Including Women in Development

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an important shift in the administration of development aid away from large governmental programs to the smaller projects of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and widespread recognition of the general failure of governmental programs to include women in development. After a brief overview of this shift and the changes that made women's empowerment an accepted development goal, this article will describe the experiences of one Guatemalan women's organization in two very different locales. This contrast is used to illustrate the necessity of devising a structural, place-based strategy for development with the consultation and participation of the women themselves for the successful inclusion of women in development projects. Numerous studies have documented the failure of top-down, interventionist projects to bring sustainable and meaningful change to populations in developing nations. Since the 1980s, large international donors have relied increasingly on NGOs instead of government agencies to administer development aid. This shift arose out of a critique of large governmentadministered development projects that failed to take local realities into account. Often idealized as independent of the state, politics, and the market and therefore free to provide strictly humanitarian aid to those in need, NGOs have been almost universally embraced as a local, community-based solution to the ineffective top-down projects of the past. Few studies have investigated how the development goals of specific NGO organizations are mediated by the local political, economic, and geographic environment. This article investigates the impact of different sociopolitical environments and the