ETD Collection

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Author: search.filters.author.Mupavayenda, MercySubject: search.filters.subject.Equality--South Africa

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    Women's empowerment: a discourse analysis of the coca-cola 5by20 global initiative
    (2017) Mupavayenda, Mercy
    Women's 'empowerment' has in the past few years become a central focus and major theme on the global development agenda. As a result of a causal link established between women's 'empowerment', gender equality, and economic growth by dominant development institutions (World Bank 2011; IMF 2013; IFC 2013) women have been framed as the answer to end world poverty (World Bank 2011) (UN Women, 2011). This huge claim has caused high contestation among development scholars and feminists who have argued that the development discourse and campaigns emanating from these institutions are deliberately designed to feminise poverty and feminise responsibility thereby creating a double burden for women (Chant & Sweetman 2012). The emerging partnerships between dominant developments institutions and multi-national corporations (MNCs) have further brought about a complex dimension to women's' empowerment'. These institutions argue that investing in women is common sense or 'smart economics'. However, feminists and other development critics suggest 'empowerment' campaigns mask the exploitative relationships private corporations and international banks have with the global South which seek to keep the system intact, turns girls and women into consumers while expanding market penetration and diffusing blame for poverty (Hengveld, 2015). This study takes a critical social science and feminist research paradigm approach, and employs a discourse analysis in order to analyse the Coca- Cola 5by20 global women's empowerment initiative. The study relies on a documentary analysis and uses documents collected mainly from the Coca-Cola website and other relevant institutional websites and research repositories. Findings show that the initiative is conceptualised around the gendered work carried out by women in the developing world. The concept of womanhood (strong, resilient, long suffering mother figure/ matriarch) employed in the empowerment development discourse exaggerates women's capabilities and has its roots in colonial and racist depictions of the 'masculinised black woman who possesses sub-human strength' (hooks, 1990). This concept of womanhood is overburdening to women, and ignores/entrenches the social order which keeps women 'powerless' to trump structural causes of poverty. The contribution of this research lies in that it offers an insight in the use of older women's bodies by the development discourse. It also interrogates the meaning and implication of the UN formalising Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a way of doing development thereby privileging markets as unproblematic spaces and a solution to promote gender equality.