Le journal de l'IRD
n° 35 May-June 2006
Translator: Nicholas Flay
T
© Morris Harisson/DGMWR
Marriage, from obedience
to equality
Demographer Arlette Gautier from IRD’s
Laboratory Population-EnvironnementDéveloppement (UR151), finds that family
law enters both directly and indirectly
into demographic behaviour. She has
conducted the first international comparative study of laws of marriage
and divorce.
Now, at the beginning of the 21st
Century, the marriage code
establishes equality between
husband and wife in 56% of
countries (based on 142 studies). In European countries,
although this equality is generally affirmed, other problems
arise such as the persistence of common
law that is often far from being equal,
or rape and conjugal violence.
School of inequality
Going beyond debates about the parity
between girls and boys in schools in
Africa, Marie-France Lange, sociologist
and head of IRD research unit Savoirs et
développement (UR105), favours a radical
analysis of the schooling of girls in
Africa.
Education is considered as a source of
emancipation for women. But it is not
always the case. The education of girls
appears to be tolerated if the feeling
that they cannot learn much at school is
reinforced. In rural life, the right to education is often therefore given lower priority than instruction in
aspects useful for the
household: such as needlework, hygiene and domestic tasks, which prepare the
future woman for a role
that excludes any emancipation.
The right to education
comes down to fundamental human rights, to notions
of equality and liberty. Girls’
lack of rights to education
is thus only a reflection of
the lack of women’s rights. Access to
education for girls depends implicitly on
the status and rights of women.
However, it is easier to formulate and
apply the assertion of the right to education for all than to affirm women’s
rights. And girls’ progress in school in
Africa should have some influence on
the claims they will be able to express
when they are adult women.
Social change and influences
of the media
Five researchers have made surveys in
five different countries (Nigeria,
Mauritania, Mali, Senegal and Ivory
Coast) on the practical ways in which
visual media, as different as photography, video, television series, advertising
or the press, are received and used
locally, and in what way they favour the
spread of standards, values and behaviours coming from other cultures.
Women watch television series (soap
operas, television films) on a massive
scale. This cannot be explained only by
the pleasure they derive from these
entertainments, but also in particular
because such programmes provide them
with the symbolic resources they need in
order to manage better in the free-forall of life in the large African cities.
he surface area of Lake Chad
has shrunk from an expanse of
25 000 km2 in the 1960s to only a few
thousand today. It has changed from
being a “Large lake” to become a
“Small lake” in a small number of years.
However, to find evidence of a much
larger “Mega-lake” Chad we have to
go back more than 6000 years, up to
the Middle Holocene. IRD researchers
(UMR Hydrosciences, UMR G-Eau) working jointly with Monash University (Australia)
recently identified the shores of this ancient Mega-lake by remote sensing, in the form
of a ribbon of sand marking a perimeter of over 2300 km. The lake occupied an area
of 340 000 km2 and had a maximum depth of 160 m (currently less than 10 m), forming the 4th largest lake in the world after the Caspian Sea and Lakes Baïkal and
Tanganyika.
These strong fluctuations of Lake Chad in the course of time are linked to large variations in climate which affect tropical Africa. Analyses on sediments and fossil pollen
combined with historical surveys have brought evidence of a complete drying-out of
the lake for a period of about 20 years towards the mid 15th Century. Conversely, during the Middle Holocene, between about 8500 and 6000 years, the Sahara was not a
region as extensively covered by desert as it is now, but bore a number of lakes and
swamps as well as more extensive vegetation cover.
p. 4 Partners
International symposium
Education, violence, conflicts and prospects for peace in Africa
F
rom 6 to 10 March 2006, a bilingual
(French-English) international symposium was held in Yaounde, entitled
“Education, violence, conflicts and
prospects for peace in Africa”, organized
jointly by the networks FASAF “Famille et
scolarisation en Afrique” and ROCARE
“Réseau ouest et centrafricain de
recherche en education”.
The whole of the work presented and the debates clearly brought to light an enormous need for scientific
knowledge, which emphasizes the little attention given
to the theme by the scientific
community. The question of
measurement appears crucial
for
accurately
grasping
0changes in intensity and
forms of violence, notably in
school situations. It is advisable both to
increase the number of detailed case
studies and take up comparative
approaches between countries. The symposium raises the manifold conceptual,
methodological and ethical questions for
which the social sciences must bring
answers of sufficiently high level to meet
the size of the issues involved.
p. 7 Research
Madagascan women: two centuries
of surprises for Europeans...
Gender-related indices and more generally those relative to the situation of
women bring into relief the special character of Madagascar compared with
continental Africa. In contrast with
what is observed in Sub-Saharan
Africa, girls receive as much schooling
as boys at primary level. Similarly, half
the students at the University of
Antananarivo are girls. The age gap
between the two sexes in marriage is small (about 4 years in
2003), whereas elsewhere in
Sub-Saharan Africa it is observed
to be between 4 and 8 years. The close
age and education level between spouses is favourable for women’s power to
intervene in decisions made within the
couple. There are no tasks that are
exclusively reserved for men or for
women, activities are complementary
and the family budget is managed by
the women. Nevertheless, several questions still arise concerning women’s status in society. In spite of legal principles
that guarantee equality, access to
employment is still unequal in the private sector.
Fierce resistance of red colobus in the Saloum Delta
R
ed colobus monkeys (Procolobus badius temmincki) of the
Saloum Delta in Senegal have managed to face the degradation of their natural habitat and gained a reprieve from what
seemed to be certain extinction. Research of a team of IRD primatologists shed light on evidence that this African monkey
has developed some ingenious behavioural adaptations to
their circumstances.
The oldest one is an increase in their consumption of fruit
and use of plants they had not hitherto drawn on for food
(grasses, herbaceous plants and seeds), in spite of their
folivore metabolism (geared to feeding on tree leaves).
The second striking development is an increase in the time
the colobus spend on the ground. This is in spite of a morphology adapted to movement in the higher tree canopy.
A more recent observation was the appearance of two
other elements of behaviour new to the Saloum red
colobus. Firstly, they show a tendency to associate with other
primate species, and in particular with the green monkey
(Cercopithecus (aethiops) sabaeus, a semi-arboreal primate of
sudanian savannah). The other is their frequentation of more open
habitats. In this way the Senegal red colobus, known up to now for
living exclusively in enclosed habitats, such as forests, dry forests,
gallery forest and forest margins, now colonize zones of less dense
vegetation, such as areas with sparse groups of trees where the
canopy is interrupted. The last new adaptation, similar to the previous one, is a recourse to the mangrove swamps. The colobus first
used these as a refuge, but subsequently adopted them as resting
and feeding places. That is the most recent development.
Consult the articles in full on the IRD Internet site : http://www.ird.fr
© IRD/E. Deliry-Antheaume
Lack of time
Time Use surveys quantify the way in
which men and women divide their time
in the course of a day or of a week, or
even from one season to the next.
Women appear to be doted with less
time than men. They have to take on, in
addition to their paid or unpaid activities, reproductive work, household tasks
and personal care. Such Time Use studies can also provide a more accurate
assessment of the women’s contribution
to the work force. They highlight in particular the multi-activity dimension of
women’s work.
The results of Time Use surveys should
therefore be taken into account in
national accounting, and the GDP of
African countries re-evaluated accordingly.
Conclusive initiatives have already been
taken in Burkina Faso, the African country where the contribution of women’s
informal-sector activities to GDP appears
to be highest.
p. 2 News
Pacific
t the end of 2005 and the beginning
of 2006, the largest volcano of the
Vanuatu archipelago prompted the close
attention of vulcanologists and the
national authorities. The sudden awakening of volcanic activity justified the displacement of several thousand people
from the island which began on 5 December 2005. The specialists feared there
might be an explosion if blockage of the
volcano chimney occurred. A mission conducted by the IRD at the end of February
observed a lake of mud contained in the
interior of the recently constructed island
and that a significant degassing process
was emitting 1500 tonnes of SO2 per day
at that time.
Lake Chad’s changes with time
Gender inequality is an obstacle for sustainable development and human rights. This
feature gives some examples of studies made by IRD researchers on social relations
between men and women in Africa..
© IRD/M. Dukhan
hile all the great research institutions abroad are bringing to
the fore study programmes on gender,
and at a time when it would be taking
a great risk to respond to international
calls for tender without making reference to gender questions, it would be
highly detrimental to the IRD to stay on
the sidelines of this inexorable process.
Shouldn’t the Institute’s intrinsic interdisciplinary character on the contrary
bring it to centre stage in tackling
research themes of the future and give
it a comparative advantage for occupying this area of research? The Institute’s
involvement would definitely not be a
case of going along with a mere fashion trend or a short-lived ideology, as
some still seem to think.
The many different institutions in the
United Nations system have played a
major role in promoting the general
increase of awareness of this social
issue which must indeed be considered
as such by scientific research. Because
it is society, or rather societies in all
their diversity, which is responsible for
the various forms of inequality
between the sexes that contemporary
studies reveal and put on the policy
agenda of most governments in the
world, in the developing countries as
much as in the industrialized states.
A
Questions of gender
Women’s underestimated work
The international network “Women in
Informal Employment: Globalizing and
Organizing” has conducted studies on
the work of women in Africa in order
to facilitate the taking
into account of gender
in macroeconomic policy
measures.
Inclusion of all the domestic and community services
women fulfil in terms of
production in surveys on
work
highlights
more
effectively the real contribution women make to the
national
product
and
to household well-being.
African women are often
predominant in informal work activities.
Taking these into account also helps
provide a clearer picture of women’s
work.
W
A giant’s wrath
p. 1 News
© IRD/Anh Galat-Luong
by Jacques Charmes
Head of Department Societies and
Health
p. 8-9 Research
© IRD/A. Luce
Gender is not
a fashion
trend
© IRD/D. Hugodot
p. 1 Editorial
© IRD/G. Favreau
Abstracts for the international issue