Women in Development

Women in development (WID) is an approach to development projects that emerged in the 1970s, calling for treatment of women's issues in development projects. It is the integration of women into the global economies by improving their status and assisting in total development. Later, the Gender and development (GAD) approach proposed more emphasis on gender relations rather than seeing women's issues in isolation.

In Africa, one of the first to recognise the importance of women in farming was Baumann in 1928, with his classic article The Division of Work According to Sex in African Hoe Culture. Kaberry published a much-quoted study of women in the Cameroon in 1952, and empirical data on male and female activities was documented in Nigerian Cocoa Farmers published in 1956 by Galletti, Baldwin and Dina.Ester Boserup's pioneering Women's Role in Economic Development brought greater attention to the importance of women's role in agricultural economies and the lack of alignment of development projects with this reality. In the preface to her book, Boserup wrote that "in the vast and ever-growing literature on economic development, reflections on the particular problems of women are few and far between". She showed that women often did more than half the agricultural work, in one case as much as 80%, and that they also played an important role in trade.

In other countries, women were severely underemployed. According to the 1971 census in India, women constituted 48.2% of the population but only 13% of economic activity. Women were excluded from many types of formal job, so 94% of the female workforce was engaged in the unorganized sector employed in agriculture, agro-forestry, fishery, handicrafts and so on. With growing awareness of women's issues, in the 1970s development planners began to try to integrate women better into their projects to make them more productive. The WID approach initially accepted existing social structures in the recipient country and looked at how to better integrate women into existing development initiatives. The straightforward goal was to increase the productivity and earnings of women.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) established a special Division for Women in Development, promoting concrete action to ensure that women participate in UNDP projects. The United Nations paper International Development Strategy for the Third United Nations Development Decade, issued in 1980, recognized a number of Women in Development issues. It called for women to play an active role in all sectors and at all levels of the Program of Action adopted by the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women, both as agents and beneficiaries. Policies on industrialization, food and agriculture, science and technology and social development should all involve women.

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