The Plight of African Women

A friend, a left-leaning columnist, tells the heart-warming story of an Ghanaian woman who came to Canada to get her Ph.D. Not forgetting her homeland, she has set up a charity offering microcredit to the women of her home village. Her name is Vida.

Here is my response:

I'm not at all sure Vida's charity is a good idea. I am not at all sure it is doing more good than harm.

Your column claims that women in Ghana are notably deprived of an education. Not true, according to the statistics at Nationmaster. Male/female attendance at primary and secondary school is close to 50/50: 47.4% female primary, 44.7% female secondary. For comparison, in Singapore it's 47.6% female in primary school; Netherlands 48.3%; Canada 48.8%. Not too far off the mark; and especially impressive in the Third World, where a lack of jobs makes it less useful to educate women as a practical matter. Indeed, your own column contradicts the claim that Vida's family was opposed to educating women: her elder sister, you note, was able to finance Vida's education, because she held a job.

Your column claims that hospitals and health care in Ghana discriminate against women. But again, the statistics belie this: as in most parts of the world, women's life expectancy in Ghana is higher than men's: 60.35 vs. 58.65 years.

You further claim that, in Ghana, men control the money. If so, Ghana is nearly unique in world terms: almost everywhere else, women do. This includes Canada: since long before “women's liberation,” and still today, women control fully 80% of all consumer spending. The typical situation everywhere is that the husband earns the money, the wife spends it. And, in fact, your own column again belies this claim: obviously, Vida's own sister was able to control her own money, to the extend that she had a large enough disposable income to support her sister in school. Note too, in Vida's micro-credit scheme, that the women are able to back one another's loans. Obviously, they have some cash to work with, entirely at their own discretion, despite Ghana's poverty, or this would not be possible.

Anecdotally, you tell the story of a woman who had to sneak away from her husband to get birth control pills. This is not too surprising. In an agricultural society, another child is usually of overall benefit to the family—not just one more mouth to feed, but two more hands to work, and one more member of the mutual support network. Each further child helps guarantee the parents' welfare in old age. For the wife, specifically, though, it represents a risk: death in childbirth is not that uncommon. So the husband is normally likely to want more children, while the wife may fear it.

But of the two, who is right? Who is thinking of the greater good to the greater number, of their family reponsibilities? It seems to me that supporting the wife against the husband in this situation is likely to be to the overall detriment of Ghanians.

There seems, in sum, no objective justification for the radical discrimination against men that Vida's project proposes; nothing, perhaps, but cultural prejudice. And is radical discrimination really a good thing to promote in Africa, which has been rocked so many times already with ethnic genocides?

As noted, the wife almost always gets to spend the family money at her own discretion. So what, exactly, is the point of putting this money very publicly in front of the whole village directly into the women's hands, ad Vida's scheme proposes? The only obvious value of this is to dramatically cut men out of the family equation, and to humiliate them—to subvert the family role of the husband and father as provider.

This obvious direct attack on the Ghanian family structure is more likely to increase poverty than to reduce it.

First, it is a serious thing to subvert the family in the Third World, because in such poor countries the family is the only form of social insurance there is. There is no government safety net—indeed, government barely functions at all, and commonly you cannot trust anyone outside your own family even to deal with you fairly. Beyond the family, it is almost a war of each against each.

Second, what is the likely and demonstrated reaction of men to having their family role as provider removed? Daniel Patrick Moynihan did a famous study of this years ago, in relation to the US welfare system. Most often, men in this situation do one of two things—or rather, families do, as the women's wishes are probably also involved: either the men stop working and relax; or they leave. Either way, the whole family suffers, and especially the children. As a result, the black family in America has almost disappeared since the 1940s, creating a permanent welfare cycle, a permanent underclass. The same is likely to happen in Ghana to the extent that Vida's approach is embraced.

Make no mistake; the result will be worse than a zero sum game. What more money the mother makes will be cancelled out by less from the father, yes. But the father is unlikely, on the evidence, to embrace the idea of taking care of the children now that the mother is too busy with her business. He's more likely to get drunk and stay drunk. Or go. And stacks of studies show that children suffer greatly every which way from having fewer than two parents. So the next generation is being mortgaged for the sake of this present social experiment; Ghana's future prosperity is being mortgaged.

I cannot imagine a more perfect recipe for Ghana's permanent colonization.