From All Africa we find this African view of get­ting involved in the Inter­na­tional mega-banks. One of the biggest crit­i­cisms of the mega-banks like the World Bank and the IMF is that the poor­est nations do not have a say as to how the loans are made.

The Chron­i­cle reporter Daniel Nonor inter­views a senior research fel­low for the Cen­ter for Con­flict Res­o­lu­tion on why this is impor­tant for Africa. Sheila Bur­wa­ree also makes a point on how women have been hurt by the global reces­sion, as gov­ern­ments step into try to fix the crisis.

Sheila Bun­wa­ree, Pro­fes­sor of Gen­der & Devel­op­ment, Uni­ver­sity of Mau­ri­tius and Senior Research at the Cen­ter for Con­flict Res­o­lu­tion, Cape Town, sug­gested this in an inter­view with The Chron­i­cle, at the start of a three day dia­logue on gen­der, Africa and the global finan­cial crises in Accra, yesterday.

Sheila Bun­wa­ree, sug­gested that a sec­ond look needs to be taken at how Inter­na­tional Finan­cial Insti­tu­tions oper­ate, and how Africa can project itself to make its voices heard in major pol­icy for­mu­la­tions, not only from the north or the inter­na­tional finan­cial institution’s per­spec­tive, but also where inputs could be pro­vided by Africans into the pre­sets, so that the poli­cies are tailor-made to suit the African situation.

“We should also look at the speci­fici­ties of dif­fer­ent coun­tries, because some­times the real­i­ties on the ground are such that we need to be able to under­stand and appre­ci­ate the dif­fer­ences, so that we can get the best solu­tions, which solu­tions should be African owned, because when they are imposed in a top to down approach, it would sim­ply not work,” she emphasized.

She noted that women have increas­ingly become dis­ad­van­taged by the global reces­sion, as African gov­ern­ments nego­ti­ate bail outs and equity loans with pri­vate indus­try, and increas­ingly pri­va­tiz­ing pub­lic ser­vices to pro­tect it cof­fers and other national mea­sures as responses to the crises.

She said the cri­sis presents a mul­ti­plic­ity of prob­lems for women, espe­cially as allo­ca­tion of resources tend to take place in a dis­crim­i­na­tory man­ner and women become more mar­gin­al­ized, stat­ing that when resources are scarce the first ones to be at the brunt of scarcity of resources are the famine class.

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