Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the work of Kenyan educator and politician Eddah Gachukia, this paper searches for the frictions, uneasy alliances, and jagged edges in which decolonial African futures focused on women in the 1960s ambivalently paved the way for Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relationships between the growth of women-led forms of developmentalism between the 1950s and 1970s and the adoption of Structural Adjustment Programs across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Often called Women in Development, or WID, these programs embraced the notion that the human capital of women needed to be fully marshalled to support colonial, national, and pan-African visions of development in the mid-20th century. This was true for African states across the political spectrum, from Tanzanian, Ghanaian, Senegalese, and Guinean socialism under Nyerere, Nkrumah, Senghor, and Touré; to capitalistic Kenya, Zaire, and South Africa under Kenyatta, Mobutu, and the apartheid regime. In the 1980s and 1990s, now-widespread Women in Development programs and the ideas underpinning them sometimes paved the way for Structural Adjustment-led cuts to African social welfare states and broader neoliberal impulses. Both building on and departing from existing literature – some of which centers white, North Atlantic-based actors such as Ester Boserup and treats neoliberal austerity as a one-dimensional imposition onto Africa – the paper examines the work of Eddah Gachukia. Gachukia was a Kenyan educator, women’s activist, anti-racist advocate, leader within the United Nations women’s movement, Member of Parliament, and NGO founder. Her work to develop the human capital of women through education beginning in the 1950s later became ambivalently coupled with neoliberal forms of austerity during Structural Adjustment. This paper does not argue for smooth transitions from the utopian socialist futures of the 1960s to neoliberal dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s. Nor does it claim that a complete rupture existed between the two periods. It instead searches for the frictions, uneasy alliances, and jagged edges through which socialist and other forms of African decolonization focused on women came to serve neoliberal cuts to the welfare state and the individualization of political action.