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

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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.