Patrons of Women

Front matter

LITERACY PROJECTS AND GENDER DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL NEPAL

Esther Hertzog

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Foreword

Heer

Public anthropology is often criticized for vacillating between a disciplinary commitment to a credible accounting for the experienced reality it studies and an accountability to worthy social causes. This divided loyalty between knowledge and ethics is habitually resolved through an unbending subscription to one or other all-embracing ideology that furnishes both the need for an overarching cosmopolitan morality and the imperative of providing a cogent, wellinformed interpretation of the matter in hand. Thus, postcolonialism, feminism, anti-globalism and other -isms of our day are turned, in the name of critical thinking, into indisputable, politically correct tenets of an uncritical, self-indulgent anthropological perspective.

It takes an intrepid, truly critical scholar such as Esther Hertzog to muster the courage of her convictions not to succumb to these trendy regimes of contrived knowledge, and instead to offer a level-headed, disenchanted, yet heartening approach to the study of the so-called underprivileged. The disillusionment lies with the disappointment with false expectations and promises, while the hope rests with the moralistically untainted scrutiny of the unadulterated circumstances of being a disenfranchized woman in a developing country dominated by organizational bigotry and bureaucratic alienation that excludes her even further from any position of power and influence. Indeed, this study bears witness to the far-reaching implications of the experience under study for world economy, political power games and moral agendas; all through the lens of an anthropological discourse free of the airs and graces of contemporary facades of paying lip service to womens rights and to the protest against the exploits of globalization. In this sense this book is a wake-up call from the vagaries of selfrighteous do-gooders and political cynics alike.

This book, however, exposes such styles of pseudo-humanitarianism for what they are, namely mere fig leaves to cover ill-intentioned investments and projects. By keeping a dignified distance from, and free of patronizing empathy for, the “natives”, Hertzog makes room for their presence and lets their voices come through as persuasive, genuine. and unperturbed expressions of their lived experience. This self-restrained stance enables the author to present an exceptionally lucid and incisive example of an ethnographically informed evaluation study of the built-in subversive forces that turn a socially designated boon into an untoward bane. With impressive vigor and verve, Hertzog took it

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xiv | FOREWORD upon herself to conduct an involved and disenchanted piece of research into an internationally sponsored feat to empower women villagers in Nepal through the introduction of literacy programs.

Drawing on a series of extended case studies embedded in the breadth and depth of contextual analysis of local politics and socioeconomic processes insidiously shaped by overt as well as covert global interests, Hertzog unveils the infrastructure responsible for the aborted initiative. To ascertain the intricacies of the multitude of circumstances and factors implicated in that destined failure to decolonize oppressed women, Hertzog is not beguiled by politically correct postcolonial ideological and pedagogical academic fads offering clichéd, often out of context, patently patronizing interpretations. Instead, she resorts to the well-tried ethos and practice of first-hand anthropological observation. She accomplishes that by interweaving the global and the local, thus making sense of what seems to be an apparently paradoxical reality of disempowering empowerment.

Spawning a gamut of interlocked circles encompassing macro perspectives from the operation of world systems, through state rule and legislation to gender relations, Hertzog addresses local cultural knowledge and custom as active, selfaware actors in a worldwide arena of power and interests. All these points of view converge to create a prism through which the studied village scene of ritual, discourse, and interaction is observed and analyzed. This field of action is manifested in the sponsored literacy classes that Hertzog investigated as she highlights their ensuing untoward repercussions in strengthening women’s presence and position. With the aim of explaining the almost fatalistic consequences of what seem to be good ideas coupled with the best of intentions, Hertzog employs a spectrum of research methods, ranging from thorough ethnographic fieldwork based on participant observation, through interviews with decision-making officials in government and the funding agencies, to qualitative content analysis of accounts and documentation.

This outstanding wealth of findings allows Hertzog to develop an original and erudite approach to the study of developing societies within the context of the emergence of forms of economic exploitation and gender discrimination under the guise of cosmopolitan ethics and empowering support. This is an unassumingly written, yet powerfully persuasive and immensely disturbing contribution to the anthropological understanding of the place of the Third World in today’s global universe.

Haim Hazan Tel Aviv University

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Preface

Heer

This book is about male domination in international gender development projects, based on research in Nepal. The book offers a feminist critique of the work of both international and local agencies, and shows how they reproduce gender stereotypes and preserve gender inequality. It is based on data I collected while working as a gender consultant for an irrigation company in rural Nepal. The book focuses on male-dominated agencies that manipulate projects intended for the benefit of women. It describes how high-ranking male officials in various agencies in Nepal cooperated in subverting resources allocated to women, while employing a well established rhetoric of gender equality to advance their own interests. Thus, women’s marginalization is preserved and further manifested through a dialectic process.

The analysis also elaborates on the hierarchical relations and ethnocentric behavior that emerge from the bureaucratically structured polarization of power between developing and developed, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, urban and rural, employers and employees, men and women, local and expatriate, consulting and consulted, and patrons and clients in Nepal.

Apart from discussing a specific case study of gender relations in the context of the development project in which I was involved, the book seeks to stress the prominence of bureaucratic characteristics in the gamut of development projects. I argue that the processes and social relations that take place in this context should be explicated in terms of power relations that are unavoidably embedded in any bureaucratic setting. Examining the enforced introduction of a women’s project into a male-dominated irrigation project reveals unrecognized and denied structured gender power differentials in particular, but it also reveals control mechanisms which are systematically built into organizations. Analyzing development projects in this vein provides a rationale for the persistence of development projects, although they are consistently described as "failures". It seems, therefore, that projects do not "fail" but rather succeed in serving, in complex, indirect, and manipulative ways, the varied interests of organizations and individuals. Analyzing the bureaucratic phenomenon also facilitates the understanding of the paradox that women’s empowerment projects mainly serve the interests of male officials. In other words, a look at why a gender project scheduled to be part of a larger irrigation project did not materialize entails the exposure of the gendered structure of the wider society. Both

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xvi | PREFACE this structure and the women’s project within the irrigation project are based on males’ domination.

The “gender development program” discussed in this book! was scheduled because of pressure that the World Bank put on the Nepali government in the mid 1990s to take upon itself women-centered projects, offering a loan of some $500,000 for their implementation. The Bank claimed that women’s advancement would accelerate the pace of social and economic change in the rural areas of Nepal.

As the book progresses it becomes clearer how and why a project intended for women’s advancement was used for the benefit of men, and failed to provide women with any of the resources promised. It describes in detail the implicit and explicit interests of all parties: Nepali government officials, heads of the World Bank, and directors of Tahal, the Israeli engineering company. It looks at the tactics they used to prevent the realization of the original aims of the scheme, and at their collaboration in making the funds allocated for women accessible to men. It illustrates the numerous manipulative strategies employed in day-to-day activities and their impact on social relationships, and particularly on gender relations. Moreover, the analysis illustrates how female employees collaborated, although reluctantly and sometimes unconsciously, with the organization's hidden agenda.

The ethnography demonstrates how organizations enhance recognition of the self-evident need for their services, by describing the village women, explicitly or implicitly, as needy and backward. However, the social and economic competence of these women, which is amply documented in the data, contradict this image. The rural women lack economic resources, yet are offered literacy programs that they believe to be only marginally needed for their daily routines. Nevertheless, in reality the developers provide neither literacy skills nor any vocational training or substantial economic assistance. Furthermore, although the village women are well aware of the deceitful game, they cooperate with the developers for their own reasons.

The book follows the growing critique concerning development and gender development in particular, while contributing to the criticism relating to women’s development projects. It argues that gender development projects (and development projects at large), contrary to their manifest aims and budgets, do not and cannot contribute to social change in gender power relations (or any other social change). Rather, they serve to support the existing power structures.

However, the book does not offer an alternative discourse or policy recommendations for gender development. Doing so would entail the acceptance of this concept, whereas the book’s basic argument is that such projects are all ultimately concerned with power manipulations rather than with social change. Thus, the theoretical analysis elaborates on structured power relations embedded in social organizations. It emphasizes gendered power relations in the bu-

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PREFACE | xvii reaucratic setting of the women’s project under study. My analysis seeks to contribute to the limited literature in this field, by using reflexive tools of a profoundly involved anthropologist in a women’s empowerment project.

The Introduction reviews the literature concerning the main issues that are discussed in the book, among which are: development and gender development projects in bureaucratic perspective; gender relations and feminist theories relevant to development projects; literacy campaigns and Nepali village women. The analysis incorporates insights from feminist, as well as economic and anthropological studies focusing on South Asia.

Chapter 1 analyses some of the dilemmas associated with the role of external consultant in “developing countries.” Looking back at my fieldnotes, I reflect on the inescapable hierarchical relations into which I was thrust in my daily interactions with local people. This chapter exposes the constructed patronage and power differentials embedded in encounters between “outsiders” or “experts” and local people, between males and females, and between junior and senior officials in the organization’s hierarchy.

Chapter 2 describes the continuous efforts of the representative of Tahal to establish a position of dominance in the project. It analyses the stereotypical expressions and ethnocentric attitudes he adopted toward local people in a drama of power which generated a good deal of antagonism.

Chapters 3 and 4 elaborate on the role that literacy campaigns play in development projects at large, and in the context of the women’s project in particular. They describe the negotiations that took place with regard to the conceptualization, budgeting, and implementation of the women’s literacy program. The analysis of written documents and field encounters tells the story of the intensive social engagements which ended up without concrete outcomes, for the project provided neither literacy classes nor vocational training.

The detailed description in Chapter 5 focuses on the seminar, a training course for village teachers involved in the literacy program, illustrates how the rhetoric of social change and women’s empowerment served male officials in particular, but also the two gender consultants (myself and a local colleague), as a means for demonstrating control. The descriptions reveal the ongoing exposure of women to collective patronization in a male-dominated framework. However, they also illustrate the compliance of the few relatively highly positioned females (the two gender consultants) with the bureaucratic codes and expressions of power relations that prevailed in the project premises.

Chapter 6 exposes the budget as a mere phantom. It suggests that the women's project did not stand a real chance of benefiting the village women from its very inception. In reality, so it transpired, the project was used to "buy off" men in higher positions, at a local and national level. The gradual exposure of the hidden agenda behind the women’s development program is connected to a discussion of feminine conduct in a male dominated organizations.

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1. This program, which was embedded in the irrigation project, is referred to by the following terms, interchangeably: gender development project, women’s project, women’s program, women’s activities project, and women’s empowerment project. This interchanging use of terms reflects the diverse terms use in daily encounters and in documents.

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Introduction

Heer

Development Projects: Persistence Despite Evident Failure

“Development” and “Development Projects”: Neocolonialism and the Discourse of Social Change

Gender development programs should be discussed against the wider background of development projects in developing countries.! Much of the criticism concerning development discourse and practices in developing countries applies to projects that aspire to effect social change in gendered power relations. Thus, the discussion of a women’s development project in Nepal will be linked in this opening chapter to the critical literature about development at large and gendered development in particular.

Various studies draw a parallel between development or aid projects and neocolonialism. Thus, for instance, Chilisa Bagele (2005) argues that “neocolonialism” signifies the dependence of many formerly colonized countries that have gained geographical and political independence, although in practice their “cultural and economic independence was never really, if at all, won. The colonial systems of domination continue ... as the former colonizers continue to economically, culturally, financially, militarily and ideologically dominate what constitutes the so-called developing world” (ibid.: 660). Some scholars claim that development is a form of structural violence (Cowen and Shenton 1995; Des Chene 1996; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). These studies argue that one of the more conspicuous instruments of neocolonialism is the aid industry, which structures hierarchal relationships and power gaps between countries and communities. These unbalanced relations are anchored in binary categories that differentiate between “givers” and “receivers,” development “professionals” and populations “in need of development,“ between the poor and underdeveloped South and the rich, modern, developed North. Critical research reveals the implied paternalism in these projects and points to development as enhancing economic exploitation in and of developing countries and regions. They expose the hidden agendas behind aid and development discourses and projects. Rather than helping the “weak” and “developing” countries, these studies contend that development programs promote the interests of international aid organizations.

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Several salient studies exemplifying this critical trend have been published in the past four decades by Teresa Hayter (1971), Vandana Shiva (1986, 1993), Arturo Escobar (1988, 1995), Graham Hancock (1989), Wolfgang Sachs (1992), Gustavo Esteva (1992), and others. Based on her research on the World Bank, Hayter found that the “purpose of aid is, and cannot be other than, to serve the economic interests of the major capitalist powers, especially the USA, and of the big corporations and banks ... [who] give priority to the interests of their major funders” (Hayter 1971: 88).? Arturo Escobar describes “development” as a dream “progressively turned into a nightmare” and defines it as the ideological apparatus at play in global power relations. He maintains that development discourse is governed by the same principles as colonial discourse. Moreover, development has “successfully deployed a regime of government over the Third World, a space for ‘subject peoples’ that ensures certain control over it” (Escobar 1995: 9). He states that: “Instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite, underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression. The debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence are only the most pathetic signs of the failure of forty years of development” (ibid.: 4). Wolfgang Sachs writes that: “Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work.

Moreover ... development has become outdated” (Sachs 1992: 1). Gustavo Esteva argues that two centuries after the social construction of development, it is a reminder, for two-thirds of the people on earth, “of what they are not ... of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved to others’ experiences and dreams” (Esteva 1992: 10). Esteva criticizes the conceptual acceptance, by many scholars, of the concept “underdevelopment” as self-evidently “real, concrete, quantifiable and identifiable” Moreover, he argues, “No one seems to doubt that the concept does not allude to real phenomena. They do not realize that it is a comparative adjective whose base of support is the assumption, very Western but unacceptable and undemonstrable, of the oneness, homogeneity and linear evolution of the world” (ibid.: 11-12). For Vandana Shiva, “Development, as a culturally biased project, destroys wholesome and sustainable lifestyles and instead creates real material poverty, or misery, by denying the means of survival through the diversion of resources to resource-intensive commodity production” (Shiva 1989: 72-73). Katy Gardner and David Lewis propose that “development” is “dead; “a non-word, to be used only with the inverted commas of the deconstructed 1990s” (Gardner and Lewis 1996: 1). As far as the practical realities of development are concerned, they assert that by the mid 1990s it became clear that the anticipated benefits of modernization, the assumed outcome of development, were “largely an illusion: over much of the globe the progressive benefits of economic growth, technological change and scientific rationality have failed to materialise” (ibid.: 1).

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Following these critiques, I view “development” as well as its derivatives— such as “developing” and “underdeveloped” (countries) and their opposite, “developed”—as representing an obsolete concept, a “non-word, and will refer to it as a term that calls for the use of inverted commas. Therefore, as a contested term, “development” and its above mentioned derivatives are to be read hereafter as if they had inverted commas around them.°

Economic and Gendered Critiques of Development and the World Bank

Incisive critiques of development and of the World Bank’s policies (which play a major role in the development industry) from the economic perspective have been offered by Graham Hancock (1989), a journalist; Muhammad Yunus (1998), an academic economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, for which he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 2007; Joseph Stiglitz (2002), who was Chief Economist at the World Bank until 2000; and William Easterly (2006), who was also an economist at the World Bank.° These works discuss development mainly in economic and organizational terms, such as the financial assistance (aid) extended by developed countries to developing countries; the economic and political interventions of the former in the management of the latter; the economic dependence, exploitation, and corruption that are embedded in this neocolonialist intervention; the growing and corrupted control of the bureaucratic machinery over budgets intended for the provision of public services; and the one-sided imposition of economic globalization.

Graham Hancock (1989) offers an extensive critique of development aid for poor countries. He provides ample examples of the disastrous impact that development and the aid industry has had on most developing countries that have been engaged in development projects.” Hancock analyzes the outcomes of international aid programs in most of the countries that were offered financial assistance by foreign agencies (the most prominent of which is the World Bank) comparing them to countries that either did not receive or stopped receiving aid. Thus, he shows how Africa lost the self-sufficiency in food production that it enjoyed before becoming a chronic recipient of development assistance,’ whereas countries like Nicaragua have done much better in the spheres of the economy, welfare, and education without development assistance.’ Consequently, Hancock condemns aid as:

often profoundly dangerous to the poor and inimical to their interests; financing the creation of monstrous projects that, at vast expense, have devastated the environment and ruined lives; it has supported and legitimized brutal tyrannies; it has facilitated the emergence of fantastical and Byzantine bureaucracies staffed by legions of self-serving hypocrites; it has sapped the initiative, creativity and enterprise of ordinary people and substituted [these with] the superficial and irrelevant glitz of imported advice. (ibid.: 189)

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Hancock blames the United Nations, the World Bank, and bilateral agencies for using aid to create and entrench “a powerful new class of rich and privileged people” in the name of the “destitute and vulnerable.” “It is aid—and nothing else; he claims, “that has provided hundreds of thousands of ‘jobs for the boys’ and that has permitted record-breaking standards to be set in self-serving behavior, arrogance, paternalism, moral cowardice and mendacity” (ibid.: 192-93). His uncompromising conclusion is that “to continue with the charade seems to me to be absurd.” Thus, he explicitly recommends that the aid industry be wiped out: “the time has come for the lords of poverty to depart. Their ouster can only be achieved, however, by stopping development assistance” (ibid.: 193).

Hancock's extensive study does not relate in any way to a gender perspective on the aid industry. No development projects are mentioned in his book that concern women in the Third World, developing countries, or the “poor countries of the South,” nor are they included in the numerous examples he uses to substantiate his claims. Indeed, this drawback can be attributed to the fact that gender was barely recognized or incorporated into development projects before the 1990s. Moreover, even at the beginning of that decade, when women and gender in developing countries gained the attention of international institutions (e.g., World Bank 1990, Murphy 1995) and the absence of development projects intended for women was acknowledged, these were subsequently financed with “small money” in terms of the overall resources available to the aid industry. Indeed, the absence of women’s perspectives from Hancock's analysis might imply that, paradoxically, women have probably gained from being excluded from aid projects, avoiding the various harmful effects that could have befallen them. Nevertheless, ignoring women’s perspectives in any sociopolitical and economic analysis may be said to entail a basic bias. Overlooking women in his analysis of aid projects, despite the significant role that they play in the economy, at both private and public levels, and their (at least) equal share in worldwide poverty, weakens Hancock's analysis.

A comparison with Muhammad Yunus’s “feminist” book (Yunus 1998), in which he describes women’s economic participation in South Asias economy and recounts his own profound engagement with poverty reduction, accentuates this point further. The book tells the story of how Yunus established the Grameen Bank as “a bank for the poor,’ first in 1976, in Bangladesh, his country of origin, and later in other countries in the region. For reasons of both social ideology and economic rationale, Yunus’s initiative targeted women, with the purpose of benefiting and empowering women and their families. Within two decades his enterprise became widely acknowledged and financially successful. From $27 lent by the Bank to forty-two people in 1976, by 1998 microloans had soared to $2.3 billion administered to 2.3 million families.

Like Hancock, Yunus expresses extreme criticism of the aid industry in general and of World Bank policies in developing countries in particular. He

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argues that the money does not reach those who are meant to be its recipients. Rather, development projects are cynically used as a pretext to benefit more affluent groups in developing countries.!° He argues that foreign aid becomes “a kind of charity for the powerful, while the poor get poorer” (ibid.: 17). Yunus also confirms Hancock's claim that pressure is put on developing countries to take the loans offered by the World Bank and IME.” He, too, places the blame on the extravagant conduct and corrupt structures of the World Bank and aid agencies; the large number of staff they employ (50,000 altogether in the “aid industry,” according to Hancock, and 5,000 World Bank employees, according to Yunus, in Bangladesh alone); their luxurious working conditions; and the squandering of most of the money on needless experts who treat the local people arrogantly. Yunus charges that in all of the projects financed by the World Bank, “their experts and consultants end up virtually taking over. They do not rest until they mould it their way” (ibid.: 14). This external meddling and imposition of policies, he insists, should be resisted, so that local solutions can be cultivated. Moreover, Yunus argues that instead of wasting the money on huge bureaucracies it should be given outright to the neediest: “Just $100 put in the hands of each of the poorest ten million families in Bangladesh would amount to $1 billion that would then either be invested in capital incomeearning goods, or, at worst, spent locally on goods and services” (ibid.: 17). Yunus recommends further shutting out the “middle men of the aid industry,’ so that people can rediscover the human and personal “help” that is tailored to their own needs and aspirations “in line with priorities that they themselves have set, and guided by their own agendas” (ibid.: 193).

Although Yunus shares most of Hancock's criticisms about the aid industry, his book differs in its approach to the role of women in economic policies and socioeconomic change. He perceives women as the main actors in poverty and its eradication. Yunus believes that working for women as borrowers of money, and with women as the Grameen Bank’s employees, serves the interests of women, their families’ and of the whole society’s wellbeing, no less than it serves the Bank’s profits. The Grameen Bank, based on microcredit programs, is portrayed as a means for changing gender power relations and promoting general egalitarianism. Thus, Yunus describes his female-centered banking policy and philosophy, which raised his female clientele to 94 per cent—prior to Grameen, women constituted less than 1 per cent of all the borrowers in Bangladesh—as a social revolution (ibid.: 90). In great detail, he describes how he approached potential clients, employing social work strategies to overcome traditional barriers to communicating with women, while convincing them and dissolving their husbands’ resistance. Profoundly motivated by his belief in gender equality he confronted the banks’ discrimination against women years before he himself became a banker, and later stood up against government officials who objected to the Bank’s female-oriented policy. Yunus prides himself for the Grameen Bank’s impact on reducing violence by husbands against their wives, by chal-

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lenging traditional constraints on men, and by communicating directly with village women. He explains the Bank’s pro-women policy as follows:

if the goals of economic development include improved standards of living, removal of poverty, access to dignified employment, and reduction in inequality, then it is quite natural to start with women. They constitute the majority of the poor, the under-employed and the economically and socially disadvantaged. And since they were closer to the children, women were also our key to the future of Bangladesh. (ibid.: 93)

Yunus’s conviction of the significance of working with women is embedded in a feminist rhetoric: Relatively speaking, hunger and poverty are more women’s issues than male issues ... being a poor woman is toughest of all ... When she is given the smallest opportunity, she struggles extra hard to get out of poverty. A poor woman in our society is totally insecure: she is insecure in her husband's house because he can throw her out any time he wishes. He can divorce her by merely saying three times’ ‘I divorce yov ... She cannot read and write, and generally she has never been allowed out of her house to earn money, even if she has wanted to. (ibid.: 92)

Indeed, this representation of Bangladeshi poor women is rather generalizing and stigmatic. However, it is not unlike the way they are sometimes described in feminist publications as well."

Do Microfinance Schemes Help the Poor and Women in Developing Countries?

Against the background of Yunus’s enthusiastic feminist-socialist presentation of his pragmatic banking approach, it is relevant to reflect on a few studies of the Grameen Bank and its microfinance schemes. This will give us some insight into the role of local economic enterprises in developing countries, and especially into women’s inclusion and exclusion practices, in the contexts of both economic development projects and microfinance schemes.

In his study of microfinance in the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, Mahabub Hossain (1988) demonstrates that by providing credit for self-employed activities the Bank has raised the income, employment, asset base, and working capital of borrowers—improving thereby the living standard of more than 90 per cent of borrowers. In addition, the Bank has also been able to reach its target group, the poorest of the poor, who do not have access to formal credit institutions, and has still maintained an excellent repayment record. Shahidur Khandker and Osman Chowdhury (1996) found, similarly, that microfinance programs have helped raise the asset base of poor borrowers, which enables