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

在我的博士论文中，我采取了一种非殖民主义的女权主义方法，批判性地解构了“赋权”概念的含义和适用性。大多数人都熟悉女性赋权的概念，我们通常认为它意味着一些积极的东西。赋权一词在国际发展理论和实践中的使用也是如此，但更深入地审视现有文献就会发现，文献中实际上并没有很好地理解它，甚至没有给它下定义。在对文献的回顾中，Ibrahim和Alkire(2007)发现对赋权没有统一的理解，而是列出了近30种对该术语的不同定义。这个术语是什么意思？它是如何使用的？这有什么关系呢？这些是我的研究提出的一些问题。作为ESRC的一名研究员，我希望通过积累在西非农村地区与女农民一起进行研究的多年经验，成为一名领先的非殖民主义女权主义学者。在攻读博士学位时，我以贝宁北部的阿塔科拉地区为例，在该国最北部的四个县进行了多年的田野调查(2017-2019年)。其目的是更好地了解贝宁农村地区的家庭贫困：由于地处偏远，家庭往往是看不见的。在数据收集期间，研究参与者(n=380)在分多波进行的焦点小组讨论(FGD)中使用法语和当地语言的混合语言：(I)Atakora的妇女总人口；(Ii)在园艺价值链中经济活跃的妇女；(Iii)在乳木果油价值链中经济活跃的妇女。女性发展报告提供了一组丰富的数据，妇女在这些数据中谈到了她们的希望和挑战；她们的日常任务和负担。我博士学位的新经验数据呼唤性别角色及其相关责任的非殖民主义理论--充分捕捉全球南方家庭劳动性别分工的理论，可以为减贫努力提供信息的理论。我的ESRC奖学金的主要目的是在我博士研究的基础上出版一本书。这本书将有助于越来越多的作家的作品，这些作家认为自己是非殖民主义的女权主义者，如Verges(2021)，Olufei(2020)和Carrasco-Miro(2020)，他们专注于欧洲和拉丁美洲。虽然有一些新兴的学者基于来自非洲的证据研究非殖民化理论(Adams等人，2021年；Devlieger，2021年)，但非洲基本上缺乏非殖民主义的女权主义方法。我的研究填补了这一空白，并进一步提供了一种多学科的方法，既能讲发展经济学，也能讲人类学和社会学。我希望我的书和期刊文章能为正在进行的对话做出贡献，并从我广泛的博士田野工作中获得新的实证证据：突出我研究中女性的有力言论，并吸引学术和普通受众。因此，ESRC奖学金将帮助我成为一名非殖民主义的女权主义经济学家，新理论基于我博士研究中丰富的新经验证据集。作为ESRC会员，我还将在剑桥的各个部门进行合作，参加会议，并召开阅读小组和研讨会。这包括邀请学者在剑桥发表演讲，以便早期职业研究人员可以相互建立网络，并会见性别和就业领域的知名学者。我计划对现有数据进行新的分析，以扩大我论文最后一章的结论--关于妇女就业与她们赋权之间的联系，以减少家庭中基于性别的暴力(GBV)来衡量。这项工作与剑桥GendV项目正在进行的研究非常吻合，贝宁将被加入有助于我们日益了解全球南部GBV的动态和驱动因素的国家名单中。

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.