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The Precarious Socio-Economic Position of Women in Rural Africa: The Case of the Kaguru of Tanzania*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Jeffrey Meeker  and
Dominique Meekers
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Extract

Research on the socioeconomic position of rural African women has been hampered by a lack of appropriate data. Indeed, macro-level data are not ideal to gain understanding of how the social and familial realities experienced by rural African women might limit their access to limited resources (Bryceson 1994; International Labour Office, 1984, 57; Whitehead 1994). Furthermore, a male head of household may not be able or willing to accurately evaluate women's economic contribution to the household. Therefore, it is necessary to interview or survey rural African women about their lives (Russell 1984). In this paper, we present Kaguru women's own opinions of how social and familial realities affect their access to resources.

In rural African societies, women are typically engaged in agricultural, household and income-earning work. Although African women often have a heavier workload than do men in these three spheres of their daily work, they typically do not experience equal access to resources, both educational and economic (Boserup 1970,1985; Goody 1976; Meena 1992; Staudt 1988). The fact that husbands and wives do not fully cooperate, and may even compete for economic resources, is problematic for many development programs.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 35 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

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Footnotes

*

This project wa s supported by a grant from the Research and Graduate Studies Office (RGSO), The Pennsylvania State University, to Dr. D. Meekers. Additional support was provided by the Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, which has support from a grant for international demographic research from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and core support from a grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. The data collection for this project was funded by a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to Dr. Etienne van de Walle, University of Pennsylvania. The authors are grateful to the University of Dar-es-Salaam and the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology for granting research clearance, to Dr. Penina Mlama for her skillful supervision of fieldwork and translations, to Monica Kimwaga for conducting the interviews, to Natasha Deer and Li Zhan for transcribing the interviews, to Nadra Franklin, Edith Ericson and Michael Zimmerman for library assistance and to Pat Draper, Etienne van de Walle, Sheryl McCurdy, Constance Mugalla and Amy Stambach for their comments and suggestions during various phases of this project.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Sociological Society, Session on Ethnographic Studies, held in State College, PA, October 21-23, 1994, and at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) Seminar on Demography and Poverty, held in Florence, Italy, March 2-4, 1995.

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