Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Illinois State U. speaker discusses women in the Third World
By Matt Rotman
The Daily Vidette (Illinois State U.)
03/08/2007

(U-WIRE) NORMAL, Ill. — Women in the Third World are currently faced with an exceptional burden because of rising economic inequalities, according to University of Illinois professor Faranak Miraftab.

Miraftab was the guest speaker Wednesday at the International Studies Seminar Series with her presentation, "Cities, Women and Neoliberalism: Reflections from the Global South."

"My reflections center around two main points," she said.

"The deep informality of the Third World cities in spatial and economic terms. . .and the community-based articulation of production and social reproduction in the Global South." She argued that an informality exists in the privatization of many social aspects, intensifying women's burden for urban development and expanding their opportunity for active citizenship.

Two-thirds of Third World cities are developed through spontaneous, unplanned activities, 85 percent of their urban residents are occupying property illegally and 28 percent are living in slums. "In urban Africa, an estimated 57 percent lack access to basic sanitation," Miraftab stated.

Miraftab also said non-agricultural employment has increased. "We see that global economy has been on the rise," she claimed.

By the 1990s, there has been a 43 percent increase in the economy of North Africa, 75 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, 57 percent in Latin America and 63 percent in Asia.

The focus of the discussion was directed toward post-Apartheid townships in South Africa, where women have found simply asserting citizenship rights is ineffective, so they bypass the male-dominated formal politics of the elite.

"Neoliberal urban processes simultaneously increase women's burden and possibilities for collective action towards social change," she said. The women form small neighborhood and community groups for the purpose of looking after each other, as well as attend political functions to learn the discourses in the political sphere.

One challenge the women have to overcome, besides severe poverty, is the lack of waste collection services in most townships. Municipal governments have taken advantage of women's free labor, using them to collect neighborhood waste, calling it "gender empowerment." Another crisis the citizens face is that the government in South Africa has evicted 10 million people from their homes since 1996.

Sometimes, if people weren't evicted, the government actually turned off the water to their buildings, and Miraftab displayed disheartening pictures of citizens waiting in line to fill buckets of water. Annaliisa Ahlman, a senior and theater education major, said the presentation augmented some of her class work. "It's also interesting to get opinions and research from outside the ISU community," she commented.

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