Cameroonian women’s empowerment through higher education: an African-feminist and capability approach
| dc.contributor.advisor | Walker, Melanie | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Martinez-Vargas, Carmen | |
| dc.contributor.author | Kwachou, Monique | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-02-03T09:11:20Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-02-03T09:11:20Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-10 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The concerted efforts of scholars, development agents and governments have established the idea that education is both intrinsically and instrumentally good, life changing, has direct returns, and is particularly empowering for women. The cumulation of these ideas has resulted in the development of societal assumptions that an educated woman is an empowered woman, and the more educated a woman is, the more empowered she will be. In Cameroon this assumption has bred some antagonism directed at ‘over-educated’ women on account of their presumed empowerment. The commonplace use of the Pidgin-English phrase ‘too much book’ or French-slang epithet ‘long crayon’ are often directed at higher-educated women to suggest their being educated is to their detriment. These expressions demonstrate the belief that a certain level of education is deemed sufficiently empowering for women in Cameroon and they risk becoming “too much” if they proceed further. In this way, education for women in Cameroon is seen as acceptable and adding value up to graduate level, at which point it succumbs to a law of diminishing returns. Thus the widespread assumption of higher education being sufficiently empowering for Cameroonian women generates two problems: 1) it promotes the limitation of young women’s aspirations and, 2) advances an incomplete informational basis for government (and public) judgement of higher education as a response to Cameroonian women’s oppressions. In response to this problematic assumption of women’s empowerment through higher education and the corresponding fear of higher-educated Cameroonian women, this study offers a two-pronged approach. It presents both a theoretical and empirical reconceptualization of empowerment for women in the Cameroonian context, from which assessments are made as to whether the women of whom empowered is assumed can consider themselves and be considered as empowered based on their higher education. The theoretical re-conceptualization of empowerment here is effected by an original Capabilitarian application- the African-feminist Capability Approach- developed in the course of the research to address inadequacies in existing frames for the conceptualization and investigation of empowerment in African contexts. The empirical re-conceptualization is the product of engaging the sample of 20 Cameroonian women graduate students in individual life-story interviews and a participatory analysis workshop befitting of a participatory narrative inquiry. The data - which is presented and analysed sequentially by way of narrative analysis and analysis-of-narratives - suggests that the assumption of Cameroonian women’s empowerment through higher education is a misconception as the higher education offered to these women lacks the capacity to adequately address the empowerment needs of these women in the face of their multivariate oppressions. The study’s findings point to: the conditionality of higher education’s potential for women’s empowerment; the need for examining intersections in evaluations of African women’s empowerment; and the ways that Cameroon’s higher education can be improved to better enable the plural aspects of empowerment which Cameroonian women have reason to value. | en_ZA |
| dc.description.sponsorship | National Research Foundation (NRF) | en_ZA |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Higher Education and Human Development (HEHD) | en_ZA |
| dc.description.sponsorship | University of the Free State Postgraduate School | en_ZA |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11660/11379 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_ZA |
| dc.publisher | University of the Free State | en_ZA |
| dc.rights.holder | University of the Free State | en_ZA |
| dc.subject | Dissertation (MDS (Development Studies))--University of the Free State, 2020 | en_ZA |
| dc.subject | Education -- Women empowerment -- Cameroon | en_ZA |
| dc.title | Cameroonian women’s empowerment through higher education: an African-feminist and capability approach | en_ZA |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en_ZA |