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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Southeast Nigerian women in civil service articulate valued capabilities through negotiation, care, and everyday moral reasoning. Utilizing the Capability Approach and African feminism, the study shows how women's agency redefines development ethics beyond colonial paradigms.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how women in the civil service articulate valued capabilities related to labour market participation and how these shape an indigenous feminist ethics of development grounded in everyday moral reasoning. Using qualitative research with Southeast Nigerian women in the civil service, the analysis draws on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (Sen, 2004, 1999) and African feminist thought, particularly Nego-feminism (Nnaemeka, 2004), Motherism (Acholonu, 1995), and Snail-sense Feminism (Ezeigbo, 2012). The data reveal how women express what they value through narrated constraints, negotiated choices, and survival strategies within institutions that are formally protective yet informally unequal.

The findings show women value interrelated capabilities, including work–life balance, voice, education and career development, security, recognition, and relational support. Importantly, these capabilities are not framed as individualistic freedoms but as relational and moral achievements, shaped by care responsibilities, institutional power, and gendered norms. Women’s agency emerges through negotiation, strategic compliance, incremental resistance, and ethical self-management, challenging dominant development paradigms that equate agency with overt opposition or autonomy detached from social relations.

This paper argues these lived philosophies constitute an indigenous ethics of care that redefines development as the expansion of survivable, dignified participation rather than abstract empowerment. By foregrounding women’s everyday moral reasoning as epistemic labour, the study contributes to debates on epistemic justice and knowledge sovereignty in African development, demonstrating how African feminist epistemologies can enrich the Capability Approach by situating aspiration, adaptation, and agency within historically grounded, relational, and care-centred frameworks that move beyond colonial and patriarchal models of development.