| | The first African regional meeting of DAWN - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era - met at the Institute of African Studies, Ibadan, from 27-29 September 1988. The meeting was attended by 108 participants from several countries on the continent and elsewhere. The General Coordinator, Dr.N. Aguir of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, affirmed one of the basic objectives of DAWN: namely, to provide a forum for Third World women now facing an unprecedented decline in living standards, due to IMF and WB sponsored structural adjustment policies as well as corruption and mismanagement. Most participants were of the opinion that one of the major questions to be asked by women of Third World debtor countries was the precise terms of reference of the various regimes which took the loans. They wondered why women of the Third World, most of whom were not consulted by the various regimes in the era of loan-taking, should now have to bear the brunt of the effects of such loans. They argued that women in the Third World generally, and in Africa in particular, were the proverbial hewers of wood and drawers of water and were severely hit by the continued deterioration in general amenities for which the creditor organisations were largely responsible, given their onerous conditionalities. Moreover it was recognised that the debt crisis was intricately bound up with the continuing food crisis, characterised by escalating prices and disappearing commodities. The 'zero-zero-one' option was a Nigerian conceptualisation for what the Sierra Leonians referred to as 'Hard Times' : a situation where few persons could eat more than a meal a day. |
