The United Nations Decade for the Advancement of Women, from 1975 to 1985, leaves a legacy of a deeper understanding of the issues, and the emergence of new networks with the experience and commitment to work for further changes. However, the role and status of women did not improve. There is a new commitment to struggle for the ending of all oppression, injustice and violence of all kinds at all levels. Feminism is a consciousness of all forms of women's oppression and a commitment to work against them. Feminist critiques illuminate the larger structures that oppress both women and men. New development theories embracing feminism are necessary to understand how patriarchy and economic systems propogate oppression. The production-oriented approach to rural development is flawed n failing to address women's lack of access to land, credit, training and new technologies. Overwhelming household tasks, cultural norms, and traditional attitudes limit women's involvement in training programs and other development activities. The basic needs approach to rural development provides access to vital services to meet a family's basic needs for nutrition, housing and clothing, and allows people's participation in decision making. However, women have little actual role in decision making so their needs, concerns and perspectives are not taken into account. Women are treated as instruments to achieve goals without appreciating their perspective. Project-based approached emphasize short term goals rather than laying the foundation for longterm changes. Few projects address structural issues or empower women. Projects must include education to increase personal growth and self reliance. Development planning can be enormously enhanced by taking gender differences into account and recognizing that people, specially poor women, can promote their own devleopment. Longterm strategies that challenge existing structures, address the existing economic order, and, most of all, recognize women's voices are needed.
Women play crucial roles in both production and reproduction, but development planners have focused on women as childbearers and homemakers rather than as individuals with their own needs and problems. Women are vehicles to achieve a project's ends. As a result, many ambitious development programs have failed. Women's health, necessary for their participation in programs, and traditional women's tasks have been neglected. Planners frequently disregard the demands and inflexibility of women's existing responsibilities. Most rural women work 10 to 12 hours per week and can not set aside family survival tasks to participate in classes, clinic visits or demonstrations. The 1st step in designing successful programs is to recognize the realities of poor women's lives, and to focus on the women themselves, their basic needs, health and responsibilities. Women must participate in planning their own development. Women's voices must be heard for programs that depend on their participation to succeed.
Proponents of income generation as a development strategy for women assume it will foster independence and economic power. However, household relationships affect women's ability to control their income. Prevailing codes of gender relationships may place the husband in control of all income. Women's participation in income generating projects may be inhibited if they do not expect to control the proceeds of their effort. Case histories from eastern Kenya of the Giriama and Mijikenda demonstrate how husbands control not only income but even group membership and participation. While household heads control the labor and income of other household members, how they choose to exercise these rights may vary. The wife's participation is viewed as withdrawing labor and cash from the household, so the husband has a claim on her income. The arrangement usually functions to benefit the household and ensure its success. Conflicts arise when the wife perceives that the arrangement is not beneficial to the household. Cultural differences between different ethnic groups may result in very different patterns of expenditures of women's income. Women are invariably in a subordinate position, dependent on their husbands to fulfill their share of the household responsibilities. Income generation enthusiasts are often ill informed about the context in which their programs operate.
To help the 50,000 people living in Saradidi improve their community, the Anglican Church of the Province of Kenya of originally organized a health project in 1979 as the cornerstone of an extensive rural development effort to reach people through parish and congregational committees. The Saradidi Health Program intended to reduce the high rates of infant and child mortality and morbidity by directly involving the community in the provision of its own health care and the improvement of its quality of life. Each village elected its own health and development commitee and later selected volunteers to work in the community. Training was given to those selected to organize teir communities for the health program--the Nyamrerwa or Village Health Helpers (VHHS). Their task was not simply to provide information about appropriate health practices, but the much more difficult 1 of spanning the 2 worlds of medical science and traditional beliefs and practices. Over the course of several years, the experience at Saradidi proved that these 2 worlds need not be in competition. They could be complementary provided that the VHHS were capable of integrating their newly-acquired knowledge with the common sense of centuries-old practice. An evaluation of the program has shown that the VHHS have now begun to accoomplish their task of influencing the practices and changing the attitudes of the people in Saradidi. The nonformal approach is effective because it involves the whole community in the process of promoting good health. The VHHS act as a catalyst, bringing together useful information and practices from the outside and making them part of the community's own information and practices.
In Egypt, as in many other countries throughout the world, diarrhea is the number 1 killer of children under 2. The recent medical miracle responsible for battling diarrhea is nothing more than a simple solution of salts, sugar and water, commonly known as oral rehydration solution (ORS). In Egypt, the use of ORS saved an estimated 130,000 infants over a brief period of 2 years, and since 1980, deaths associated with diarrhea have been reduced by nearly 2/3 for children under 2. However, the lives saved in Egypt would not have been possible if mothers, pharmacists, doctors and nurses had not known about ORS and had not used the solution in the proper way at the proper time. The process of education Egyptians about ORS occurred due to the adaptation of commercial marketing methods for socially beneficial ends. The National Control of Diarrehal Diseases Project has managed to get the message out to mothers and medical professionals through a carefully planned communications strategy involving the coordinated use of mass media, market research, and evaluation; and relying on a multiplicity of channels that encompassed the Ministry of Health, medical professionals, the private sector and foreign technical assistants. This article outlines the ways in which social marketing was used to make this project a success.
