Women and good governance: Theoretical Dimensions of the Debate
Friday 5th January 2007

Two dimensions can be considered by women:i) the global evolution of the continent and the role of the African state. and ii) good governance.

1. The global evolution of the continent and the role of the African state

It is about asking ourselves how to build a wealthy Africa from the continent’s human resources. It would be difficult to take up this challenge without the input of women, whose courage, resourcefulness and imagination are a tremendous hope for the continent. In so doing, two points seem particularly important: a national or even Pan-Africanist awareness and promotion of social justice through a redistribution of national wealth, based on equality of chances. Women are the first to demand increased efficiency of public services, solutions to health, educational training, justice and security problems.

Even if women’s claims are clearly perceived, however, a right perception of political stakes and what it takes to the crystallization of an egalitarian sense of citizenship and national awareness are absent. Most African states have difficulties in infusing such national awareness in their citizens. The number of competent women, who are able to participate in the management of power on an egalitarian basis, is still low. Various strategies must be deployed to address the lack of competent women at the various levels and in various sectors. Besides, incorporating gender in governance and creating a leadership that could bring about economic changes demands actors to conduct such changes, as well as a clear understanding of the stakes and the right choices to make.

This is why the road to women’s leadership must be put in a historical, economic and political context and also why all attempts of reproducing the modern nation state have so far failed.

The challenges that need to be taken up are the building of a national market, increasing of the living standard, and this cannot be done by merely relying on international aid, in a context of impoverishment of people. It is such a context, dominated by the informal sector and structural adjustment policies, that we need to anchor in a democratic system, where women would be able to play a political role.

2. Good governance

In the face of such a situation, one can ask, as Godfrey Lardner, an economist at the UN Economic Commission (ECA), whether African women really need to go to a lot of trouble to try to catch the distressed boat of development in Africa.

Does the famous oft-misused concept of good governance have the same meaning for all actors? Whenever one talks of good governance, the first thing that comes to mind is the fight against corruption. Furthermore, according to a survey we have carried out on behalf of the United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the content of this concept changes according to whether the person concerned is from the institutional world, from the civil society or a political party.

Very few studies make a relationship between ‘good governance and gender’, since researchers do not usually consider such a dimension.

CODESRIA has been organizing Governance and Gender Institutes for a couple of years now. For the time being, both themes are not interconnected, and the gender dimension is hardly dealt with in the abundant literature. The question raised by Ayesha Imam, Amina Mama and Fatou Sow (1997) about engendering social sciences is illustrated by the theories on governance, which revolve around some elements, such as the nature of the state - the gender of which is considered as male by the African feminists, and which, to some authors such as Achille Mbembe, Jean-Francois Medard and Patrick Chabal, is associated with political clientelism or neopatrimonialism. However, there is still room for hope, because, as Mbembe (1992) says, a certain number of quasi-qutonomous spaces of expression have been created, and several non-formal organizations have been set up. ‘A real social power is being created, in unprecedented forms, while the civil society is taking shape, sometimes at the margin of the state or outside the control or postcolonial bureaucracies, according to very heterogeneous modes’. It is in such a context that the dynamism of the civil society, informal sector, is taking place in most African countries.