Engineering gender equality: The effects of aid on womens political representation in Malawi, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia

The project looks at the effects of aid on women's substantive (acting for women) representation in Malawi, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia. Specifically, the project explores whether gendered aid is most efficient in countries where there is a high degree of descriptive representation and a visible women?s movement to push and support female legislators to act in the interest of women. Whereas Uganda has had a strong women?s movement and higher representation of women, Malawi, Sudan and Zambia have had weaker women?s movements and lower levels of descriptive representation. How has gendered aid contributed to women?s representation? When, where and how is gendered aid most effective? Highlighted and tentative findings (1) Even in the cases that have low levels of women?s descriptive representation and weak women?s movements, we see a push for gender equal legal reform with support from international donors. We find that although women?s movements can be weak based on numbers, actors within such movements can be strong based on the regional ? and international capital. International aid can thereby compensate for a weak women?s movement, at least in the short term. (2) Based on a new and innovative approach to the study of women?s substantive representation, including a unique data set from Uganda, we find women participate in parliamentary debates on an equal footing with men once elected to legislative assemblies. Participation in legislative debates is an important tool for parliamentarians to communicate policy positions and exert influence on the policy process. (3) Gender equal reform meet resistance when the reform issue contradicts the doctrine of the dominant religious or cultural group. Child marriage legislation is doctrinal, and thereby counter-mobilization against measures to prohibit child marriage is expected. child marriage reform has stirred counter-mobilization Sudan, but not in Zambia. Investigating the roles of Islamists in Sudan and chiefs in Zambia in response to activism on child marriage reform, we identify variation in the nature of child marriage law, specifically whether it is codified or living, as an explanatory factor for the presence or absence of counter-mobilization. The distinction between a codified and a living system of family law, is important because it leads to variation in the legal power structure and, by extension, in the political battle over changes to child marriage law (4) When and how do traditional authorities (TAs) provide effective governance in support of gender equality. The results of one of our survey experiments in Malawi suggest that the answers depend on the authority?s gender and citizens? characteristics. We find that under particular circumstances, TAs can be more effective endorsers of policy messages than parliamentarians can. This is the case for female TAs in the sample as a whole, as well as among women, those who follow matrilineal customs, and those who hold supportive attitudes about gender equality. At the same time, our analysis suggests that the gender of the TA is important. For a gender-sensitive child marriage reform law, female TAs and female parliamentarians are more effective endorsers than their male counterparts in the sample as a whole (5) Gendered aid can get politicized/causes backfire effects, but there are variations between countries, within countries and between groups of the general population. (a)Findings from Sudan suggest that international aid to criminalize female genital mutilation (FGM) backfired at the national level, but not at the sub-national level in the east. Conservative religious leaders evoked a campaign against the criminalization of FGM that largely rested on the initiative being part of a Western agenda in the country. We did not see politicization of international FGM aid at the local level where religious leaders supported criminalization to protect girls against harm. Local government?s high dependency on international aid combined with proximity to FGM practicing communities are identified as important mechanisms that enabled the enactment of anti-FGM laws in eastern Sudan. (b) We test how endorsements affect public opinion across domestic and international advocates, two policy reforms (gender quota and land rights), and population subgroups in Malawi. We find that the effectiveness of the endorsements depends on the policy reform. Domestic women's groups and Western donors are effective messengers of gender quotas, but cause a backfire effect for land reforms. All messengers cause a backfire effect, especially among men, when it comes to land reform. What matters is not so much the type of expert, but rather the type of policy promoted, and how policy reform triggers support or resistance depending on the implications for the respondents.

The last decade, women's political empowerment has been the biggest target area of gendered Norwegian aid with seven African countries on the top-10 list of recipients. The theory of change underpinning this aid is that increasing the number of women (des criptive representation) in political decision-making processes is important for its own sake, but it is additionally regarded as a powerful tool to fight gendered injustices more generally. It is expected to increase pro-women initiatives, acts and legis lative outcomes (substantive representation) and to change patriarchal attitudes and make public perceptions more favorable towards women in politics (symbolic representation). This project looks at the effects of aid on women's substantive (acting for wo men) and symbolic (role-modeling women) representation in Malawi, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia from 2007 until 2013. Recent studies of a related phenomenon, democracy assistance, have found that aid is more effective in preventing backlash in newly democrati zed states, rather than fostering transitions from autocratic to democratic regimes. Based on this logic, the project explores whether gendered aid is most efficient in countries where there is a high degree of descriptive representation and a visible wom en's movement to push and support female legislators to act in the interest of women. In these cases, gender equality assistance might bring about processes that translate numbers into women?s substantive and symbolic representation. By studying four case s, Malawi, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia, which are main recipients of gendered Norwegian aid, we seek to explore when, where and how gendered aid is most effective. Malawi, Sudan and Zambia represent cases with weak women's movements and low descriptive repre sentation in 2007, but have since experienced uneven trajectories of developments in women's descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation. How has gendered aid contributed to these processes?