Petites mains féminines, vulnérabilité professionnelle et pratiques conjointes de compensation financières dans l’administration publique universitaire au Cameroun

Abstract

This article aims to conduct an ethnographic study on small female hands in the administration of the University of Yaoundé II in order to see to what extent the use of the concept of financial resilience makes sense. As a result, located in positions of administrative inferiority, small female hands, temporary administrative contract workers or with default status, seem more exposed to the pressures resulting from the various socio-political, health, economic and management hazards that may be faced the university institution. By taking into account the Covid-19 crisis as a temporal reference point, this study highlights the different financial strategies and practices mobilized by these agents to circumvent and confront the difficulties to which their socio-professional condition predisposes them. As such, it must be considered that these income compensation practices reflect the capacity of this category to adapt to the degrading developments which determine their precarious working conditions. They provide good information about their realities as resilience entrepreneurs. We can therefore link the financial resilience of small hands to legitimate socio-professional conditioning. One that promotes, as a position of action, the compensation of their income through the diversification of income-generating activities and the establishment of mutual aid and solidarity systems within the institution.