• Develop an understanding of how gender and race intersect with economic issues and their effect on women’s entrepreneurship in the developing world
• Identify and consider the unique challenges as well as commonalities faced by women in specific localities across the globe, and how these specific challenges are shaped by racial difference
• Identify and consider the impact of the racialized history of development institutions and development discourse, and their impact on contemporary development policy
• Integrate gender specific issues and sensitivity to racial privilege in their business plans to offer more specialized and individualized solutions.
• Apply the Gender Lens Impact Investing approach (GLII) discussed in the course to reflect critically on both their own business plan and its development process.
• Identify the role of social innovation and social entrepreneurship to tackle some gender specific issues.
• Critically analyze relevant cases of economy, society and global inequalities: work, employment, migration, poverty, gender and sustainable development and the climate and ecology discourses.

Among businesses, decision-makers and investors seeking ways for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals there is increasing recognition of the need to incorporate gender and race into investment analysis and development policy. A failure to understand the significance of gender and race relations can interfere not only with the fulfillment of policy objectives but also sustainability prospects. In this class, we will explore/discuss how gender relations affect women’s choices and participation in the entrepreneurial activities; solutions embraced as well as sustainability prospects. We will also consider the ways that race, and its intersections with gender, continue to be central to the discourse and practices of the development sector.

This course consists of four modules, not including the introductory and concluding sessions. The first two modules cover scholarly and policy debates about the relationship between gender and development and race and development respectively. These sessions will cover feminist and postcolonial scholarship on development, women’s relationship to the economy and environment (including the centrality of reproduction and reproductive health), and the significance of the historical legacies of race and racism in the origins of major development institutions for the legitimacy and effectiveness of these institutions today. The final section of the second module will bring the first two modules together to consider the intersectionality of race and gender in development, for example, through a focus on the labour of low-income women in the global South and its place within development approaches.

The third module will consist of a series of country and regional case studies that draw attention to different issues at the intersection of gender, race and development. These might include: gender dynamics in a specific locality; access to resources; women’s everyday lives and survival strategies; reproduction/fertility and population; women’s relationship with the environment; cultural tensions between development practitioners and the recipients of development aid. The course will include examples and cases from all continents to demonstrate women’s heterogeneity and individuality across the globe.

The fourth module turns to practice, and considers alternatives to mainstream development and investment models that have the potential to be more inclusive and sustainable on gender and racial lines. These will include gender lens impact investing and participatory development. These models and others will be examined to consider both their implications for generating financial gains as well as specific social and environmental beneficial effects.

1. Averett, S.L., Argys, L. M., and Hoffman, S. D. The Oxford handbook of women and the economy, New York : Oxford University Press, (2017)
2. The Women, Gender & Development Reader, 2nd Edition edited by Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma and Laurie Nisonoff, London and New York: Zed Books (2011).
3. Yvonne A. Braun and Assitan Sylla Traore 2015 “Plastic Bags, Pollution, and Identity: Women and the Gendering of Globalization and Environmental Responsibility in Mali.” Gender and Society 29(6)863-887.
4. Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman 2012 “Fixing women or fixing the world? ‘Smart economics’, efficiency approaches, and gender equality in development.” Gender & Development 20(3):517-529.
5. Naila Kabeer 2005 “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: A Critical Analysis of the Third Millennium Development Goal 1.” Gender & Development 13(1):13-24.
6. Christina Abraham (2015) “Race, Gender and ‘Difference’: Representation of ‘Third World Women’ in International Development,” Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 2(2): 4-24.
7. Kai Chen (2013) “Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (7): 1256-1257.
8. Sarah White (2002) “Thinking Race, Thinking Development,” Third World Quarterly 23(3): 407-419.
9. Uma Kothari (2006) “An agenda for thinking about ‘race’ in development,” Progress in Development Studies 6(1): 9-23.
10. Kathryn Moeller (2019), “The Ghost Statistic that Haunts Women’s Empowerment,” The New Yorker, January 4, 2019.