Deconstructing development: the discourse of maendeleo and the

politics of women’s participation on Mount Kilimanjaro (published in: Development and Change, 2002, 33, 1, 101-27)

Dr Claire Mercer, Department of Geography, University of Wales Swansea,

Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP

C.C.Mercer@swansea.ac.uk

Abstract

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s

actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic

context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village-based women’s groups on Mount

Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this paper deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on

the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organisations

is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and

global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga

men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which

women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over-representation of

better-off and higher-status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest

women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing

inequalities within Chagga society.

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INTRODUCTION

Discourses on participation, empowerment and development

The positioning of participatory development and empowerment at the centre of both

radical and neo-liberal perspectives on development in recent years must surely be one of

the most remarkable convergence of opinion in discussions on development.

Disillusionment with state-sponsored attempts to encourage participation for

development in many newly-independent nations, widely read as mobilisation for

modernisation, firmly placed participatory approaches in the ‘alternative development’

camp as practised by NGOs and community organisations by the 1970s. Many of these

organisations, as well as development theorists and activists, influenced by the radical

approach to empowerment associated with Freire’s notions of conscientization, linked

participation to socio-economic and political empowerment during the 1980s.

Simultaneously, the hegemonic rise of neo-liberalism has lead to the re-discovery of

participation by states and multilateral agencies. As Mayoux (1995) has pointed out,

participation became ‘institutionalised’ in the 1980s, as the onus of development shifted

from the state to the people. While the instrumentalist vision of participation still wields

influence, governments and multilateral agencies have broadened their view of

participation, and are now extolling its virtues as an essential ingredient in notions of

democratic citizenship and sustainable development within the framework of a reformed

state. Against this backdrop of conflicting agendas, critical commentators have expressed

concern that the cross-over of participation and empowerment into the mainstream of

development theories and practices should alert us to the danger that they may merely

become, if we can assume that they have not done so already, empty ‘buzzwords’,

depoliticized of their original agenda for change (Cleaver 1999; Nederveen Pieterse 1998;

White 1996).

A growing critical literature has begun to engage with these tensions raises a number of

important issues for those who would advocate the efficacy of the participation and

empowerment approach as a workable solution to the grinding poverty and

disenfranchisement of the poor. Perhaps most significant of these are ‘the dangers of

localism’ (Mohan and Stokke 2000); the populist romanticising of ‘the local’, the focus

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on artificially-bounded homogenous ‘communities’ defined by development projects

(Cleaver 1999), and the failure to link local conditions to the effects of wider political and

economic forces. There is also recognition that participatory development and

empowerment are not apolitical tools which have similar effects over space and time.

Recent empirical work has shown that the benefits of participation, or the participatory

process itself, is often hi-jacked by local elites (Desai 1996; Green 2000; Mayoux 1995).

As Green (2000) has pointed out, a causal relationship is often assumed to exist between

participation and empowerment. Recent work has cast doubt upon this assumption,

however. Can we assume that participation is empowering? Moreover, who defines

empowerment, and how should it be measured? The significance of local social norms

and values in shaping people’s perceptions of such subjective concepts as development,

participation and empowerment has been noted by a number of authors (Cleaver 1999;

Kabeer 1999; Mayoux 1995). For example, Green’s work in southern Tanzania reveals

that local conceptions of what it means to ‘be empowered’ (although the term

‘empowerment’ is not recognised locally), which include building one’s own brick and

corrugated-roofed home, are entirely at odds with Western understandings of the term

associated with the alternative development school, which tend to eschew versions of

empowerment which focus on individualistic, materialist terms (as does the World Bank

(2000)) in favour of vague notions of community empowerment.

Recently, much of the work on participation and empowerment has focused on women.

Socialist feminist writers have been keen to point out that participation in women’s

organizations can lead to their individual and collective empowerment (Kabeer 1994;

Rowlands 1997; Sen and Grown 1987; Young 1993). The key to empowerment lies in

women’s abilities to overcome their ‘internalised oppression’, which starts on a personal

level and is consolidated and supported through women’s organizations and networks

(Rowlands 1997). Writing on Tanzania, Tripp refers to the opportunity for women to

develop a ‘new consciousness’ through participation in women’s organisations, which

‘allow women to think of themselves as a collectivity capable of meeting new challenges’

(1994:152). However, the concept of empowerment remains difficult to define and

evaluate (Kabeer 1999). Part of the problem with measuring (women’s) empowerment is

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that it is entirely subjective and open to value-based judgements of the ‘measurer’,

particularly when the measurers tend to be Western, white middle-class women and those

being measured are often poor, black women in the Developing World (Mohanty 1991).

Methodology and reflexivity aside, several writers have recently drawn attention to

empirical problems in the participation and empowerment literature, particularly as it

relates to women. There has been a tendency to imply that all women can be lifted out of

their internalized oppression through participation in groups. However, this denies the

effects of local politics and social hierarchies. Several studies have been undertaken

which suggest that particular groups of women tend to become involved in women’s

organizations (usually the relative elite in terms of wealth, status, ethnicity, religion).

More importantly, Mayoux (1995) has argued that greater attention needs to be paid to

understanding why women participate. As Kabeer (1999) has pointed out, there is a

difference between status and autonomy. That is, certain norms and values guide social

and cultural practice in any given locality, such that individual status is tied up in being

seen to adhere to such norms. A woman may exercise her agency by choosing to

conform with such expectations, although in doing so she may be compromising what to

an outsider appear to be her ‘best interests’. The question is whether choosing to adhere

to restrictive patriarchal norms, through which women may boost their status, constitutes

empowerment, for as Kabeer notes, ‘status is likely to be antithetical to empowerment’

(1999:457).

Following these lines of critical inquiry, this paper argues that analyses of participation

need to pay greater attention to local cultural norms and values, as well as to wider social,

cultural, political, and economic milieux in which people and places are embedded.

Recent work in geography and anthropology can be useful here in drawing attention to

the ways in which global discourses of development and modernity are translated,

appropriated and ‘re-worked’ (Pred and Watts 1992) at the local level by a range of actors

(Arce and Long 2000; Dahl and Rabo 1992; Peet and Watts 1996; Pigg 1992). This work

has begun to fill in the questions raised by writers such as Escobar (1995) and Ferguson

(1990), whose work has been significant in identifying the debilitating effects of the

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discourse of development, but which essentially privileges the effects of a dominant,

global discourse of development over the role of local actors in shaping and re-

appropriating the ‘symbols, practices and trappings’ (Arce and Long 2000:5) of

development and modernity according to their own world views (Dahl and Rabo 1992;

Everett 1997). Indeed, Escobar’s focus on the discourse of development has been

upbraided by those who argue for multiple discourses of development (Grillo 1997)

which compete against one another, undergoing redefinition as they jostle for pole

position as the hegemonic discourse in any given locality.

This paper draws on fieldwork carried out among Chagga village women’s organizations

in Hai District, situated on Mount Kilimanjaro in the north east of Tanzania. Drawing on

a post-Marxist1 framework within development studies which seeks to engage a

materialist ontology with certain insights of the postmodern critique of ‘development’,

the paper examines the material and the discursive relations in which women’s group in

Hai are embedded. The analysis differs from earlier Marxist-feminist approaches to

women’s cross-class organizations which privilege the conceptual tools of political

economy, and also from socialist-feminist approaches which imply that all women can be

lifted out of their subordinate position through the empowerment approach. Situating the

participatory process itself within wider discursive and material spheres, the paper argues

that insights into the motivations for peoples’ participation can be gained through the

deconstruction of development discourses in a given locality. Following Foucault (1977),

the dominant discourse of development on Mount Kilimanjaro, which I refer to as

maendeleo, is explored in order to unearth the layers of meaning contained within it, and

the subjectivities produced through active engagement with it, at the local level. I

suggest that a Chagga developmental subjectivity is constructed by the discourse of

maendeleo which provides a set of locally-informed norms and ideas about development

and how the individual should proceed. Furthermore, in focussing on participants within

the village context it becomes clear that participation is more usefully understood as an

individual strategy for gaining access to social status and material resources. Whether

this constitutes empowerment for those women who participate is a complex issue,

1 (See Booth 1994, Corbridge 1993, Slater 1992).

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towards which this paper can offer only tentative insights. My concern is to explore the

cultural and discursive spheres in which women’s groups are situated, and to argue that

these neglected dimensions of local social life are central to an understanding of the

wider potential for women’s empowerment and social change. It is concluded that

women’s groups tend to perpetuate the dominant development discourse while actively

excluding certain social groups from participating.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ON MOUNT KILIMANJARO

For the Chagga who live on the fertile lower slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, the twentieth

century brought wide-ranging transformations as local circumstances were shaped by,

and responded to, extra-local contexts (Moore 1986). Of particular significance were the

missionary societies which established stations across the mountain, dividing the

contiguous and densely populated coffee-banana belt into Roman Catholic and Lutheran

areas respectively2. During the early twentieth century Christianity spread quickly, and

Church influence has become at least as significant as that of the state. The missions

introduced and encouraged coffee cultivation. Initially distributed to village elites who

immediately sought to maximise their output through land appropriation and

consolidation, coffee production became the predominant commercial agricultural

activity for all farmers on the mountain, increasing from 100,000 trees in 1916 to 987,175

in 1925 (Iliffe 1979). Yet for those members of the poorer lineages who had not been

part of the initial elite-led ‘land-grab’ (Setel 1996), coffee production signalled the

emergence of pockets of poverty which deepened with time. The enduring legacies of

widespread coffee production were to integrate the Chagga into the global capitalist

economy, while simultaneously producing socio-economic inequalities. Popular

perceptions of the Chagga both within and outside Tanzania tend to focus on their

relative affluence rather than internal stratification. Indeed, the Chagga pride themselves

on being a modern and internationally-oriented group of people within Tanzania

(Stambach 1996b). Chagga have benefited from the transformations brought by the

introduction of the coffee crop. However, there are also signs of poverty. The region has

7

a higher rate of severe protein-calorie malnutrition than other (economically) poor

regions such as Tabora and Dodoma (Howard 1994), and suffers from high rates of

young male out-migration (Setel 1996), while many of those who stay on the mountain

are forced to eke out a living on plots of under once acre (Swantz 1985). Conditions for

farmers have become precarious since the coffee price crashes in the 1970s and the recent

withdrawal of state and donor support to Tanzania’s marketing cooperatives, associated

with the liberalisation of trade and structural adjustment during the 1990s (Gibbon 1998).

For example, national figures show a decline in the proportion of coffee exports within

Tanzania’s overall export profile from twenty per cent in 1990 to fourteen per cent in

1999 (http://www.imf.org/external/country/TZA/index.htm, 2000). In Hai District

council records show that coffee production fell by over fifty per cent, from an estimated

5,889 tonnes in 1976 to 2,855 tonnes in 1990 (Hai District Council 1997), although it is

not clear how much of this decline is attributable to the increasing costs associated with

coffee production, or from competition from private buyers’ posts which have sprung up

over the mountain in recent years. The precarious economic situation for Kilimanjaro’s

coffee farmers provides a significant backdrop against which women’s groups now

operate.

Women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro

The research for this study, carried out in 1996 and 1997, focused on formal village-

based women’s organisations3 in the mountain villages of Hai District. Discussions with

District and Ward Community Development Officers provided a general overview of the

extent and nature of formal women’s groups in the District, and four villages were

selected for further qualitative research (Nkawari, Nringa, Soni and Nshari4), based on

the representative range of women’s groups active within those villages5. Group

2 The spread of Islam on the mountain took place later than that of Christianity. The number of mosques is small and there are far fewer Muslims in less well-defined geographical areas than those dominated by Roman Catholics and Lutherans respectively. 3 ‘Formal women’s groups’ differentiates those groups which adhere to the dominant development discourse on Mount Kilimanjaro (which often seek donor support) from those more informal groups such as small savings and lineage groups. Not all such formal groups are registered with the District Community Development Office (although the majority are); most have a recognisable organisational structure comprising Chair, Secretary and Treasurer. 4 All names of people and places have been changed. 5 All four villages are Lutheran villages, the dominant denomination in Hai District.

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discussion meetings were held with all women’s groups in the four villages. A

qualitative household study was also undertaken in Nkawari village, where a wealth

ranking was carried out and a number of household representatives in each rank

interviewed. The qualitative material presented here relates in detail to four of these

women’s groups; the Nringa Women Dairy Cooperative (NWDC) in Nringa village, and

Ifaya Women’s Group, Kilalo Women’s Group, and Kwarungi Women’s Group, all in

Nkawari village.

As will become clear, formal women’s groups have a long history of organizing on

Mount Kilimanjaro, as in much of Tanzania. During the 1940s and 1950s missionaries

and colonial officers were important catalysts encouraging women to form groups which

focused on religious duties and instruction, and domestic education and income-

generation respectively (Mulligan-Hansel 1999, von Bülow 1995). Following

independence, the Tanzanian state launched the UWT6 (Union of Tanzanian Women)

affiliated to CCM7, which mirrored the structure of the CCM from the villages to the

national level. Groups were run as cooperative shops selling basic commodities, while

also engaging in activities such as clothes making, cookery, childcare, and other small

income-generating activities such as poultry projects and brewing (Geiger 1982,

Mulligan-Hansel 1999). The UWT’s presence in most villages (as well as work-places)

rendered it a significant mobilizer of women from the 1960s until the late 1980s when

national economic crisis hampered women’s local level efforts, although the national-

level structure of the UWT continues to exist. Economic pressures over the last two

decades have also precipitated the move towards income-generation activities among the

Lutheran and Roman Catholic church women’s groups, so that the majority of formal

women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro are now principally engaged in income-

generation. In fact, women’s groups are now the most numerous of all types of non-

governmental development activity on the mountain (von Bülow 1995; Kiondo 1995),

and in terms of their origin and means of support are variously linked to religious

institutions (Lutheran or Roman Catholic churches, mosques), the village government,

6 Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania.

9

private patrons, or the District Community Development Office. Those linked to their

local church or mosque are the most numerous, principally because of these institutions’

policies towards women and development. The Lutheran Church, for example, has a

women’s group in every parish. Most groups are run by elite women in the villages,

although many groups have male ‘advisors’ attached to them, such as the parish pastor

and evangelist, the imam, or prominent senior male villagers. The range of groups within

Hai is wide; the differences between, for example, the NWDC with over 400 members

and annual profits of Tsh500,000/=8, and the modest Jitegemea9 group in Soni village

with eight members selling locally-brewed beer, illustrate the stark gaps in donor support,

group leadership and income-generation activities which exist between women’s groups

(see table 1). However, despite the relative differences in size and commercial success,

the vast majority of women’s groups on the mountain engage in activities associated with

women’s roles in Chagga society; they centre on the home, childcare, women’s

agricultural responsibilities (caring for livestock, harvesting and grinding maize) and

‘community development’ initiatives such as running kindergartens, schools and training

centres for village youth (table 1).

[Table 1: Women’s groups in research villages: at end of paper]

Funding and support for women’s village-based organisations is a key factor in

differentiating between groups. Those groups under the umbrella of the Lutheran

Church, for example, tend to operate on negligible budgets. Women sell their handiwork

after church on Sundays and invest the profits into a church women’s account which the

women’s groups use at their discretion10, although the consent of the pastor and

evangelist is required. Financial support from the church is sometimes provided; more

often external assistance is sought through the church’s international links, or the women

7 Chama Cha Mapinduzi: (Party of the Revolution), the single party in Tanzania until the change to multi-partyism in 1992, which has since won elections in 1995 and 2000. 8 At the time of research Tsh1,000/= was roughly equal to £1 sterling. 9 Jitegemea: self-reliance. 10 At the time of research the only purchases any of the women’s groups in the study had made with their funds were in the form of donations to their church; one group had decided to donate a new altar with their fund money. Pastors are allowed to take a percentage of the women’s groups income for ‘general purposes’, although no specific information on this was forthcoming.

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themselves establish the group with their own (or their husbands’) contributions. For

example, Kwarungi Women’s Group in Nkawari village, established by Kwarungi

Church, runs a tailoring school and has recently started a livestock-keeping project

financed by German Lutherans with whom Kwarungi has particularly strong ties.

However, those groups which have fared better financially are often not linked to their

local church. The most successful groups have been those which have attracted the most

external funding, although such groups are in a minority. Based on data from the Ward

CDOs for all formal women’s groups in Hai, forty-nine per cent of the non-religious

groups in the district have no donor, thirty-nine per cent have one, while only twelve per

cent have more than one donor. The NWDC is the best-resourced group in the district. It

is also renowned as the largest and most successful village-based women’s income-

generating group in Kilimanjaro, gaining itself a national reputation. Kilalo Women’s

Group in Nkawari village has received support from two donors, the first of which helped

the group purchase a milling machine which is now run as an income-generating project,

while the second overseas donor funded the purchase of a large number of graded

milking cows for distribution among the members. The group is among the more

successful in the district. Nevertheless, the fact that almost fifty per cent of all non-

religious women’s groups have no donor indicates that the majority of women’s groups in

Hai operate small-scale, very low capital-intensive activities. They often have few

members, are less active and rely on what small amounts of capital they can raise

between themselves. A case in point is Ifaya Women’s Group, established some time ago

as a UWT branch under the umbrella of the Nkawari village government and which has

received support in the past, but which now faces problems of inertia, poor leadership and

a dearth of financial support.

In Hai District, seventy-nine per cent of all non-governmental development activities are

women’s income-generation activities11 (Mercer 1999; also Kiondo 1995). Given the

financial strains under which the majority of Tanzanians have increasingly found

11 Non-governmental development activity indicates the wide range of development-related pursuits undertaken by all types of non-governmental actors in the District (including women’s groups, community groups, international and national NGOs). Other types of non-governmental activity identified in the

11

themselves, it is no wonder that participation in community development initiatives

should be seen as an economic survival strategy (Kiondo 1995). Membership of the

village women’s groups in Hai, some of which make a sizeable income through

cooperative milk marketing, are seen by Chagga men and women as a strategy to boost

household income:

‘I joined soon after the cooperative started. I had cows but no market, so I had to join to get what I wanted….money’*12 (NWDC member).

CM13: ‘Why do you think Ifaya Women’s Group is important for village development?’ Respondent: ‘So that they [women] can do things together and can get income to use in the household’* (male villager, Nkawari).

‘Even here at Nkawari women wanted to start their own NGO….because people here are poor, they need to get some money, women need to get some money, to send children to school’* (male village leader, Nkawari).

The understanding that the economic benefits of female participation are to be shared by

the whole family rather than for the individual woman is a central point which shall be

returned to below.

DECONSTRUCTING MAENDELEO

On Mount Kilimanjaro, a locally-informed version of how to participate in and make

sense of the world is constantly being constructed and negotiated within the parameters

set on the wider scale (Moore 1996). Such is the case with the discourse of development,

or maendeleo14 in Swahili which stems from the verb kwenda (‘to go’, ‘move forward’,

survey included youth training projects (10%), village income-generation projects (3%), service provision and community empowerment (2%), and men’s income-generation (2%). 12 Quotations marked with an asterisk denote excerpts from interviews which were translated from Swahili or Kichagga into English by my research assistant (a Chagga woman) during the interview. 13 i.e. the author. 14 In the Chagga language, ‘development’ is translated as ilyilyo mbee (meaning to see far, to progress far), although this is not commonly used. Most Chagga prefer to speak of maendeleo rather than ilyilyo mbee, no doubt because it resonates with the language of independence and Nyerere’s entreaties to build and develop the nation (all of which was carried out in swahili due to Nyerere’s policy of promoting it as the national language).

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‘to progress’). Although maendeleo is widely used in East Africa and often denotes

similar ideas about development and progress, maendeleo is not a unitary, fixed discourse

over time and space, but rather is mutable, contingent, and open to local reinterpretation

and appropriation. A particular version of maendeleo has emerged on Mount

Kilimanjaro, fusing a number of shifting local, national and international discourses of

development, and producing a set of norms and values which are negotiated at the local

level to construct a distinctively Chagga developmental subjectivity.

Maendeleo on Kilimanjaro has been shaped and influenced by discourses circulating at

the local, national and international scales, and has become a hybridization of ideas about

modernity (associated with Westernization), Tanzanian national identity, and Chagga

norms and values. Maendeleo is concerned first and foremost with modernity and socio-

economic development. Village services such as electricity and water supplies, schools

and health facilities, and possessions such as cars and corrugated iron-roofed houses are

seen as symbols of maendeleo, indicating the culture of conspicuous consumption of

Western items which has become intimately bound up with notions of development and

progress on the mountain (Moore 1996). Simultaneously, certain aspects of Chagga

lifestyles, such as keeping improved livestock and using good agricultural practices are

also central to maendeleo. These aspects draw on the cultural importance of livestock

and subsisting (at least in part) from the products of the family land. It is not the aim here

to posit the modern (Western) against an implicitly inferior traditional (Chagga) way of

being and doing. Rather, the intertwining of the modern and the local within the

discourse of maendeleo should be seen as mutually reinforcing, reflecting the Chagga

desire to uphold local cultural meanings associated with livestock, land and agriculture,

while incorporating the trappings of the modern way of life into the village, homestead,

or individual sphere of influence (Stambach 1996a; 1996b).

National level discourses of development have also filtered down to the local level and

have become incorporated into the dominant discourse of development. The rhetoric

associated with Nyerere’s nation-building strategies of the 1960s and 1970s, embodied in

the Arusha Declaration (1967) and ujamaa, made their mark on the national

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consciousness. Although during this period Kilimanjaro’s elites attempted to protect the

mountain from the material effects of the post-colonial state’s commitment to

redistribution, it is quite clear that Nyerere’s powerful development discourse embodied

within ujamaa had a far more subtle effect. He called for the pursuit of modernisation,

progress and development through the increased production, self-reliance and

egalitarianism of and among the people. Moreover, Nyerere’s ‘fatherly visions of guided

participation’ (Sundet 194:43) not only entreated Tanzanians to ‘build the nation’, but

constructed a Tanzanian national identity based on the nation as ‘the African extended

family writ large’ (Rubin 1996:264). In this way, Nyerere’s ideas about development,

participation and self-reliance became central to Tanzanian national identity. On

Kilimanjaro, policies such as villagization had less direct impact than elsewhere in

Tanzania15, yet the rhetoric of self-sufficiency and self-reliance filtered down to those

living on the mountain. These ideas are still prevalent in the way that Chagga talk about

what maendeleo means to them today.

Significant in explaining the proliferation of village-based women’s groups on

Kilimanjaro is the gendered nature of the discourse of maendeleo. The interweaving of

local, national, and international discourses on women in development produces norms

and expectations of how men and women should participate in the development process.

The absence of village-based male groups, or even mixed-gender groups, is no doubt

related to greater individualised male participation in the formal economy. Indeed, the

open pursuit of individual political and material advancement has gained legitimacy

within Tanzania following the shift to multi-partyism and a neo-liberal economy (Moore

1996, Rubin 1996). Nevertheless, collaborating in a group for community-based

maendeleo has become associated with women and domesticity. On Kilimanjaro, ideas

about women’s role in development have been shaped over time by Chagga patriarchal

values, religious institutions, the Tanzanian state, and international development policies

on women and gender. These perspectives have often been conflictual and women’s

income-generation activities have been an area of contestation between the church, which

15 Given the high population densities and problems with land availability on the mountain, people were not physically moved into new villages as part of the villagisation policy, although village boundaries and

14

promotes the idea that respectable women should eschew private business in favour of

group activities, and the vast majority of women (including the Chairladies of church

groups) who engage in petty trade out of financial necessity. The Church’s position has

nevertheless been extremely influential in shaping ideas about respectable gender roles.

For example, it is a policy of the Lutheran Church’s Women Department to establish a

women’s group in every parish. Women are encouraged to join their parish women’s

groups in order to learn about their roles as housewives, mothers, and being useful

community members. As the Pastor of one Lutheran Church commented:

‘[The women’s group] was founded by the Church because they found that women at the Church had nothing to keep them busy, nothing to produce for families’*.

A female farmer in Nkawari further explained that:

‘I was one of the first women to join [Kilalo Women’s Group] because I was a leader in the Church and the message came through the Church….we were told to join by the Church to set an example to other women’*.

The Chairlady for the Lutheran Church’s Women Department in the region further

elaborated on the church’s policy on women’s role in development:

‘We are trying to empower women through participation in tandem with community development and women’s role in the community. Women’s role is central, they have a big care-taking responsibility. They need to be equipped with the knowledge for rearing children, and taking care of those in employment. This is a peasant society so women are doing the most part of the work. So we want to give women the awareness and skills to cope with the everyday burden of work. We give this to women through groups. They get advice on how to manage the household, education, taking care of the family property, cattle keeping, keeping money, how to aid family income through small projects such as handicrafts and vegetable gardens, health education, community education, civics’.

The Church is not alone in promoting women’s communal activities. While many of the

women’s groups in Hai District were formed relatively recently (1990s), a number of

groups have existed in various guises for some time. As outlined earlier, during the

administrative structures were reordered accordingly (Moore 1986).

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1960s the UWT established a network of village- and workplace-branches and became

the government’s channel for defining and disseminating ideas about women’s role in

national development. The UWT groups themselves have withered since the 1980s,

although their members have often re-incarnated themselves into ‘new’ women’s groups.

For example, Ifaya Women’s Group claims to have been established in 1990 (table 1),

while discussions with individual members revealed that the group was a former UWT

group which had simply recast itself following the UWT’s demise. Stimulus for

women’s collective organisation continues to come from the state. Following their earlier

role in colonial times, Community Development Officers perform outreach work with

women’s organisations in Hai. They meet with women in villages, encourage them to

form income-generation groups and promote group membership of women’s umbrella

organisations which masquerade as NGOs16, but which in reality are linked to the state.

Over time, both church and state have played important roles in fostering widespread

acceptance of the link between women, collective organisation, and community

development on Kilimanjaro. This has been supported by the shift within international

development discourses towards a concern for women in development, and the focus on

women’s organisations as vehicles of a more socially-inclusive development (Kabeer

1994). Such discourses have important material effects at the local level, particularly on

Kilimanjaro where elite men and women are linked to networks of knowledge and

information which convey messages from the donor circles of Dar es Salaam to the

villages on the mountain, as the Chairlady of Kilalo Women’s Group suggests:

“We heard about women’s groups announced on the radio and in the newspapers, and we heard of Nringa, and we started to think why didn’t we start our own?”*

The dominance of community activities by formal women’s groups arises from the

interweaving of a number of discourses which circulate at different levels. The focus of

16 In Hai District: KIWODEA, a women’s umbrella ‘NGO’ established and run by a number of government staff within the Regional Community Development Office and local entrepreneurs, gives loans to women’s groups on receipt of the groups’ payment of a hefty ‘fee’ to join the umbrella. Loans are repayable at a 20 percent interest rate; another is a national government fund which is administered by the Ministry of Community Development, Women and Children, which also identifies itself as an ‘NGO’.

16

the international development community on women’s organisations interweaves with a

highly gendered national development policy and local patriarchal socio-cultural

practices on Kilimanjaro, all of which contain strong messages about women’s

contribution to ‘development’. Within this discursive environment, accounting for the

dominance of community-based development activities by women’s groups appears

straightforward: forming groups under the aegis of a church, mosque, the village

government or local Community Development Office is regarded as a safe and

respectable vehicle through which women may pursue development. However, to

understand the processes of women’s participation in, or exclusion from, village-based

community groups, it is necessary to explore the ways in which individuals are actively

involved in reappropriating the normative values inherent within the discourse of

maendeleo.

The subjects of maendeleo

Chagga men and women have played an active role the re-appropriation of maendeleo,

producing a distinctive Chagga developmental subjectivity which produces a set of norms

and values about the role of the individual in the development process. Maendeleo

represents all that is ‘good’ according to the Chagga. Maendeleo first and foremost

represents modernity and progress, but is also embedded in Chagga cultural norms and

values relating to gender, education, industriousness and religiosity. These are values to

which the attainment of prestige and status on the mountain are attached. To be a ‘good’

Chagga man or woman is to actively engage, or conform, with these ideals. It is not

uncommon, for example, to hear of villagers being described by their neighbours as

‘development-minded’ or ‘a progressive person’. In this way, a distinct ideal Chagga

‘developmental’ subjectivity is shaped by the discourse of maendeleo.

Rather than completely redefining local identities, maendeleo has introduced new

measures of power and status which are given local meaning according to existing norms

and ideas (Moore 1996). However, certain groups and individuals are able to work

within these culturally constructed notions of prestige and status in order to advance

themselves, their families, or their community groups.

17

Most frequently, maendeleo is associated with the socio-cultural values central to Chagga

identity; education, industriousness, and knowledge. Social traits which are frowned

upon, such as laziness and ignorance, are regarded as the preserve of those who are

‘undeveloped’. The ideal Chagga developmental subject is someone who has some

education and who can send their children to school, s/he works hard and is never idle,

s/he only drinks local brew after working hours (and not in public bars in the case of

women), s/he does not believe in ‘backward’ ideas such as witchcraft, and s/he follows

religious teachings. It also helps if the person is financially successful, owns a car, lives

in a concrete house, holds down a paid job, and can host the neighbours in style for

important social events such as weddings and funerals (applicable to men). Indeed, this

normative subject position is a gendered one: while men must live up to the cultural

expectations surrounding male roles in the family and community, women must fulfil

their roles as good housewives, mothers, and community members. One way women

achieve this is through membership of local women’s groups.

Being part of a community-based women’s group is often directly associated with notions

of ‘development’ and ‘progress’. Several women made such a connection when talking

about the benefits they gained from participating in their groups:

‘I joined the women’s group to get good progress in my household’* (Kilalo member).

‘…I wanted to work for development and acquire my daily needs in my home’* (NWDC member).

Moreover, to appear to be ‘development-minded’ and a ‘progressive person’ is bound up

in the Chagga imagination with education, modernity and industriousness. Those who

are not members of groups are considered to be ‘uneducated’ and as not ‘knowing’. As

the leaders of one of the Lutheran Church women’s group remarked:

Pastor: ‘The problem is a lack of education. Most women don’t understand the benefit of joining other women [in women’s groups]. Some women are too proud

18

and rich, and don’t feel they need to join a women’s group when they are rich enough, what would they gain?’ Evangelist: ‘Some women are proud because they are too jealous to share their knowledge with other women’*.

In another interview:

CM: ‘What do women gain from joining these groups?’ Mama Anna: ‘They learn a lot about childcare and looking after the household’. CM: ‘How do you think this helps women’s position in the village?’ MA: ‘It helps women a lot, some members could not get cows on their own, so they are getting cows and milk. Also it keeps women busy rather than wasting time in local bars. Also doing household visits you learn a lot….about mats, making tea….that you can try and do in your own home’* (Kilalo member).

In the first exchange, members of groups are represented as educated and willing to share

knowledge, while non-members are regarded as ignorant and non-development-minded.

In both discussions the undesirability of pride and the consumption of alcohol in public

are highlighted as practices of women who do not participate in women’s groups.

Moreover, there is a sense in which social control can be exercised over women who, by

spending time in village bars, are perceived as a ‘threat’ to married women’s interests.

Village elites, and group members themselves, construct images of women’s group

participants as respectable Chagga who ‘understand’ the benefits of local development.

Women’s groups can also be viewed by men as a vehicle for ‘correcting’ the behaviour of

women who exhibit ‘undesirable’ social traits:

‘How can I get my wife into Kilalo Women’s Group? We are having some quarrels, she went to KCMC [Lutheran Church hospital] a while ago, and while she was away I found a lot of things in our home to do with witchcraft which belong to her. Now that she has come out of hospital she is too afraid to return home and she is living with her parents. I need her at home to look after the children….I want to try and get her into the group because it can help the household, and maybe we could get a cow’* (male villager, Nkawari).

Participation in an income-generating group is also important for some women because it

enables them to improve their family status by educating their children:

19

‘It is very important to be in the women’s group because it can help us to raise the status of our families by paying school fees for our children’* (Jiendeleze member).

The value attached to education, and its implications for ‘development’, are evident

(Stambach 1996b). Women are thus able to conform to local and national development

discourses which encourage them to be development-minded and industrious. By taking

an active part in their local women’s groups they are fulfilling Chagga ideals about what

it means to be a good, Christian or Muslim, modern Chagga housewife, and national

ideals about the role of women in the household, community, and the nation. However,

not all women are included in such women’s groups, and it is to the issue of unequal

participation that we now turn.

INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION

As outlined earlier, social life on Mount Kilimanjaro is deeply marked by stark

inequalities between rich and poor. Opportunities for participation in village-based

women’s organisations are related to social position. In Nkawari village, such patterns

are not universal, but a general picture emerges in which both the very poorest and the

very richest women are not participating in local women’s groups (tables 3 and 4). It is

the middle wealth groups (wealth groups three and four, see wealth rankings in table 2),

and a substantial proportion of the upper wealth group (wealth group two) which are most

active in the village women’s groups. The poorest wealth group (five) and also the

richest wealth group (one), are the most under-represented groups in terms of

membership of women’s groups17. In the case of the Kilalo Women’s Group, which has

distributed cows donated by an overseas NGO to some of its members, the middle and

upper wealth groups are also represented disproportionately among the recipients (table

4). In fact not one household ranked one or five received a cow from the group.

17 Wealthy women do not participate because they are often away from the village, either in local towns or further afield, running businesses or visiting family. Their relative wealth and status in the village is such that they have no immediate need to boost either of these through joining a women’s organisation. From the perspective of those in the village, these women are viewed as ‘rich and proud’.

20

Wealth rankings were used as a guide to household wealth, and were generally accurate

in those households interviewed18. A good proportion of the villagers in Nkawari are

relatively prosperous (table 2). The biggest rank group (four) is taken as the ‘average’

standard of living (in wealth ranking sessions informants described this group as wastan,

meaning normal or average). These households are not considered to be ‘poor’ in this

study. It is wealth group (five), identified during discussions as either maskini (poor) or

fukara (almost destitute) who are considered to be the very poorest and marginalized

people in the village.

Table 2 Descriptions of wealth ranks in Nkawari village

Wealth Rank

% of HH in Nkawari

Description

1

2.5 Extremely wealthy, owns businesses, cars, large modern house, children may be educated up to university (possibly out of Tanzania eg Kenya), “most advanced people in the village”

2

8.0 Wealthy, can educate children to high levels, nice house and big farm, 3-4 cattle, can help neighbours and hold big ceremonies, may have a job, runs businesses

3

26.3 Has a concrete house, 2-3 livestock, can usually educate children to Form 4, may own a car, fair-sized farm, may be employed (e.g. as teacher), or run small businesses

4

46.8 Manages daily subsistence, 1-2 cattle, 1-2 acres of farmland, educate children to Standard 7 (sometimes Form 4), often have concrete homes (although some made from mud), may receive help from relatives

5 16.4 Very poor, cannot educate children, food insecure, little or no land, lives in a mud shack, may work as labourer, or be unable to work, e.g. sick/disabled/old, dependent on neighbours and relatives

Table 3 Wealth rankings of all women’s group members in Nkawari village

Wealth rank Standardised no. of HH in Nkawari

Total no. of members of all groups

% of members of all groups

1 8.1565 40.8 19.6 2 2.5013 60.0 28.8 3 0.7595 62.3 29.9 4 0.4273 33.3 16.0 5 1.2181 12.2 5.8 Total 208.6 100.1

18 Fifty-five semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out with either the male or female household head, or with both together, depending on who was at home at the time of interview.

21

Table 4 Wealth rankings and cow donations (Kilalo only) for members of Kwarungi, Ifaya and Kilalo women’s groups in Nkawari village Wealth rank % women

Kw’gi % women Ifaya

% women Kilalo

% Kilalo women with cows

1 39.2 0 8.3 0 2 42.1 9.4 22.7 22.0 3 10.1 51.8 40.7 51.5 4 7.2 11.3 24.6 26.5 5 1.4 27.5 3.7 0 Total 100 100 100 100 N.B. Tables 3 and 4 show members of women’s groups in each wealth group, where the number of households in each wealth group has been standardised according to the total number of households in the entire village, as in the results presented in the wealth rankings in table 2.

Participation in women’s community groups is linked to the status of an individual or

household. Women from households whose members are prominent in the village, either

through association with a local church, mosque, the village government or the village

coffee co-operative, or whose husbands have prestigious jobs in the local towns or further

afield, are often involved in their local women’s organisation. The distribution of cows

among the Kilalo Women’s Group in Nkawari Village has similar effects (table 4). The

majority of recipients are in the middle and upper wealth groups from higher status

households. The influence of wealth and status on women’s participation is particularly

evident among the leaders of the various women’s groups, who are drawn predominantly

from the middle and upper wealth groups. These women are also often distinguished

either through their occupation, other positions held within the village, or the status of

their husband (all of the women are married).

These patterns of inclusion and exclusion were often commented upon in discussions and

interviews. While those directly involved in women’s organisations are keen to

demonstrate that they are helping the poorest members of the community, other

commentators remain unconvinced, such as this Ward Community Development Officer:

“Most of the women’s groups are formed by not very poor women and very few NGOs [i.e. community-based organisations] have rich women. It’s difficult to start an NGO with a mix of rich and poor women because at first most NGOs start with

22

their own contributions so it’s difficult to agree on what to contribute. Most of the rich women are self-sufficient and don’t want to co-operate with the poorest women, so NGO members are usually of the same status”*.

Entrance fees and periodic donations for women’s groups is common practice,

particularly for those groups surviving without financial help. Contributions range from

relatively small sums of approximately Tsh1,000/=19 to quite substantial amounts (such

as one group which planned contributions of Tsh50,000/= each over three years).

Entrance fees were a barrier for the poorest households whose female members had not

joined their local group:

CM: ‘Why didn’t your wife join the Kilalo women’s group?’ Joseph: ‘We heard about it but we couldn’t afford it. We knew how much it cost’* (male villager, Nkawari).

‘I have heard about Kilalo Women’s Group but it was too expensive’* (female villager, Nkawari).

Many women also cited the constraints placed upon them by their domestic workloads as

a reason for their non-participation, while others highlighted patriarchal social norms

which discourage women ‘roaming’ the village alone:

‘I’m a member of Kwarungi Church but I’m not a member of the women’s department. I would very much like to join, but the problem is time. I have to stay here and look after the children, the livestock, go to the market - I don’t have time to attend meetings at the Church’* (female villager, Nkawari).

‘Women do not join groups for several reasons; domestic problems, husbands are not willing to allow their wives to go out; women are busy from 6am to 6pm, they have no chance to get out…. for example, it is only through my work that I can get out of the house, if not what would I do? My husband wouldn’t let me out’* (Kilalo member).

A number of women also pointed to the perceived differences in women’s status and

prestige, suggested here by one of the Kilalo Women’s Group leaders from a wealthy

household;

23

‘Some women don’t join because they feel inferior, they think that members are rich, can afford things and can be close to the Church, they are in good positions’* (Kilalo member).

Group members are usually among the better-off sections of the community; they are

active members of the church, dress well and have good homes, are married to husbands

with formal sector jobs, and may have either worked or attained some secondary

schooling themselves. These women are able to conform to the ideas and norms

associated with being a good Chagga woman concerned with ‘development’. The

majority of members are also older, married women. The relative status commanded by

these women tend to discourage younger women from participating. Poor women find it

difficult to participate in group projects because they feel inferior, but elite women are

also involved in excluding those who do not match the required standards. To be seen to

‘fit in’ and to belong to the ‘right’ social group is an important factor influencing

participation. As a former Chairlady of Ifaya Women’s Group who was eventually asked

to step down by the members lamented:

‘Ifaya women have a certain calibre – if you’re not born here and are not either Muslim or Lutheran then they are not happy with you. I was born in Kilema [East Kilimanjaro] and I’m a Roman Catholic’* (female villager, Nkawari).

Membership of a women’s group is an important element in elite women’s strategies to

maintain their position in the village.

The social position of a woman and the household from which she comes is therefore

central to an understanding of the ways in which opportunities for participation in local

women’s organisations are structured. Chagga social norms differentiate women

according to age, marital status, religion and wealth, producing hierarchies of prestige

which have repercussions for women’s inclusion and exclusion. In Nkawari village, the

membership, and particularly the leadership, of women’s groups is overwhelmingly

19 In 1996 Tsh1,000 = £1.

24

characterised by older, married women who come from the middle and upper wealth and

social status groups.

Participation: empowering women?

While it is clear that certain women are excluded from participating in women’s groups,

it does not necessarily follow that the participatory process is an empowering experience

for those involved. The extent of women’s participation in the groups based in the four

villages included in this study ranges from the nominal (where the group exists virtually

in name only and has ceased operations), to the minimal (where only the committee

meets regularly). In between there are a number of women’s groups which are lying

dormant while ‘waiting for donors’, or whose activities require infrequent meetings. In

nearly all cases, it is the executive committee of each group which is the most active in

terms of decision-making. As observed above, these roles are usually filled by local elite

women. Many of the positions on these committees have not changed hands for several

years, which means the most active roles within the women’s groups remain with elite

members of the community. In those cases where leaders have left the group it may be

come time before their positions are filled. Very little is required of ordinary members in

terms of active input, as one of the committee members of the Kwarungi Women’s Group

explains:

‘We started a small group of a few women who can contribute something….we announced to all KKKT women [i.e. women attending Kwarungi Lutheran Church] that anyone interested could join for a membership fee of Tsh1,000/=….the women’s group has a committee of seven although currently there are just four. One died, one left the village and one is sick….most of the members are not active. Many don’t contribute but they are asking if there is any profit. We are thinking of calling a meeting for all members to say that if anyone is unwilling to do as required then maybe they should leave the group. It is better to remain with a few who are interested and working properly. Members should pay their fees and buy their shares, and they should attend meetings and activities of the group. The committee meets once a month and the whole group meets twice a year’*.

The primary aim of the members of the Kwarungi Women’s Group is to support

livestock-keeping. This has required donations upwards of Tsh1,000/= and intermittent

communal labour, such as the collecting of wood to build a new kibanda (cow hut).

25

From the members’ perspective, this has entailed very little participation on their part, as

one woman elucidates:

‘I contributed some money, Tsh1,000/=, for the cows, and we have obtained Tsh1,000/= profit since then. But I do not have time to go there and sit in a meeting. Other women are discouraged because it is almost 4-5 years since we contributed the money for the cows and up to now we haven’t seen any good profit. Most of the women think the leaders are using the money for their own benefit, so they don’t see why they should contribute ideas and money….I don’t know what’s going on with the project since I paid my Tsh1,000/= and got my Tsh1,000/= profit. Now they have so many activities including the cows that I don’t know what they are doing….I don’t know, I don’t participate’*.

Although this woman’s non-participation is presented as her own choice (or at least, she

is constrained by her domestic workload), her participation is nevertheless couched in

terms of financial support to the group. Comments from members of the Kilalo Women’s

Group suggest that such experiences are not uncommon:

‘I go to meetings and exchange views, sometimes we divide the profit. I don’t know where the cows came from, I didn’t ask….and I don’t remember the last time I attended a meeting, I’m busy most of the time’* (Kilalo member).

The commercial success of NWDC in Nringa village offers an alternative perspective.

The group enjoys the most donor support of all women’s groups in the district, and has

forged links to the local and regional state. Nringa village is well-positioned within local

and national networks which have helped it gain access to donors. It is also one of the

most prosperous and influential villages in Hai District. Many residents have risen to

prominent positions in government and within the private sector, and remittances support

a number of village projects. The demand for NWDC milk among the Nringa diaspora

(which stretches to Dar es Salaam) has aided the project’s success. Members have

frequent contact with the organisation as they have to go to the offices once a month in

order to receive the payments for their milk sales to the cooperative. Committee

members are voted in once a year although the manager, a former Nringa UWT leader

and primary school teacher by profession, has remained in her post since the organisation

was founded in 1988 due to popular demand. Well-attended meetings are held for the

26

entire 400-strong membership three times a year at which decisions and developments are

discussed, and the management enjoy a relatively high degree of legitimacy among the

members. Members are familiar with the group’s activities (including long-term plans

which include acquiring a tractor and a small bus) and feel fully involved in the

organisation. Nringa enjoys a higher degree of visibility and status within the village

than most other women’s groups, partly because the of the significant income it generates

for its members, now a vital part of household budgets given the recent decrease in

profits from coffee sales:

‘The importance of coffee has declined over the last few years….now there is less overall production. Now we are keeping dairy cows, selling calves, and the milk project [NWDC] is contributing a lot to help families’* (Men’s group discussion, Nringa).

The benefits of membership are interpreted, both by men and women, in terms of gains

for the family rather than for the individual women. As two members of the cooperative

explained;

‘Now that we have the project we can earn monthly and do something with the money. Also because women take care of the children, we can now pay school fees….now we have enough money for the family, we can work together with our husbands to make good homes’* (NWDC member).

‘Before the project, women stayed at home with the family and looked after the children. Now the project has made this much easier’* (NWDC member).

The financial benefits of the NWDC are the exception on Kilimanjaro. The experiences

of the women’s groups in Nshari and Soni villages, for example, are closer to the

Kwarungi Women’s Group in Nkawari. Several of the women’s groups in these two

villages have joined one of two major women’s umbrella organisations: KIWODEA20, a

regional umbrella for women’s NGOs, and BAWATA21, a national umbrella NGO for

women’s organisations, both of which use Ward Community Development Officers to

recruit village women’s groups. They offer substantial loans to those groups which pay

20 See note 12 above.

27

their entrance and contribution fees. However many of the village-based women’s

groups in Nshari and Soni which had joined one of these organisations were not clear on

their entitlements as members. In one case, the members of a group had paid their fees to

join BAWATA to their Ward CDO, who subsequently did not visit them again over a

period of several years. While such incidences point to the lack of accountability of the

umbrella organisations and some Ward CDOs at village level, they also suggest a general

lack of interest among members, or a lack of communication between leaders and

members. It is clear that women are not demanding greater accountability from these

organisations. The possibility that this is largely because they do not feel able or willing

to take such action cannot be overlooked.

It is unlikely that minimal levels of participation play an active role in fostering the

empowerment of the majority of women; nor is it apparent that these women would wish

to be empowered. However, as Kabeer (1999) has noted, there is a danger of measuring

women’s participation and empowerment against a set of value-judgements which may

hold little significance for the women concerned. From the position of the members,

there are important gains to be made from membership of local groups. For those women

involved in successful economic groups, the extra income is a huge incentive. For some,

this signals a wider process of social and economic change on the mountain which is

prompting the reconfiguration of gender relations:

CM: ‘Why are there many women’s groups but no men’s groups?’ Mama Lucy: ‘They don’t want to. Most husbands cannot even afford their own clothes, women have to struggle to buy them for them’. CM: ‘But don’t men get money from coffee?’ ML: ‘Most of them like drink. Most men wake up in the morning, go out for a walk, when they come back the wife will have made tea, lunch or dinner and he has done nothing. But who is paying the school fees? Most of the time it is women’. CM: ‘So who plays important roles in development in Nkawari?’ ML: ‘Women. We had a meeting for women here and discussed household development, we discussed the weaknesses of our husbands, so women should think what they can do and use whatever they earn to look after the household and the family. Mama Masawe, the Chairlady for the Church Women Department, organises these meetings to discuss development in the household. All things in the

21 Baraza la Wanawake Tanzania (Council of Tanzanian Women).

28

home are being bought by women – we go to the market, sell some bananas, get Tsh2,000/=, and think: how can I use this? Then we buy cups and spoons… we are learning these things in our group’. CM: ‘Have things changed for women then?’ ML: ‘It’s a better life than before because we are now allowed to have money and are allowed to buy things for the house like cows, a bed….we are allowed to do this by our husbands....Women have attended meetings and learned, and now men have come to learn that women can bring development to the household, so most men are now giving their women freedom to do their own things’* (Kilalo member).

A number of women also highlighted the positive social outcomes of their participation:

‘I want to be with other women, I can’t stay inside without knowing what other women are talking about. We are getting cows, education, and relaxation of mind’* (Kilalo member).

‘I can’t stay at home idle without exchanging ideas with other women. My grandchildren are noisy so meetings are a time to relax….there aren’t many other opportunities for women in the village’* (Kilalo member).

These social benefits are clearly important gains for women. Given the realities and

constraints for women associated with the patriarchal norms of Chagga society, there are

few opportunities for women to meet other than at church, the mosque or the market, or

during the course of their daily domestic chores. Whether such benefits constitute

women’s empowerment, or whether participation is simply a mechanism for boosting

women’s income, status and social support network, is a more difficult question. It is

clear that membership of economically successful women’s groups can help women by

increasing their income, which may in turn allow them to play a greater economic and

decision-making role in their household. However, recent problems associated with

coffee production may well have resulted in greater pressure being placed on women to

contribute to family budgets. It is unclear whether women are able to take control over

their labour, time and money, or whether they are under increasing pressure to substitute

for declining household incomes by covering school and medical fees and farm inputs.

At the same time, the social status to be gained from educating one’s children may offset

any negative consequences of increased financial pressure which women may experience.

However, a minority of the women’s groups in Hai District are able to offer members

29

substantial income. Economic benefits may be an incentive to start or join a group, but

they are not always realised. This suggests that social gains are an important benefit for

the majority of women engaged in non-capital-intensive activities. Some group activities

are concerned with meeting what have been defined as women’s practical gender

interests (Molyneux 1985), such as the church groups. However, the focus of these

women’s groups is on equipping women to meet the demands of Chagga society as they

stand, rather than encouraging women to challenge the status quo. Both men and women

view membership entirely in terms of possibilities for boosting household incomes and

family status. Little mention is made of women’s positions and the possibilities for

changes in gender relations. Church groups encourage women to conform to the model

of the ideal Chagga Christian wife, mother, daughter, or community member as

constructed by the discourse of maendeleo, which in turn is appropriated by some women

to obtain social status.

CONCLUSION

Participation in women’s groups on Kilimanjaro is an unequal process in which better off

individuals are able to take the norms and values constructed by the dominant

development discourse of maendeleo and work within them to further their interests.

Women’s participation is channelled into group activities which are acceptable within

patriarchal society, and which are encouraged internationally as an appropriate vehicle

for achieving women’s empowerment. They operate under the aegis of religious

institutions, private patrons, donors or the local state, which serve to legitimise the

women’s organisations, and the groups engage in activities which are considered to be

socially acceptable for women. For the women involved, they are able to present

themselves as the ideal female Chagga developmental subject, boosting their personal

and family status, their social networks, and, in some cases, their income. Whether or not

this constitutes empowerment is a moot point: what is clear is the way in which

participation is reinterpreted and reappropriated on Mount Kilimanjaro, highlighting the

inadequacies of much (Western) development literature which fails to recognise the

manner in which local social, cultural, political and economic conditions influence

people’s agendas and motivations for ‘getting involved’. Moreover, this paper has shown

30

how the participatory process serves to exclude, in both material and discursive terms, the

very poorest women: precisely the category which is often assumed to have the most to

gain from participatory development. On Mount Kilimanjaro, participation reproduces

existing inequalities.

This paper has revealed the ways in which the ‘dangers of localism’ (Mohan and Stokke

2000) distort understandings of development. ‘The local’, the site of participation and

empowerment, is not a bounded, even space, but rather is embedded in wider relations of

discursive meaning and material exchange which produce inequalities, but also

possibilities for change, at the local level. Nevertheless, romanticising about the

empowerment of local communities is problematic. People do not engage in

‘development’ activities because they want to be empowered, as understood within the

‘alternative’ (Western) discourse on development. Individual men and women have their

own agendas. For those who are able and willing to participate, empowerment is not

automatically forthcoming. Women’s groups form a part of a strategy for consolidating

some individual women’s interests (whether these be social, political or economic), but

the suggestion that they can issue forth sustainable improvements in the lives of the

majority of poor disenfranchised women should be treated with caution. Advocates of

participatory development and community empowerment, particularly of women, may

have to come to terms with the fact that those who are imagined to desire empowerment

actually value ‘status over autonomy’.

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Freda Mary Dumkow Scholarship in the Department

of Geography, University of Liverpool. For constructive criticism on earlier drafts the

author would like to thank two anonymous referees, Bill Gould, Katie Willis, and John

Campbell, as well as participants at the DSA conference session on participatory

development (September 1999, Bath), and the LSE Geography, Environment and

Planning Research Seminar (November 1999, London).

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