Women culture development paradigm in practice

Research shows that if you help women in the third world, you help everyone.

Same ideas we've been learning in my global 180A class. Excerpt from a paper I wrote on development:

In light of the failings of capitalist development, the prospects for elevating the standard of living in the Third World seem dim. Fortunately, there are encouraging signs that some forms of development are more positive and successful than others. Too often, the needs of Third World countries are not taken into account by foreign development directors. A newer paradigm which challenges modernization theory is the basic-needs definition, which takes a more human approach to development gives “greater emphasis on health and education, and identifying the equitable distribution of wealth and resources as a development goal and strategy” (Schech and Haggis, 12). This approach is attached to standards that transcends the material, and focus on more human aspects of well-being through the provision of basic needs, taking precedence before profit. This strategy is alive in the United Nations’ Human Development Index (Schech and Haggis, 13), and a number of grassroots development movements resisting profit-based development around the world. More than profits, subsistence is presented as an end to development.

While women often bare the brunt of failed development strategies, they also are frequently integral to successful strategies centered on basic-needs. In the midst of continuous battle between Israel and Palestine, women on both sides are working together towards the development of a civic democratic society, with peace as a central tenant of development (Perry and Schenck, 136). In Colombia, madres comunitarias are viewed as the local “globalization success story,” with their counterpart being the “technomuscular capitalism” (Talcott, 30). These women are shifting the ends of development from the export of capital to meeting the immediate needs of locals.

Women are shifting the debate, creating yet another new paradigm for the notion of development, “decentering production as the chief site of political, economic, and cultural analysis” (Talcott, 4), in opposition to President Truman’s definition emphasizing production and profits as the ends to development. This new understanding of development takes gender into consideration, and acknowledges the existence of development at the local level, often led by women, in conjunction with or resistance to top down development.

Vandana Shiva has said that “development is a beautiful word, suggesting evolution from within” communities organizing at the grassroots level (Shiva, 107). Admittedly, prior to considering development from the basic-needs, self-determinist approach, I had only seen it through an antiglobalist lens, and not considered its positive implications and its prospects for success if prescribed from the local level. It is suggested that development has the ability to provide an antidote to the ills of globalization (lecture, 1/13/05). In light of having been presented with new perspective on the meaning of development, I have a greater understanding of the discourse surrounding the process, and a new sense of confidence that if the knowledge of alternate forms of development is applied, development can act as a positive force of change for people of the Third World.