‘Powerless, poor and needy?’: Reproducing colonial discourses of gender and Muslim women through educational interventions by I-NGOs in Afghanistan

Abstract

International development initiatives in the Global-South are often shaped by Western and Eurocentric constructions of gender, female agency and empowerment embedded in popular narratives of universal rights and white mainstream feminist ideals. Through a qualitative desk-study and documentary-analysis, this paper explores the cases of two I-NGOs: Canadian Women for Women of Afghanistan (CW4WA) and Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) to unravel how colonial discourses of gender and educational development, and homogenous and pathological notions of Muslim women are mobilised in Afghanistan to deliver various political agendas and reproduce patriarchal relations, as well as wider Global South/North divisions and entrenched inequalities. We engage with epistemic shifts. We argue that I-NGOs educational interventions take bottom-up approaches informed by local knowledges and contexts and decolonised notions of gender, power and participation, which promote and sustain a more socially just and transformative education in the developing world. We also argue that epistemic shifts are required informed by post-colonial and critical realism approaches to gender and development, both in terms of research/theory and policy formulation.