Expertise in the Age of Development

Abstract This article examines small-scale development programs targeting women in Niger and Senegal between 1962 and 1975. Development's attention to large-scale public works and programs targeting men as productive laborers obscures UNESCO's promise to provide men and women in developing countries equal access to and an equal role in the transformation of their nations. Studying women's animation, a grassroots approach to modernizing rural African villages, allows us to better understand the gendered and raced dimensions of development and explore tensions among and between development planners. This article asks how white women experts, who sought to emphasize women's needs and to valorize their contributions, fit into development. It examines women practitioners’ efforts to counter gendered assumptions about the agents of change in Africa. It shows that women experts adhered to development's universalist worldview, yet simultaneously encountered and critiqued failures to uphold the development ethos. It demonstrates that development's modernization programs perpetuated ideas about women's labor, relegating it to the domestic and reproductive spheres.