Large and small houses in Luganda: housing construction and gender in South Africa
This article discusses the participation of women in housing delivery in Luganda, which occurred at a time of both political and economic changes that had a profound impact on their ability to consolidate their core structures. The findings suggest that few women in Luganda were involved in ‘skilled’ residential construction. When they participated, it was in supportive roles such as clearing the sites for construction, carrying water and mixing the concrete. However, home ownership brought women benefits in that their houses provided the space and infrastructure that they needed to effectively carry out their informal sector activities, which related to the services sector. This study argues that skilled work in construction is better remunerated than in the services sector, in which most women work. If women are to enter the formal construction sector it is imperative that they alter their attitudes and those of their spouses. Projects dealing with shelter delivery should therefore focus not only on the product but also on raising the consciousness of the beneficiaries with regard to gender matters.
Shelter as Sustenance: Exclusionary Mechanisms Limiting Women's Access to Housing
Fsransk Mlraftsb is cuffently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation research examines the spatia/and social impacts of women's home­ based production in urban areas of developing countries. She has a Master of Architecture from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Her undergraduate architectural studies were at Tehran University In Iran. Her work In the U.S., Norway, Latin America, and Iran has helped her develop a social understanding of the buln environment. This paper discusses the role of shelter for the suste­ nance of women in cities of the developing world and the ways in which women's access to shelter is limited in these societies. This problem is particularly important since processes of economic change and urbanization that bring women to cities in the developing world often strip them of forms of social support and force them to seek shelter in a commodified environment in which they lack adequate monetary resources and/or legal or social rights.
Woman-Headed Households and Poverty: Insights from Kenya
Over the past four decades the number of households headed by women has increased worldwide. The great majority of these households are impoverished. Scholars have characterized poor woman-headed households as an expression of social pathology, as the outcome of cultural diffusion, as a survival strategy of the poor in capitalist economies, and, in the United States, as a legacy of black slavery.' Underlying these characterizations are value judgments about woman-headed households and the forces that shape them. Recognizing woman-headed households as a social form is inherently value laden for Western scholars because it calls into question basic Western assumptions about "natural" (and universal) forms for family structure and gender relations.2