Inclusive Ecosystems? Women’s Participation in the Aquatic Ecosystem of Lake Malawi

Joseph Nagoli,Lucy Binauli,Asafu Chijere

doi:10.3390/environments6010003

Joseph Nagoli, Lucy Binauli + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/environments6010003

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Abstract

Ecosystem services and their role in alleviating poverty are centered on a set of gendered social relations. The understanding of these relations between men and women in aquatic ecosystems can unveil gender-based opportunities and constraints along the value chains of the ecosystem services. A gender discourse perspective on participation of actors of an ecosystem can further facilitate the understanding of the complex and subtle ways in which gender is represented, constructed, and contested. This paper analyses the barriers to the participation of women in the fishing industry. The analysis is based on a study conducted in five fishing villages of Lake Malawi through a structured questionnaire, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and observations. First, it looks at gender and participation from a theoretical perspective to explain how gender manifests itself in participation and interrogates why women have limited benefits from the fishing industry. Second, it highlights the barriers that seem to preclude women from participating, which include institutional embedded norms, financial, socio-cultural, and reproduction roles. In general, women had little influence on the type of fishing sites, markets, and access to financing of their businesses. A gender transformative agenda is therefore required to proactively facilitate changes of some entrenched institutional norms as well as having greater access to financial services and new technologies in order to enhance women’s full participation and equal benefits from ecosystem services.

Highlights

Gender is a socially constructed phenomenon, which can unravel the hidden norms and power relations existing in socio-ecosystems
Gender differences tend to exist because of how society views the intricacies of behaviors, which seem embedded in individuals with respect to gender roles in a particular socio-ecosystem
Brown and Fortnam [1] report that gender is a critical determinant of how people benefit from ecosystems differently, and the absence of gender perspectives makes ecosystem-service frameworks weakly aligned with the central concerns of global development around equity, justice, knowledge, and voice

Summary

Introduction

Gender is a socially constructed phenomenon, which can unravel the hidden norms and power relations existing in socio-ecosystems. Gender differences tend to exist because of how society views the intricacies of behaviors, which seem embedded in individuals with respect to gender roles in a particular socio-ecosystem. Socio-ecosystems generate important ecosystem services while accounting for the human dimension that shapes and is shaped by its nature [2]. Posit that society and culture create gender roles that are assumed to be ideal and acceptable by the people in a particular socio-ecosystem, and subsequently shape the behavior of its individuals. The aquatic socio-ecosystem in particular, combines the natural productivity of water, vegetation, and aquatic wildlife especially fish whose value chains employ millions of people. In Malawi over two million people are employed or directly benefit from the fish value chain [5]

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