Introduction
In recent decades, Africa’s average annual growth has consistently outpaced the global average, and the continent is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies. Driving these impressive statistics are the so-called lion economies. With growth rates far in excess of those registered at the start of the 2010s, countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa continue to perform well, despite the recent global recession (IMF 2021). While initially fuelled mainly by a mix of primary commodities and natural resources, many of Africa’s ‘lions’ are now looking to diversify and sustain these growth rates into the future. An ‘Eastern turn’ in ambition and policy is discernible as states increasingly look to the experiences of successful Asian economies to emulate their models. Although the specific dynamics of these Asian models vary, a common feature across all is their labour-intensive, export-driven model of manufacturing-led industrialisation which is dependent on a continuous supply of low-cost, often feminised, labour. This raises important questions in relation to its gendered implications.
Drawing on the experience of a number of East Asian economies and applying the lessons from these to Africa, in this Debate I argue that there are significant gendered implications to these development policies based on manufacturing which, to date, have largely been ignored in the contemporary literature on African political economy. I highlight, in particular, four lessons for African states intent on pursuing similar paths in this regard. These lessons suggest that a broadening of national discourse and policy in ways that move beyond narrow ‘add women and stir’ approaches to economic development is necessary if African states are to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with Asian models.
Africa’s ‘lions’: what makes them roar?
Emerging dramatically from the economically stagnant and socially dislocating structural adjustment decades of the 1980s and 1990s, Africa’s lion economies have drawn considerable attention and debate. While the fortunes of some (notably, large oil producers such as Angola and Nigeria) have waxed and waned somewhat over time, many of the world’s fastest growing economies are still in Africa. Although suffering an overall contraction in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, many countries continued to record growth rates in positive figures, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects growth rates of approximately 3.8% for the region in 2022 (IMF 2021).
A complex range of factors lies behind the rise of the region broadly, and the lions more specifically. However, analysts and commentators are united in highlighting the important role played by natural resources, in particular mineral resources such as oil, natural gas and coal in this growth (see e.g. Beresford 2016; Bhorat and Tarp 2016; Frankema and van Waijenburg 2018; McKinsey 2016; Taylor 2016). These same analysts sound a strong note of caution in relation to this natural resource dependence, however. The many pitfalls and costs associated with such dependence are well known. These include vulnerability to global fluctuations in prices; weak linkages to domestic economies; limited employment generation; tax avoidance practices among mining companies; negative impacts on local communities; and, of course, the existential threat to the global climate and our collective survival from fossil-fuel-based industries around the world (Bhorat and Tarp 2016; Frankema and van Waijenburg 2018; Kimeyni, Mwega and Ndung'u et al. 2016; Khisa 2019; Mills et al. 2020; Taylor 2016). Less frequently discussed, but no less important, are their gendered impacts (World Bank 2009; Bradshaw, Linneker, and Overton 2017; Wegenast and Beck 2020). Looking east to Asia where, at different points of the twentieth century, many Asian tigers (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and their South East Asian cubs (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam) grew their economies rapidly by exploiting their relatively low labour costs to manufacture products for the world market at lower prices than industrialised economies, commentators’ common solution is to follow a similar path. Mimicking these models, a reorientation in direction and investment towards low-wage, labour-intensive manufacturing industries is proposed (Bhorat and Tarp 2016; Cramer, Sender, and Oqubay 2020; Mills et al. 2020). As Bhorat and Tarp argue in their full-length volume on the opportunities and pitfalls for Africa’s lions moving forward,
where industrialization has taken place, it has generally been dominated by mining rather than manufacturing activities. In fact, in most regions and periods since the 1990s, manufacturing has declined substantially. This weakness in manufacturing represents a key indicator alluding to the vulnerability of the growth and development trajectory of many of Africa’s economies. (Bhorat and Tarp 2016, 7)
Lessons from Asia’s tigers and their cubs
There is, of course, no single ‘Asian model’ or industrial strategy that can be replicated or applied across the diversity of African states and contexts. This diversity notwithstanding, a number of common success factors across Asian models have now been identified. In particular, an export-oriented development strategy driven by low-wage manufacturing has been central to all models (Felipe 2018; Seric and Tong 2019; Van Donge, Henley, and Lewis 2012). Often described as the ‘engine of growth’, low-wage manufacturing has driven sustained rapid growth in many contexts, where, with female labour at its core, ‘competition turns on cost minimisation’ (Felipe 2018, 2). While providing new opportunities for many women, it has also added to women’s existing burdens in a range of different ways. The rich body of empirical literature emerging from Asia, following its decades of experience in this area, both provides a window into what is in store and offers some lessons as to how this model might work more equitably and sustainably within an African context. Four specific lessons can be drawn from this literature.
Women’s labour: ‘cheap’, ‘docile’ and disposable
It is now over 40 years since Elson and Pearson’s path-breaking work on the links between the cheap, efficient and productive labour of dextrous, ‘nimble-fingered’ women and models of export-led manufacturing development in the global South (Elson and Pearson 1981). Together with a wide range of other scholars and researchers who followed, the authors highlighted how this industrialisation strategy was characterised by the rediscovery of women’s labour as a specific asset (cheap, productive and easy to control) with the attendant laxity in industrial relations to regulate it. Today, a voluminous body of literature exists that documents complaints of low wages, poor working conditions, frequent layoffs and a lack of rights and union protection for women working within manufacturing industries in many Asian countries (see e.g. Addison and Demery 1988 on East Asia; Foo and Lim 1989 on South East Asia; ILO 2005 and Robertson et al. 2016 on Asia broadly; Berik and Rodgers 2010 on Bangladesh and Cambodia; Gunawardana 2016 on Sri Lanka; and Dobbs and Loh 2020 on Singapore).
National policy in some countries did develop to make provision for and to enforce progressive worker protections in certain industries; see for example Lim (2018) on Singapore’s ‘correctional wage increases’ together with subsidised health, housing, transport and pension provisions for workers in the context of a diversification towards capital and skill-intensive investments. However, opportunities in these industries for women remained limited due to difficulties juggling careers and domestic care responsibilities. From the wealth of literature and empirical material available, it is clear that, in the words of one specialist in the field, ‘the spread of labour intensive, export-oriented manufacturing has depended on the construction of gendered production processes that are based on the exploitation and control of low waged female labour’ (Elias 2005, 203).
Gendered transformations in the informal economy
Studies from Asia have also uncovered a correlation between a growth in female participation in formal manufacturing sectors and a growth in female participation in informal sectors (Beneria 2001; Chen, Sebstad, and O’Connell 1999). This comes about as women seek to supplement their incomes from their manufacturing work or, failing to secure work in factories, turn to informal-sector activities in an attempt to secure some remuneration.
Unlike other regions in the world, women already dominate the informal economy in Africa, with one source reporting an 89.7% participation rate (ILO 2018). Participation in the informal economy is increasing for both women and men, and it is widely recognised as the most precarious sector of employment (ILO 2018; Malta et al. 2019). Both women and men face risks of unstable earnings, with no access to health insurance. However, in addition to these risks, women carry the double burden of informal work and care responsibilities in the home. Moreover, they are disproportionately impacted by a lack of access to social protection (Ulrichs 2016); they are more likely to experience discrimination in accessing financial and other services (Golla 2017); and they are more likely to risk intimidation and abuse from powerful counterparts (Skinner et al. 2021). Women in the informal sector are also particularly adversely affected by global economic downturns, such as those experienced following the contagion of the 2008 global crash (Cohen 2010), as well as more recently, following Covid-19, as they lack the economic and social safety nets often afforded to those in the formal sector (ILO 2020; Skinner et al. 2021).
Growing gendered inequalities
While the Asian model has succeeded, to varying degrees, in reducing poverty in different countries, this has been accompanied by significant increases in inequality. A wide range of studies track the polarising impacts of changes in labour market and income distribution at both economic and social levels (see Ahuja et al. 1997 on East Asia; Baum 1999 on Singapore; Wang 2003 on Taiwan; Chiu and Lui 2004 and Forrest, La Grange, and Yip 2004 on Hong Kong; Tai 2013 on Singapore; Hong Kong and Taiwan; and Kanbur, Rhee, and Zhuang 2014 on Asia more broadly). Kanbur, Rhee, and Zhuang (2014, 23), examining trends and drivers across the region, report that of the 37 economies with available data in the 2000s, 14 had a Gini coefficient of or greater than 40, the level widely considered the threshold for ‘high inequality’.1 A common pattern is discernible – highly skilled workers with more education see their incomes rise, while low-skilled workers see their wages either stagnate or decrease, with this trend disproportionately felt by women (Oxfam 2016; Rodgers and Zveglich 2014). This pay gap is apparent even in countries where women have higher educational attainment than men, as Chang and England’s (2011) findings in Taiwan reveal. Although rising inequalities in incomes can be associated with a general rise in the standard of living, they have also been shown to be associated with rising grievances and political instability (Lei 2020; World Bank 2011). Widening inequalities are already a feature of many African states, with this trend set to increase following the Covid crisis (IMF 2021). In the absence of state policies to regulate wages, such inequalities are likely to deepen even further.
A crisis of social reproduction
A fourth trend emerging from the Asian literature is a crisis in social reproduction as women juggle the double burden of work within their remunerated jobs and unremunerated work within their households and wider communities. This crisis manifests in four ways. First, it manifests in changes in the nature and composition of families. Drawing on a range of time-series government data across a number of Asian countries including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, both Tai (2013) and Takenoshita (2020) chart increases in marriage age, decreases in fertility rates and growing numbers of divorces. While, on the one hand, this signals a newfound independence among Asian women, on the other, it also represents a broader crisis in family life. As Tai notes, ‘Women in Asian cities are in a dilemma over careers and families. The pressures of a job are incompatible with the demands of family life and motherhood’ (2013, 1153). Second, the crisis of social reproduction restricts social mobility, limiting the possibilities for women to move from lower to higher paid positions due to ongoing disproportionate responsibilities for family care (Lim 2018). Third, with many women needing to move away from their homes to industrial centres, especially urban and mining areas, to secure work, their unremunerated family work is transferred to other family members, often grandmothers in rural areas. This further adds to the costs and burden of social reproduction within local households and communities. And fourth, as both Elias and Roberts (2016) and Gunawardana (2016) argue, this crisis of social reproduction, while damaging to families and households, also threatens the very economic system that depends on it. The nature and composition of families in urban Africa is also rapidly changing (McLean 2021). In the continued absence of state supports for family and community care, together with shifts in discourse and practice around gendered relations within the household more broadly, a similar crisis across African contexts seems inevitable.
Conclusion
There is certainly much to be admired within Asian models that emphasise development policies based on labour-intensive, export-driven manufacturing. Providing significant opportunities for individual security, progression and development, for women and men alike, they offer a welcome alternative to the widespread environmentally damaging and socially dislocating models of natural resource exploitation that offer limited benefits locally. Commentators and analysts, focusing on these local benefits, understandably prioritise questions around what is needed for countries to increase their take-up of such industries. Issues such as capital accumulation, infrastructural development, technological advancement and institutional reform dominate debates in this field. However, the ‘local’ remains largely unproblematised in such debates. The implicit assumption is that benefits will accrue equally. However, the overall lesson from Asia’s decades of experience is that economic policy is not gender neutral, and that the much-touted model of low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing increases gendered inequalities and discriminations. Some consideration of these differential gendered impacts would greatly enhance debates and commentary in this field.
To overcome such inequalities and discriminations, and to facilitate more inclusive growth, a broadening of national discourse and policy is required. This needs to move beyond ‘add women and stir’ approaches that seek to insert women into existing inequitable manufacturing structures rather than seeking to balance and transform those structures. In particular, if they are to avoid some of the pitfalls of Asian states, African analysts, commentators and policymakers will need to broaden and engender national policy discourses and spaces, supporting strategies and programmes that promote fair and progressive pay and working conditions for all workers, greater public investment in infrastructure and social services, and a macroeconomic environment that supports and redistributes unpaid domestic labour across the household and community. Workers themselves can also draw inspiration from the small yet significant gains derived from female workers’ resistance in manufacturing plants in Malaysia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka (Rosa 1994), and in a British multinational corporation in Malaysia (Elias 2005). As the Asian experience has demonstrated, failure to act will exacerbate gendered inequalities and discriminations and undermine the essential social base of economic growth.