She Stays and Pays: Rural Women's Labour and Empowerment in Atakora, Northern Benin, West Africa

在我的博士论文中，我采用了一种非殖民化的女权主义方法，批判性地解构了“赋权”概念的意义和适用性。大多数人都熟悉女性赋权的概念，我们通常认为它意味着积极的东西。在国际发展理论和实践中，赋权一词的使用也是如此，但深入研究现有文献就会发现，它实际上没有得到很好的理解，甚至没有得到很好的定义。Ibrahim和Alkire（2007）在他们的文献综述中发现，没有对赋权的统一理解，而是列出了近30种不同的术语定义。这个词是什么意思？它是如何使用的？为什么这很重要？这些是我的研究提出的一些问题。作为一名ESRC研究员，我希望通过多年在西非农村地区与女农民进行研究的经验，成为一名领先的非殖民主义女权主义学者。为了获得博士学位，我以贝宁北部的Atakora地区为案例研究，在该国最北部的四个县进行了多年的田野调查（2017-2019）。其目的是更好地了解贝宁农村的家庭贫困情况：由于地处偏远，这些家庭往往不为人所知。在数据收集过程中，研究参与者（n = 380）在分几轮进行的焦点小组讨论中使用法语和当地语言：(i) Atakora的一般妇女；（ii）在园艺价值链中从事经济活动的妇女；（三）在乳木果油价值链中经济活跃的妇女。FGDs提供了一套丰富的数据，妇女在其中谈论她们的希望和挑战；他们的日常任务和负担。我博士的新经验数据呼吁建立性别角色和相关责任的非殖民化理论——这种理论充分捕捉了全球南方背景下家庭劳动的性别分工，这种理论可以为减少贫困的努力提供信息。我获得ESRC奖学金的主要目的是根据我的博士研究成果出版一本书。Verges（2021年）、Olufemi（2020年）、carraso - miro（2020年）等关注欧洲和拉丁美洲的“非殖民女性主义”作家的作品将会越来越多。虽然有一些新兴学者基于非洲的证据研究非殖民化理论（Adams et al., 2021; Devlieger, 2021），但非洲在很大程度上缺乏非殖民化的女权主义方法。我的研究填补了这一空白，并进一步提供了一种使用发展经济学、人类学和社会学语言的多学科方法。我希望我的书和期刊文章可以用我广泛的博士田野调查的新鲜经验证据为正在进行的对话做出贡献：突出我研究中女性的有力话语，吸引学术界和普通受众。因此，ESRC奖学金将帮助我成为一名非殖民化的女权主义经济学家，我的新理论建立在我博士研究中丰富的新颖经验证据数据集的基础上。作为ESRC研究员，我还将与剑桥大学各部门合作，参加会议，召集阅读小组和研讨会。这包括邀请学者在剑桥发表演讲，这样早期的职业研究人员就可以相互交流，并与性别和就业领域的顶尖学者会面。我计划对现有数据进行新的分析，以扩展我论文最后一章的发现——关于妇女就业与赋权之间的联系，以家庭中基于性别的暴力（GBV）的减少来衡量。这项工作与剑桥正在进行的GendV项目的研究非常吻合，贝宁将被列入有助于我们日益了解全球南方性别暴力的动态和驱动因素的国家名单。

In my PhD thesis, I take a decolonial feminist approach to critically deconstruct the meaning and applicability of the concept of 'empowerment.' Most people are familiar with the idea of women's empowerment and we generally assume it means something positive. The same is true for the use of the term empowerment in international development theory and practice, but a deeper look at existing literature reveals that it is actually not well understood or even defined in the literature. In their review of the literature, Ibrahim and Alkire (2007) found no cohesive understanding of empowerment and instead list nearly 30 different definitions of the term. What does this term mean? How it is used? Why does it matter? These are some of the questions my research asks.As an ESRC fellow, I want to emerge as a leading decolonial feminist scholar by building upon my years of experience conducting research in rural parts of West Africa with women farmers. For my PhD, I took the northern region of Atakora in Benin as a case study where I conducted multi-year fieldwork (2017-2019) in four counties in the most northern part of the country. The aim was to better understand household poverty in rural Benin: households so often invisible due to their remote location. During data collection, research participants (n = 380) spoke a mix of French and local languages during focus group discussions (FGDs) conducted in multiple waves: (i) the general population of women in Atakora; (ii) women economically active in the horticulture value chain; (iii) women economically active in the shea butter value chain. FGDs provided a rich set of data where women spoke about their hopes and challenges; their everyday tasks and burdens. The new empirical data of my PhD calls for decolonial theory of gendered roles and associated resposibilities - theory that adequately captures the sexual division of household labour of contexts in the Global South, theory that can inform efforts at poverty reduction. The primary aim of my ESRC fellowship is to publish a book based on my PhD research. This book will contribute to a growing number of works by authors who identify as decolonial feminists such as Verges (2021), Olufemi (2020), and Carrasco-Miro (2020) who focus on Europe and Latin America. Though there are some emerging scholars working on decolonising theory based on evidence from Africa (Adams et al., 2021; Devlieger, 2021), a decolonial feminist approach is largely missing in Africa. My research fills this gap and further provides a multi-disciplinary approach that speaks the language of development economics as well as anthropology and sociology. I hope my book and journal articles can contribute to the ongoing conversation with fresh empirical evidence from my extensive PhD fieldwork: highlighting the powerful words of the women of my research and engaging both academic and general audiences. As such, the ESRC fellowship will help establish me as a decolonial feminist economist with new theory grounded in a rich dataset of novel empirical evidence from my PhD research. As ESRC fellow, I will also collaborate across departments in Cambridge, participate in conferences, and convene reading groups and workshops. This includes hosting scholars to speak in Cambridge so early career researchers can network with each other and meet leading scholars in the area of gender and employment. I plan to undertake new analysis of existing data, to expand upon findings of the final chapter of my thesis - on the connection between women's employment and their empowerment, as measured by the reduction of gender based violence (GBV) in the household. This work fits well with the ongoing research of the GendV project in Cambridge, and Benin will be added to the list of countries that contribute to our growing understanding of the dynamics and drivers of GBV in the Global South.