Senegal

One response to the phenomenon of globalisation in politics, economics and culture has been a resurgence of fundamentalist movements. To fundamentalists, women symbolise ethnic and cultural purity, and their rights and status have become an enormous issue. But the links between fundamentalisms, tradition and modernity are very complex. In this article I look at the […]

In societies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, older women, or grandmothers, traditionally have considerable influence on maternal and child health at the household level. However, most maternal and child health (MCH) programmes focus exclusively on women of reproductive age. In an MCH project in Senegal, a community study showed that grandmothers and […]

This article discusses the difficulties of reaching relatively poor populations with labour-saving technologies. Taking the case of milling and dehulling technologies in Senegal and The Gambia, it presents a simple analytic model that helps to explain why the vast majority of these labour-saving machines are under-utilised in rural areas. Though donors continue to support such […]

Dem explores how Oxfam’s work in rural areas can adapt its approach to meet the needs of urban women. She uses the example of Senegal’s economic crisis of the 1980s that plunged many women in urban areas into poverty. Sustainable development in this case meant women organising themselves and working together to actively determine their […]