IIARD International Institute of Academic Research and Development

IIARD International Journal of Economics and Business Management (IJEBM )

E-ISSN 2489-0065
P-ISSN 2695-186X
VOL. 4 NO. 7 2018

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Gender, Globalization and Women's Poverty: Evidence from Nigeria

Ngozi G. Iheduru, FCA

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Abstract

This paper attempts to examine the process of globalization, especially financial integration and investment, foreign capital transfers and the profound effects it has had on the lives of women in Africa with a case study of Nigeria. It also examines the globalization-engendered national policies of privatization and commercialization that have had adversely affected the living conditions of Nigerian women. Structural adjustment programmes, enforced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other multilateral international financial institutions have resulted in massive privatization of previously state owned enterprises, the relaxation, of tariffs and quotas that have led to inundation of foreign mass-produced goods and consequent massive job losses; scaling back of social programmes, and overall trade liberalization that has led to the a new level of women impoverishment in Nigeria are studied. Women's positions as workers, producers of food, and homemakers are now impacted-not only by the local conditions of ethnicity, religion, and cultural rigidities but invariably also by the gender-blind rules of globalization. The paper further examines how the process of globalization has exacerbated the existing gender inequities, deepened asymmetrical power relations between men and women widened the hitherto unequal access to credit, education, economic resources, and health services thus resulting to further immiseration. Statistical data from the last decade and half, since the structural adjustment for globalization in the early 1990s, is used to illustrate these contentions. Finally the paper concludes with implications of the findings for better public policy for women in Nigeria.

keywords:

Gender, Globalization, Women's Poverty

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