider, Sarah. “Working Women of the World Unite? Labor Organizing and Transnational
Gender Solidarity among Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” in Ferree, Myra
Marx and Aili Mari Tripp. Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism,
Organizing, and Human Rights. New York, New York University Press, 2006,
pp. 110-140.
Tripp, Aili Mari. “The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms: Consensus,
Conflict, and New Dynamics,” in Ferree, Myra Marx and Aili Mari Tripp. Global
Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights. New
York, New York University Press, 2006, pp. 51-75.
Rwanda Sources:
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. http://www.peacewomen.org/WPS/Rwanda.html
Dirasse, Laketch. “The Gender Dimension of Making Peace in Africa.” The Acronym Institute. Issue No. 48, July
2000. http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd48/48gender.htm
McCrummen, Stephanie. “Women Run the Show in a Recovering Rwanda.” Washington Post. October 27, 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/26/AR2008102602197.html?sid=ST2008051504314
Vopini, Lauren. “Development: Peace Baskets Bring Hope to Rwandan
Women.” Inter Press Service News Agency.
August 31, 2008. http://ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=43740
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