by Bogaletch Gebre,
Founder/Director of KMG

This article is excerpted and edited from Gebre’s presentation at a seminar in Addis Ababa in September 1991. Reprinted courtesy of Life & Peace Review, published by the Life and Peace Institute, Volume 6 Number 3 1992–Women: Today & Tomorrow

Women of Ethiopia—rural peasants and city slum dwellers—are, to use an idiom from the industrialized world, “the canaries in the mines.” Coal miners in England and the United States took these small birds into the mines because they would normally sing almost constantly. But when poisonous gases began to overwhelm them they would stop singing, thereby warning the miners of danger.

Ethiopia’s women sing much less than they did when I was a child in the village. Will we be able to heed their warning in time?

Women in the Third World can be described in three broad categories. The largest group is made up of “canaries,” burdened with a heavier work load, with less and less to support their families, as development leads to the denuding of the forest and pollution of water supplies, and destruction of other natural resources.

Second, there are women of the middle class, who have a certain degree of education, and work outside the home out of economic necessity.

Third, there are a small number of women who are highly educated and affluent, who hold important jobs and social positions. For the most part, women of the second group perceive women of this last, tiny, elite group as their ideal.

Rural and urban poor women, on the other hand, perceive themselves as different. All their energies go to their families’ survival in harsh and worsening conditions. In the villages and in the city slums, a major part of their time and strength goes toward providing basic amenities of life, like carrying water long distances, gathering firewood, and preparing food. Their aspiration is to have enough rain to bring in a normal harvest so their routine of life is not disrupted and they are not displaced from their homes.

Their higher aspiration is for their children to have some education, especially for their sons. They may hope, through their children, to see some improvement in the harshness of their own lives.

Although at the policy level Ethiopian education is not discriminatory against women, in some areas a staggering 94 percent of women have no schooling. Nationwide just 46 percent of all girls entering grade one remain till grade four, in some regions just 22 percent.

In 1989, at higher levels of education, women were 14.5 percent of students going for a two-year diploma, 8.2 percent for undergraduate and 6.4 percent for graduate degrees. For most female students, the primary level of education terminates at grade 6.

Education for Survival Education of women is one of the most reliable predictors both of their own and their children’s survival. Education for women is the strongest link between economic growth and lower birth rates.

Mothers are primary educators whether or not they are so recognized, and whether or not they live in a literate or an oral society, or in something in between. If we truly desire to build a peaceful society, women as primary educators of young children are in the best position to begin the nurturing of peaceful people. But to be effective as teachers of peace they must be respected as women, and have access to education themselves.

What is the chief obstacle to the education of women? The violence to nature that seems intrinsic to the high-technology development model is also associated with violence toward women who depend on nature for sustenance for themselves, their families and their societies. The concept of the human right to dominate and master nature, without considering ecological balance, has come to us from the industrialized revolution of Europe and the United States. It directly contradicts traditional practice in the rural economies of Ethiopia, in which a portion of the work of farming was devoted to preserving and nurturing the land itself.

This industrialized concept is also associated with a particular pattern of domination and mastery over women derived from a 19th-century European belief that women (and non-European men) were “closer to nature” than European men, and therefore rightfully dominated and mastered by men. These ideas have been transferred to African societies through European colonial and economic institutions, and have eroded women’s traditional rights in relation to land and wealth, as well as excluded most women from equal participation as partners in development.

When mechanized activities normally carried out by women in traditional societies are routinely given to men,women lose their rights and position in relation to these activities. Men are trained in modern construction and agricultural methods, while women are routinely excluded from such training, in spite of the fact that house construction and agriculture have often been the traditional domains of women.
The privatization of common land for revenue generation erodes women’s traditional land-use rights. The expansion of cash crops undermines subsistence food production, and women are left with meager resources to feed and care for children, the aged and the infirm, while men seek work elsewhere or are conscripted.

Peasant women of the Third World are forced into asymmetric participation in development, by which they bear the greatest costs but are excluded from the benefits. While large numbers of men as well as women are impoverished by development processes, women tend to lose more. Men and boys are given greater access to education. They are given greater access to training for new kinds of jobs in the developing economy, while women and girls are often deprived of educational opportunity, being expected to stay home to do “women’s work” while their sustenance land base, the principle source of food for themselves and their children, is disappearing as land is taken up for large-scale mechanized farming of export crops.

Sustenance is built on the continued capacity of nature to renew its forests, fields, and rivers. These resource systems are linked with the life systems of oral cultures, where women are largely responsible for managing the integrity of ecological resources. Thus these women are in a creative partnership with nature to maintain life.

This critical partnership is destroyed when a development scheme is introduced which excludes women from training and decision-making, and transforms nature from active partner to passive “resource.”

A shift in the perception of food—from a traditional oral society’s view of it as a sacred gift to the modern view of it as a mere commodity to be produced and exchanged for profit—underlies the increasingly destructive antagonism between economic activity and ecological balance around the world.

Ecological destruction and marginalization of women are the inevitable result of development programs and projects which ignore the ecological practices and community support systems of traditional cultures.

Before the advent of industrially conceived development, both men and women in traditional societies shared a daily practice of producing and renewing life. Aware of nature as a living force, men and women had to cooperate with and respect each other, though they often had quite different domains.

What Can Be Done?

There is a relationship between peace, the environment, and the situation of women. The problems of bringing peace to Ethiopia, the difficulties of protecting the environment and women’s inequitable participation in economic and political life, all have the same roots.

To remove obstacles in the way of peace, to secure the survival of natural resources essential for the future, or to improve the situation of women in Ethiopia, those who make policy will have to look carefully at, and be willing to change, some fundamental assumptions and attitudes.

A critical point is the lack of respect for women’s unpaid labor reflected in the way economic calculations are made. The UN System of National Accounts (UNSNA) is used to calculate each nation’s Gross National and Gross Domestic Products (GNP and GDP). UNSNA is used to analyze past and present developments in national economies, make predictions, access revenue requirements, and make resource allocations.

This system of accounting is supposed to give information about the working of economies as a whole and the ways in which the various parts relate to each other. For there to be real accuracy this whole would have to include all goods and services produced and exchanged within the human community. But this supposedly all-inclusive system does not include the unpaid labor of women. It leaves women statistically and economically invisible. Household services (that is, what women do in an unpaid capacity) lie outside the “production boundary.” In African households, housewives produce on their own small farm plots up to 80 percent of all food consumed, and bring from its sources to its places of use 70 percent of the volume of all water used. (In some locations, source and point of use may be as much as 15 kilometers apart.)

Even when the UNSNA production boundary is extended to include non-monetary activities, as when the informal economy of drugs, prostitution, and other crime is “guestimated”, women’s work in building and construction, health and care of extended families; processing storage, and transportation of food, carrying water; collecting firewood, and subsistence crop farming is still excluded because the work is done by housewives. Women’s primary production, and the consumption of their produce by men and others in the household, are considered of insufficient importance to show up in the analysis of the way the economy works.

A woman sustains life, makes it possible for everyone else to go to work, bears and nurses children, and provides them with their earliest education. The failure of international and national governments to acknowledge these activities as value-producing robs women of their dignity, while all other activity is given some measure of respect by being quantified in the general economic analysis.
Without this unpaid work of women, no other production is possible. Unless the activities of women that do not involve exchanging money are included in the shaping of public policy, there will be no qualitative participation of the female half of the population in development. The situation of women is the key to any analysis of the economic underpinnings of a society, and to any realistic hope there might be for sustainable improvement.

In 1975, at the beginning of the UN Decade for Women, international development planners assumed that the improvement of women’s economic situation would automatically flow from expansion and diffusion of the development process.
With Development,

New Problems Arise

By 1985, it was becoming clear that development itself was creating many new problems. With a few exceptions, women’s access to economic resources had worsened, their burden of work had increased, and their health and educational status had declined, both absolutely and relative to that of men.

When we see the great contrast between the wealth of the industrialized countries and Ethiopia’s poverty, it is tempting to think we must do what they do, and try to catch up. But that is the course of disaster. Before India’s independence, Gandhi was asked by a British official: “Once India gains her independence, how long will it take her to reach Britain’s standard of living?” Gandhi answered, “It took Britain half the globe’s resources to reach its current standard of living. How many globes will it take India to reach Britain’s standard of living?”

The development model imported from the industrialized countries is accelerating the flow of resources and capital out of the Third World a great deal faster than it is bringing wealth in.

Without clear social and environmental protections built into it, development aggravates and deepens devastating social inequities. It hastens the process of ecological degradation. Women’s loss of political control over nature’s sustenance base allows those resources to be drained away from the women, children, and poor people who are most in need.

The exclusion of women’s productive labor from national accounting systems not only misleads nations in allocating goods and services to their people (particularly women and children), it also perpetuates the myth of the worthlessness of women, and undermines the education of young children, who learn the worth of women early. If mothers do not count for much, young girls perceive themselves as less than boys and do not see themselves as taking part as equals in Ethiopian society. Parents do not put a high premium on girls’ education, and this robs a nation of the best use of half its people’s intelligence.

The discipline of economics itself came out of the industrial revolution of 18th and 19th century Europe. Women of the Third World are challenging the way economics is conceived, and the industrial concept of nature as an object of domination and exploitation. We see economics, defined as merely production for profit and capital accumulation, as dangerous to human survival.

In order to prove useful in the transformation toward a world in which women and all other oppressed people have some equitable part in economic activity, economics must be reconceived to include all human activity involving paid or unpaid exchange. Conceived in this way, “exchange activity” includes caring for one’s family, community and the environment.

Women must have access to education in order to gain a voice in modern political institutions. Where the largest number of people have no political voice, there cannot be peace or social and economic justice, without which environmental preservation is impossible.

Peace can be achieved in Ethiopia only if we find a way for the many different ethnic and cultural streams of our country to honor our differences, and learn from each other. We must learn to identify those practices and ideas which foster conflict, oppression, and the destruction of the ways of life and environments which support the largest numbers of our people. We must support those which will be essential to the survival of future generations. Underlying those efforts are attempts to bring peace and equality into relationships between Ethiopian women and men.

Respect for women’s labor (reflected in the UNSNA,) respect for the potential contributions of women’s intelligence (reflected in an aggressive female literacy program), and respect for ecological knowledge carried by oral cultures (reflected in a program of national research) are, I believe, the foundation for peace in Ethiopia, and the world.

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