Mouhamadou Tidiane KASSE argues that the implementation of neo-liberal policies and strategies in Africa, which have culminated today in globalisation, resulted in the feminisation of poverty on the continent. “Liberalisation began by hitting social services. Women were to suffer the most from the effects, due to tradition and their social position.”

Today, two concepts stand together. They work in parallel, but also together, since, inevitably, the two situations they encompass feed off one another. Since the beginning of the 1980s and the implementation of neo-liberal policies and strategies in Africa, which culminated today in globalisation, the feminisation of poverty has become an irreversible, downward spiral. Among other consequences of this situation, the 1990s saw the spread of Aids in Africa begin to take on a feminine character.

Just as poverty becomes more feminine, Aids also takes hold of it. In the first decade after its appearance, the disease was mainly rife among men, but now it has seen its distribution reversed to the detriment of women. Of the 25 million people living with HIV in Africa (out of 37.8 million globally), 58% are women. The proportions are the same for the 9,000 people who contract the virus every day in Africa.

The feminisation of poverty and its effects on women’s health are preventable. Neo-liberal policies paved the way for this when they began taking control in Africa from the 1980s onwards. The Economic and Financial Recovery Plan (EFRP) of the 1970s was followed by Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s, and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in the 1990s. This semantic shift shows the successive failures of these policies that were set up by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which both locked Africa in an endless spiral of poverty. All these policies have today resulted in globalisation, which has moved the continent’s fragility up one level, with the same disastrous effects. What previously happened merely at a local level, within States, now takes place on a global scale, transcending borders and state sovereignty.

The template for today’s tragedy was drawn in the 1980s. Liberalisation began by hitting social services. Women were to suffer the most from the effects, due to tradition and their social position. The decision to make access to education more and more expensive led to girls falling behind. Twenty years later, millions had to be invested to provide them with an education to make up for the effects of this disaster. At the same time, mortality rates among mothers and children went well beyond being scandalous and the reduction of these rates is today one of the development goals of the new millennium. All this is happening in such a way that it looks like one is emptying a barrel in order to refill it again. And this is serious when human lives are at stake.

Survival strategies

The findings of a study entitled “Les familles dakaroises face à la crise” (“Families in Dakar confronting the crisis”) were worrying for the years following the implementation of liberal policies: “It is in fact wage earners in the private sector who are most acutely affected by the crisis of the 1980s. Among men, the unemployed make up 13.7% of industry. In construction, the figure is 14.3%, it is 4.6% in the private service sector and production and 9.1% in business. The agricultural and fishing industries have been hit the hardest by unemployment (18.8%).

“But the situation is all the more tragic for women, whose level of unemployment is 21.6% in industry, 15.0% in the service sector and production and 19.2% in business. The higher levels of unemployment among women are so acute that many have had to state that they are housewives after looking for work in vain. The figures given for women are therefore low estimates for female unemployment.” (Cf. Les familles dakaroises face à la crise – Ifan, Orstom, Ceped - 1995)

The continued process of world trade liberalisation has created a context of economic and social disintegration, with women suffering the most in Africa. In the two-tier societies that are being set up, the effects are piling up at the end of the line. Here, women are the final – and weakest – link. Girls are being deprived of an education, ruining their futures through teenage pregnancy, and wives are experiencing all manner of marital violence (latent or visible, codified or not by society), which is exacerbated by poverty and the absence of life’s basic necessities.

The survival strategies women have employed, through becoming involved as workers in production or industry, do not stand up to new deprotection laws. Factories close or streamline their staff and imports kill off whole sections of production they invest in. Today, female traders in Africa have to go ever further to compete with Asian products that are flooding into markets. As one Senegalese woman put it, “In the 1980s, I used to go to Gambia. When the 1990s came, I had to go as far as Nouakchott and Las Palmas to develop my business. Today, you have to go to Dubai, Taiwan and Hong Kong to compete with the markets that have been established where we are. Especially with the Chinese. Investment is more expensive, journeys are longer and difficulties are greater when it comes to reconciling our role as pillars of the family and our economic functions. In the group of women with whom I organise alternate trips and shared purchasing, we spend hundreds of millions of francs on business each year. But because we work informally, because we do not offer the guarantees deemed necessary, the State will not support us and banks will no longer offer us credit.”

So, laws do not work in women’s favour and the social environment even less so. Natalie Domeisen, of the ITC International Trade Forum, is quoted as saying: “Do women encounter added difficulties when trying to expand their trade through exports because they are women? This is precisely the fundamental question societies should be asking themselves and should be agreeing upon in order to speed up change. For small businesses, access to finances, market information and training is essential. Women who are involved in exports have, however, fewer opportunities to access the support networks that a good number of their male counterparts have. The type of assistance they need is also different. Most businesses belonging to women are part of the service industry, and the main way of developing these businesses is by setting up networks with a view to creating a client base.”

Life and health

The great majority of women, however, are far from these concerns of market dominance. Instead, daily concerns revolve around health and survival strategies. One major concern today is that millions of women do not have access to healthcare during pregnancy and childbirth that could save their lives. For example, only 53% of births in developing countries take place with the assistance of a qualified person (a doctor, midwife or nurse). With the poor nutritional condition of women before pregnancy, due to healthcare that is inadequate, inaccessible or too expensive, not to mention the lack of hygiene and care during labour, there has been a huge increase in dangerous pregnancies.

Beyond the failures of national policies, globalisation has turned healthcare into a market area, and drugs into a market good. The debate and conflict between countries in the South and the North in relation to the Agreements on Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), under the framework of the World Trade Organisation, have been instructive in this regard. Supported by the patents they hold, drug multinationals have been opposed to certain products being made in countries in the South, where local industry could do this job in order to reduce accessibility costs and improve the health of populations. The issue made the headlines in 2000, when thirty-nine drugs companies undertook legal proceedings against South Africa for allowing its population access to low-cost drugs, particularly anti-retrovirals. In April 2001, they withdrew their action when African States raised their shields by sticking to safeguards. The agreement on TRIPS requires WTO member governments to ensure, over a period of twenty years, copyright and patent protection for various new products, including pharmaceutical products. Without the consent of the inventor, no one can use, make or sell a particular product during this period. In the meantime, Aids is killing people – and particularly more and more women. The 2005 UNAIDS data for sub-Saharan Africa shows that 58% of infected adults are women.

To end this pandemic and slow down its effects, anti-retroviral treatment required, at one point, 600,000 CFA francs per month (around 1,000 dollars; the costs have been reduced since then and the drugs are even free in certain countries thanks to public spending). Yet it would have been possible to produce generic drugs locally, thus reducing costs. In India, a pharmaceutical group set the price of ARV’s at 600 dollars (per person, per year) for African governments. However, between the rights of patent holders and the right to life for millions and millions of people, it was necessary to reach a contentious legal decision. Brazil had to face attacks from America for adopting a law that authorised local production of anti-retroviral drugs such as AZT, which helps to prevent transmission from mother to child.

With the mobilisation of countries in the South, ethics took precedence over profit. And after threatening South Africa with sanctions at a point when the country was wrestling with American pharmaceutical companies, President Bill Clinton signed a decree to change American intellectual property laws applying to the distribution of drugs to counter HIV/Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. This decree forbade anyone from lodging a complaint to the WTO in order to block the wishes of sub-Saharan African countries to produce or obtain drugs to fight Aids.

The market logic that is taking hold of healthcare relates to the fact that this sector is an enormous source of revenue, in terms of drugs, the provision of healthcare, laboratory materials, etc. And up until now under the WTO, the precedence of the right to healthcare over patent rights has not yet become a reality. Even if small gains have been made, the United States remains tied to the idea that a wider agreement on property rights could tomorrow be extended to the diseases that generate much higher profits for laboratories.

In effect, even if the debate has focused on diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and Aids, medical research on these three most deadly pandemics comes to less than 5% of the total budget for research at the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. But to make concessions in this domain is seen as a threat to making a tidy profit. A case in point is the sale of drugs that are threatened by the arrival of generic drugs between now and 2007, which is valued at 50 billion dollars – 17.8 billion of which go to the American companies Merck and Pfizer.

This is how some people’s billions are the source of other people’s misfortune. According to the current logic of globalisation, world trade rules control national policy. We are witnessing the loss of sovereignty and international agreements are directly influencing public policy. In social services such as healthcare and education, finance ministers determine what is invested and what is undertaken according to the standards of international financial markets. The wild logic of economic gain thus takes precedence over the necessities of social well-being.

In Mali, for example, the fight against malaria has at its disposal neither the necessary financial means nor an adequate institutional policy. The national programme is only one of the areas of the Prevention Division of the National Health Directorate, and has a budget of 1.5 billion CFA francs per year. And to put to work even the slightest of action, many steps need to be taken to move it along (cf. Panos News, forthcoming). Yet, according to the United Nations’ 2005 report on the Millennium Development Goals, malaria destroys a million lives each year, mainly women and young children – consequently slowing down economic growth by 1.3% per year. And 90% of these deaths take place in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 2,000 children are lost to this disease every day. Mali is among those countries where this disease is still endemic, and requires prevention and constant funding.

Since the 1980s, African countries have done nothing but put up with this. But do they have the means to resist? The partial failure of the last WTO ministerial summit in Hong Kong in December 2005, which was supposed to close the Doha Round after the Cancun stage in September 2003 (which also failed), was due to the mobilisation of countries in the South against a process that places them in an endless trap. But the resistance over cotton, where the reserves of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, on top of other issues, are not enough to stop the machine called globalisation. The WTO is but one structural framework to have ended in failure. Meanwhile, the process continues according to its own dynamics, led by multinationals.

Resistance from civil society, through the mobilisation of the anti-globalisation movement, remains a very weak obstacle, whose consequences have struggled to take root in wider society. And in this movement, the proportion of women remains very slight. In the demonstrations of the African Social Forum, the female component is still very marginal. It is less a vehicle for reflection on resistance and alternatives to globalisation than an appendix to the changes that a being sought. We continue to debate what we put up with (physical violence, mental violence and so on) rather than the solutions women hold and the tools to give them impetus to act.

In the current climate of the feminisation of poverty and the feminisation of disease, the vicious circle is growing and affecting more and more women, and at the same time is closing in them as part of a continued process that is making precariousness more widespread. Page (2000) writes: “The subordination of women in African society, in the face of the HIV/Aids pandemic, is leading to premature deaths and the break-up of millions of families across the whole of the [African] continent. The fact that this in turn is creating a generation of rootless and traumatised children will have grave consequences for the future stability of many countries in Africa. While we concentrate solely on preventing infection and caring for those who are dying, we are neglecting the opportunity to prolong the healthy and productive lives of Africans who are HIV-positive, particularly mothers with children of a young age.” The logic of globalisation does not want this process to end.

•Mouhamadou Tidiane Kasse is Coordinator of Flamme d’Afrique, a daily newspaper published by IPAO and ENDA on occasions of meetings of social movements.
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