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Fixing women or fixing the world? ‘Smart economics’, efficiency approaches, and gender equality in development Sylvia Chant & Caroline Sweetman Published online: 08 Nov 2012.

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Fixing women or fixing the world? ‘Smart

economics’, efficiency approaches, and

gender equality in development1

Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman

This article focuses on the current trend for investing in women and girls as ‘smart

economics’, which is a direct descendant of the efficiency approach to women in

development (WID) prevalent in the wake of the economic crisis in the 1980s. We

highlight the dangers of conflating the empowerment of women as individuals with the

feminist goal of removing the structural discrimination which women face as a

gendered constituency, and consider the implications for feminists in development if

they adopt smart economics-speak and work in coalition with individuals and

organisations who have fundamentally different aims. This has attractions in strategic

terms, but risks recreating the very problems gender and development seeks to

transform.

Cet article se concentre sur la tendance actuelle de l’investissement dans les femmes et

les filles dans le cadre de l’« économie intelligente » qui tire directement son origine de

l’approche d’efficacité pour ce qui est des femmes dans le développement (WID -

women in development), approche qui était très courante au lendemain de la crise

économique des années 1980. Nous mettons en relief les risques que comporte le fait de

relier l’autonomisation des femmes en tant qu’individus et l’objectif féministe

d’élimination de la discrimination structurelle à laquelle se heurtent les femmes en

tant que groupe constituant représentant un sexe, et nous examinons les implications

pour les féministes dans le secteur du développement si elles adoptent un discours

d’économie intelligente et travaillent dans le cadre de coalitions avec des personnes et

des organisations dotées d’objectifs fondamentalement différents. Cela présente des

côtés attrayants en termes stratégiques, mais risque de recréer les problèmes précis que

le genre et le développement cherchent à transformer.

Este artı́culo se centra en la tendencia actual de la ‘‘economı́a inteligente’’, la cual

propone invertir en las mujeres y niñas. Dicha orientación se remonta al enfoque

basado en la metodologı́a de la eficiencia aplicada a las ‘‘mujeres en el desarrollo’’ (WID

por sus siglas en inglés), que prevaleció tras la crisis económica de los años ochenta.

Las autoras advierten sobre el peligro de confundir el empoderamiento de las mujeres

como individuos, con el objetivo de las feministas de eliminar la discriminación

Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012 ISSN 1355-2074 print/1364-9221 online/12/030517�13 – Oxfam GB 2012

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estructural enfrentada por las mujeres como grupo de género. Asimismo, analizan las

implicaciones que, en caso de trabajar en coalición con personas y organizaciones cuyos

objetivos son distintos, podrı́a tener el uso del lenguaje de la economı́a inteligente para

las feministas en el desarrollo. Aunque ello representa ventajas en términos

estratégicos, si reproduce los mismos problemas que la perspectiva de género y el

desarrollo buscan transformar, puede encerrar riesgos.

Key words: smart economics; efficiency; feminist economics; empowerment; gender equality; World Bank

Introduction

There has been enormous progress on ‘mainstreaming’ gender equality concerns into

development since the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women (1975�/1985). Yet when

we look back over the past 30 or so years, we can perhaps detect a sense of ‘plus ça

change, plus c’est la même chose’ (the ‘more things change, the more they stay the same’),

in that the majority of development actors remain focused on narrow economic

development goals. Comparatively few have genuinely shifted their policies and

missions to reflect a concern for more holistic ideas of human development

(epitomised by the work of Amartya Sen), rights-based development, or notions of

human well-being and happiness.

This article focuses on the current widespread interest in ‘smart economics’, which

rationalises ‘investing’ in women and girls for more effective development outcomes

(Chant 2012). Soundbites on ‘smart economics’ as the rationale for investing in women

and girls have become ubiquitous. For example, UNICEF refers to the ‘Double

Dividend of Gender Equality’ (www.unicef.org). Policymakers and practitioners report

needing to argue for funding for programmes with gender equality aims on the basis

of broader social and economic impact (a trend noted in Moser 1989, who dubbed this

the ‘efficiency approach’ to women in development).

The agenda of smart economics is a far cry from the nuanced and subject-sensitive

ideas of what the empowerment of women and the attainment of gender equality

actually entails, to be found within the gender and development literature [ranging

from the early work of Caroline Moser (1989) to map what empowerment might look

like in project terms, to the ongoing work of Naila Kabeer (2003) which focuses on both

structure and agency, and to the highly participatory research and activism associated

with the Department for International Development-funded Pathways of Women’s

Empowerment project at the University of Sussex �/ see PoWE 2012]. A gender and

development approach recognises gender inequality as a relational issue, and as a

matter of structural inequality which needs addressing directly and not only by

women, but by development institutions, governments and wider society.

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http://www.unicef.org

Women as a development resource: the rise and rise of a big idea

The thinking behind smart economics extends back until at least the ‘lost decade’ of the

1980s, when it became eminently obvious that women, individually and collectively,

were acting as a buffer to the fall-out of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs). The

effects of SAPs included rising male un- and under-employment, falling purchasing

power, and scaled-down public-sector service provision. As Diane Elson and others

noted at the time, women were expected under SAPs to substitute for the failure of

state institutions to provide health, education, and other services for their citizens

(Elson 1991), and to make ends meet in an era of high and increasing unemployment.

Critiques of anti-poverty approaches to women in development have highlighted

the severe toll that increasing hours and intensity of work had on women’s sleep,

leisure, and food (Jackson 1996). Feminists have also flagged up the limits to women’s

‘social capital’ �/ that is, their reciprocal bonds and friendships �/ which have been relied

on to subsidise household and community survival during sustained periods of

economic crisis (González de la Rocha 2007). Yet of course, despite the critiques

asserting the injustice and unsustainability of passing the buck to women to ensure

economic survival, women did make a vast difference. Through their efforts, in the form

of increased efforts to earn money and cut back on domestic budgeting, and intensified

unpaid labour at household and community levels, households were ‘cushioned’ to a

substantial degree from the worst effects of neoliberal restructuring (Elson 1991).

At the start of the focus on gender mainstreaming, at the UN Fourth World

Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, growing consciousness of women’s apparent

ability to withstand economic crisis and carry on providing gave rise to the core message

in the World Bank’s flagship publication on gender issues that year: Enhancing Women’s

Participation in Economic Development (World Bank 1995). In a chapter unashamedly

entitled ‘The Pay-offs to Investing in Women’, the World Bank professed that:

Investing in women is critical for poverty reduction. It speeds economic development by raising

productivity and promoting the more efficient use of resources; it produces significant social

returns, improving child survival and reducing fertility, and it has considerable inter-

generational pay-offs. (1995, 22)

Added to the economic messaging came statements alluding to evidence of other social

‘goods’ to be gained by investing in women, drawing on evidence associating female-

controlled income with better outcomes for children (Whitehead 1984), and associations

between female education and lower fertility rates (Jeffery and Jeffery 1998).

From Beijing onwards, gender equality and the empowerment of women became

increasingly adopted as a goal which made simple economic sense. The World Bank

made an explicit link to Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3, ‘Promoting Gender

Equality and Women’s Empowerment’, in the Gender Action Plan (GAP) 2007�/2010, as

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well as in several other World Bank publications. Gender equality itself is here

depicted as smart economics, in that it enables women to contribute their utmost skills

and energies to the project of world economic development. For example, the Global

Monitoring Report argues that:

[i]n the long run . . .greater gender equality in access to opportunities, rights and voice can lead

to more efficient economic functioning and better institutions, with dynamic benefits for

investment and growth. The business case for investing in MDG 3 is strong �/ it is nothing

more than smart economics. (World Bank 2007, 145)

Yet as Naila Kabeer’s work has shown, including her 2003 work on the Gender

Equality MDG alluded to earlier, attention to collective action to enable women to

challenge structural discrimination has been downplayed in analyses of what women’s

empowerment means in the context of the MDGs, in contrast to the education,

employment, and political leadership of individual women.

Today, the win�/win synergies assumed to exist between gender equality and

efficient economic development form part of the mission statements and change goals

of a wide range of development organisations. Many have adopted a particular focus

on young women and girls. For example, in Plan International’s ‘The State of the

World’s Girls 2009: Girls in the Global Economy. Adding it All Up’ (2009), quotes from

two senior World Bank personnel stress that ‘girls matter’ �/ not only in their own right,

but to the project of economic development. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, then Managing

Director of the World Bank,2 is quoted as claiming that: ‘Investing in girls is the right

thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do’. The current President of the Bank, Robert

B. Zoellick,3 further asserts that: ‘Investing in adolescent girls is precisely the catalyst

poor countries need to break intergenerational poverty and to create a better

distribution of income. Investing in them is not only fair, it is a smart economic

move’ (Plan International 2009, 11, 28).

Development organisations and governments have been joined in this focus on the

‘business case’ for gender equality and the empowerment of women, by businesses and

enterprises which are interested in contributing to social good. A key example is the Nike

Foundation, in its ‘Girl Effect’ initiative �/ ‘Investing in Girls has the potential to save the

world’ (www.youtube.com/watch?v�WIvmE4_KMNw). One of the promotional

videos of the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign takes the message of investing in girls to perhaps

even more extreme lengths by proposing that once these investments are made girls will

‘do the rest’, ‘change the course of history’, and safeguard the ‘future of humanity’.4

The real impact of smart economics on women

Why does the rise and rise of smart economics matter? We think that even if everybody

�/ women and men, girls and boys �/ nominally stands to gain from the adoption of

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smart economics as a rationale for investing in women and girls, it is nevertheless

critical to ask some hard questions about principle and practice.

In particular, it is imperative to ask whether the goal of female investment is

primarily to promote gender equality and women’s ‘empowerment’, or to facilitate

development ‘on the cheap’, and/or to promote further economic liberalisation (see

Chant 2012; Zuckerman 2007). This is because �/ as feminist critiques of SAP showed so

clearly �/ the actual lived experience of women in poor households and communities

suggests that a win�/win scenario in which poverty is alleviated, economic growth is

assured, and gender equality attained, is very far from the truth.

In fact, in the wake of macro-level global economic changes and the imperatives of

poverty reduction, women and girls in many societies are faced with a grassroots

reality of compensating for economic austerity measures and decline, which are

compounding various complex crises including food security, climate change and the

ongoing spectre of HIV. Relying only on female populations even to guarantee

business as usual, let alone transform the world, demands super-human sacrifices in

terms of time, labour, energy, and other resources (Chant 2012).

Listening to the voices of real women on the ground, it is quite clear the toll that

complex crises are taking on their lives, and the injustice that this represents. As

examples, here are two voices from recent research by Sylvia Chant (2008), which

indicate a decided trend towards a ‘feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation’.

In the Philippines, one 44-year-old female shopkeeper, part-time hospice worker, and

mother of four, declared:

A poor man will say ‘I do not have a job, I do not have some things’, and usually most will

resort to gambling or drinking . . . vices . . . to try and compensate them for what they don’t have.

Whereas a poor woman will carry her responsibilities. She will create something in order to have

earnings. I have to have a sari-sari store (small grocery shop) to have earnings. I have to cook to

eat, to sustain ourselves, different to a man. (ibid., 177�/8, Panel 3)

In the Gambia, another mother of four, a 35-year-old fruitseller and batik-maker

echoed this:

Men are not doing anything �/ if they pay for breakfast, it’s women who pay for lunch and

dinner. Women pay for school lunches. You see the festivals, and it’s the women who are

selling . . . some men are not working, and some men refuse to work, or if they work they don’t do

it for that [the family]. (ibid.)

From such a vantage point, it is heartening �/ and no surprise �/ that Elaine Zuckerman

from the international financial institution (IFI)-watching Washington DC-based non-

government organisation (NGO) Gender Action, complained that the World Bank’s

focus on gender issues in the GAP 2007�/2010 amounted to a ‘business case [which]

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ignores the moral imperative of empowering women to achieve women’s human

rights and full equal rights with men’ (Zuckerman 2007, 1). She further observed that:

Adhering faithfully to the Bank’s decades-old business model, GAP aims to increase women’s

participation in land, labour, products and financial markets �/ while privatising them as much

as possible �/ which benefits corporations the most. (ibid., 2)

Possibly in reaction to such critiques, GAP 2007�/2010’s successor: ‘Applying GAP

Lessons: A Three Year Road Map for Gender Mainstreaming 2010�/13’ incorporated

some welcome shifts in approach and in thematic priorities. As pointed out by Gender

Action’s Elizabeth Arend (2010), for example, highlights included strengthening

gender mainstreaming in Bank operations, an increased focus on maternal mortality

and reproductive health, and more comprehensive plans for gender-focused monitor-

ing and evaluation.

However, on a more negative note, Elizabeth Arend (2010) contends that these

advances are held in check by the World Bank’s reticence on how it actually

incorporates ‘gender issues’ in projects with ‘gender coverage’ and how these have

actually benefited women. Another major problem is the pernicious, if not explicitly

articulated, presence of ‘smart economics’ in GAP 2010�/2013, which prioritises the

‘need to build and disseminate a solid business rationale for gender equality [which is]

the basic incentive for Bank staff to mainstream gender issues and for client countries

to demand gender equality work’ (ibid.).

In light of the contradictoriness of GAP 2010�/2013, the World Development Report

2012 (WDR 2012), coming just before its mid-term point, provided a potentially

fruitful space for a reflective pause and re-consideration. This was especially so given

the World Bank’s apparent enthusiasm for consulting a wide variety of stakeholders

internationally (for a full discussion of Sylvia’s personal experience of engagement

with the creation of the WDR 2012 with LSE colleagues and affiliates, see Chant

2012).

The fact that WDR 2012 is the first of the World Bank’s annual flagship

publications ever to focus on gender is, as Shahra Razavi (2011, 2) describes, ‘a

welcome opportunity for widening the intellectual space’. It indicates that the World

Bank is taking gender seriously, which will certainly affect the ways in which gender

issues are addressed in the wider development community. However, despite the fact

that the WDR does employ ‘rights speak’ and give priority to gender equality as ‘a

core goal in and of itself’, which is to be applauded, we remain concerned about the

fact that reference to gender justice and rights proceeds directly to the instrumen-

tality of gender (read women) for development: in the run-up to WDR 2012, for

example, the draft document which featured on the World Bank’s website

proclaimed that

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‘The Bank recognises the importance of gender equality for poverty reduction and development

effectiveness’

and that:

‘One rationale for policies aimed at improving gender equality has been that such policies, if

successful, will yield a large dividend in terms of economic growth.’ (Chant 2012, Table 2)

In the final published version, there are numerous references to smart economics

which point to clever conflations, suggesting that efficiency and rights are one and the

same (Chant 2012). In the Overview alone, for example, we hear that ‘Gender equality

matters intrinsically . . . [and] instrumentally’ (World Bank 2011, 3) and that ‘Gender

equality matters for development �/ it is smart economics. An instrument for

development’ (ibid.).

How will these apparent contradictions play out in policies and practices informed

by the WDR 2012? Is it really possible to promote rights through utilitarianism, and if

so, what guarantee is there that the formulations of gender equality, women’s rights,

women’s empowerment will be achieved?

What does smart economics leave out? A feminist critique

Even if we accept that smart economics amounts to an efficiency approach with

elements of empowerment bolted on to the side, the programmes with which it is

associated rely on a reductive understanding of development and its aims, and

critically assume a much smoother and easier transition between individual ‘economic

empowerment’ and engaging with the social and political structures which constrain

individuals �/ and women as a collective marginalised group �/ in reality. These

structures discriminate on grounds of gender, race, and class, as highlighted in gender

and development writing since the inception of the field (see Young 1984, for example).

Smart economics seeks to use women and girls to fix the world. It may be well

overdue to hear how important women and girls are for economic survival, stability,

and growth, but the literature on gender and development has long borne witness to

this, starting with Esther Boserup’s classic 1970 text, Woman’s Role in Economic

Development. It is less welcome to women who are already contributing vast amounts

to both production and unpaid reproduction to be romanticised and depicted as the

salvation of the world. Embroiled in this message is the risk of overestimating what

women are capable of in a global order characterised by on-going gender bias and

structural barriers to their capabilities. For this reason, feminist understandings of the

empowerment of women and girls living in poverty in the global South emphasise that

this involves public action to transform the laws, policies, and practices which

constrain personal and group agency.

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Another question here is, what is to be done to address the interests and needs of

the growing world population of older women? An efficiency-driven focus on young

women and girls as smart economics leaves this critical part of the global population

out. Does the empowerment of women cease to be an issue when those women move

into adulthood, or go beyond their reproductive years? In respect of the private sector

and its adoption of girls as a particular focus, are human beings only worthy of

development assistance, with their considerable contribution recognised, when they

are attractive to the media, and support youthful branding and product placements?

In addition, aside from traditionally marginalised cohorts of women, what about

male stakeholders? ‘Smart economics’ messaging, and the programming emanating

from it, focuses narrowly and exclusively on the agency of women and girls, and

leaves men and boys out of the picture. Is this because the focus is on economic

investment rather than economic, social, and political change, and economic invest-

ment in men and boys is regarded as already sufficient? Or is it because the

prospective ‘returns to development’ from male investments might be less than those

in their female counterparts? And if the latter is so, to what degree does this imply

the perpetuation of stereotypes of male ‘egoism’ and ‘irresponsibility’ versus female

‘altruism’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ (Brickell and Chant 2010).

The smart economics approach represents, at best, pragmatism in a time of

economic restructuring and austerity. Without reform of the institutions whose

decisions and resource distribution shape their lives, women and girls are set up for

exhaustion and failure. As suggested earlier, analyses and programming informed by

an efficiency perspective have their roots in the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s,

casting women as agents of survival and recovery in states undergoing variations on

the standard SAPs package of ‘reforms’, focusing on cutbacks in public employment

and expenditure. In the present time of economic meltdown and austerity in many of

the countries of the global North, there is great pressure on the IFIs, on bilateral and on

international NGOs facing crises in funding, to invest in developing countries in ways

which are maximally cost-effective.

Smart economics oversimplifies complexity and shifts responsibility. Caroline

Moser (1989) charged the programmes that she saw as informed by an economic

efficiency perspective with focusing on women as being the solution to the crises

created by structural social and economic problems. Women are enlisted as

footsoldiers to serve in battles whose aims are not related directly to their interests �/

consigned to the role of ‘conduit for policy’ (Molyneux 2006), in the service of others,

particularly children. This has been especially noted in the context of conditional cash

transfer (CCT) programmes and micro-finance initiatives which, in relying on

essentialising maternalist gender stereotypes and expecting particular kinds of

contributions from women, often lead to increased labour burdens and the perpetua-

tion of ‘female altruism’ (ibid., also Brickell and Chant 2010; Chant 2008).

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These boost the appeal of programmes which depict their ‘beneficiaries’ as

requiring merely a simple injection of funds or training before becoming powerhouses

of agency and action. Such programmes leave much of the responsibility for project

success or failure on the shoulders of the women and girls depicted as strong,

resourceful, and endlessly energetic in their efforts to better themselves, their families,

and their nations (Cornwall and Anyidoho 2010).

This reminds us of the scenarios critiqued by feminists in the 1980s, in which the

impact of SAPs on the care economy as governments rolled back social spending was

mitigated by women’s labour in the soup kitchens and at home. How fanciful is it to

see the same dynamics of exhaustion, asset depletion, and disillusion now affecting the

women and girls which smart economics approaches depend on to deliver the

development goods? (Rai et al. 2011).

How should feminists engage with smart economics?

Many feminists working in development institutions who have profound ideological

difficulties with an instrumental focus on women that focuses on them and their ‘rights’

purely due to a concern for other development goals, actually use these arguments

strategically. The discussions at the Beyond Gender Mainstreaming Learning Event

which forms a part of the project giving rise to this issue of Gender & Development bore

witness to this reality �/ noted by Cecile Jackson in her 1996 paper ‘Rescuing Gender

from the Poverty Trap’. The work of gender mainstreaming in development is difficult,

often demoralising, and frequently very poorly resourced, in terms of both human

resources and financial support. This requires strategic decisions about working in

coalition with stakeholders whose understanding and vision of what they are about is

very different from one’s own; and on flexibility in recognising shared opportunities for

work which further goals which are shared, sometimes by very different players.

Of course the resources which come to women and girls from programmes and

projects informed by efficiency and smart economics perspectives are incredibly welcome

to them. A pragmatic perspective which is widely held by many gender and development

policy advisors and practitioners is that these resources can be taken and used by women

regardless of the original intent. For many, they represent the only source of funds and

other resources. The working model of empowerment that these projects use depends on

attitudes and beliefs in wider society responding positively to a growing number of

women using resources wisely and transforming their family and community well-being.

The approach taken in projects is all-important. Micro-finance projects have been

widely discussed in relation to their ability to support the empowerment of women

involved in them (Mayoux 2006), but there is a clear message that the answer to the

question of how helpful they are is, ‘it depends’. One major factor is that projects which

focus on savings seem to be more successful than those focusing on credit. Another is

that ‘transformative potential’ �/ Kate Young’s term, from her classic work on gender

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mainstreaming (1993) �/ needs to be integrated consciously into these projects. In

addition, development funders need to focus consciously on getting institutions ‘right for

women’ (Goetz 1995), focusing on the links between male bias in their culture and broad

aims, the interventions they make and fund, and outcomes for women on the ground.

Much gender equality work relies on funds from organisations which have no such

issues with the concept of women delivering development goals to benefit others, with

little or no emphasis on the well-being, empowerment or rights of the women

themselves. To adopt a focus on smart economics is a useful pragmatic strategy for

many gender and development advocates and activists. Many of them would prefer to

use more radical and transformative messaging, but recognise that they are engaging

with politically and socially conservative institutions which need to be involved on

their own terms. For international NGOs and other development organisations

participating in advocacy and campaigning for change in international bodies and

national government, arguments based on justice and a commitment to equality may

have less chance of success than arguments linking (aspects of) the empowerment of

women with efficient, cost-effective development goals.

Conclusion

In smart economics, lack of an essentially political critique of what is wrong with

the world at the level of analysis results in programming which focuses solely on

the agency of individual women and girls to deliver development goals �/ changing

the world with minimal or no support from other actors. Since development

institutions are part and parcel of the structure of society surrounding women and

girls, they need in addition to analyse and challenge the structural inequalities

which constrain the rights, choices, aspirations, and dreams of women and girls.

This suggests a course of action which focuses on the relational aspects of gender

inequality �/ taking into account men and their roles, and concentrating on the

advocacy role of development institutions representing the interests of women and

girls to governments, among others. Feminists working in development therefore

need to be very careful about supporting, and working in coalition with, individuals

and institutions who approach gender equality through the lens of smart economics.

This may have attractions in strategic terms, enabling us to access resources for

work focusing on supporting the individual agency of women and girls, but risks

aggravating many of the complex problems that gender and development seeks to

transform.

We have argued in this article that the agenda of ‘smart economics’ is a far cry from

the nuanced and careful ideas of what the empowerment of women and the attainment

of gender equality actually entails to be found within the gender and development lit-

erature. It is the descendant of the ‘efficiency’ approach to women in development

identified by Caroline Moser in the late 1980s (Moser 1989). As such, smart economics

Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012526

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returns our gaze to women and their agency, in an approach which fails to focus on the

existence of structural discrimination against women in IFIs, governments, and private

business. This structural discrimination constrains the agency of women and girls and

presents many of them with insurmountable obstacles, despite their best efforts to

advance their own interests and meet their own needs.

In order to expand their agency, women and girls need well-placed actors in

development institutions to remove the structural constraints on it �/ by challenging

and dismantling gender �/ and race and class �/ biases in their analyses, policies, and

practice. In contrast to smart economics, what is needed is a gender and development

approach which recognises inequality as a relational issue, and which recognises the

equal rights of all women and girls �/ regardless of age, or the extent of nature of their

economic contribution. Gender and development should also involve the inclusion of

other social actors vital in supporting the empowerment of women �/ including, most

importantly, men and boys.

Smart economics is concerned with building women’s capacities in the interests of

development rather than promoting women’s rights for their own sake. We think this

matters, because it does the agenda of the empowerment of women and the attainment

of gender equality a very significant disservice. Going forward, it is necessary to

reassert the primacy of gender justice and rights in a manner which eschews the notion

that it is only worth investing in women if they can ‘fix the world’.

Sylvia Chant is Professor of Development Geography at the London School of Economics and Political

Science. Postal address: Department of Geography and Environment, LSE, Houghton Street, London

WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: [email protected]

Caroline Sweetman is Editor of Gender & Development.

Notes

1 Matthew Gutmann’s main title for his 2009 monograph on sex, birth control, and AIDS

in Mexico was ‘Fixing Men’ (Gutmann 2009). We are very grateful to Matthew for

giving us permission to adapt his phrase.

2 In July 2011, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala left the World Bank to become Minister of Finance

in Nigeria in the new administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.

3 Robert Zoellick was appointed as the 11th President of the World Bank in 2007. 4 Interesting reactions to the Nike ‘Girl Effect’ campaign can be read on the ‘Aid Watch

blog’ on ‘So now we have to save ourselves and the world too? A critique of the ‘‘Girl

Effect’’’ at http://aidwatchers.com/2011/01/so-now-we-have-to-save-ourselves-and-

the-world-too (last checked by the authors October 2012) and on Contestations, Dialogues

on Women’s Empowerment, Issue 4, March 2011 at www.contestations.net/issues/issue-

4/ (last checked by the authors October 2012).

Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012 527

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http://aidwatchers.com/2011/01/so-now-we-have-to-save-ourselves-and-the-world-too

http://www.contestations.net/issues/issue-4/

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