For southern women, SAPRI is very important because the women in the South are the least informed, least involved, and least capable of coping with adjustment. So SAPRI is an opportunity for women to voice their concerns, to participate and be involved, and to put forward their analysis, their local knowledge, and their coping methods. SAPRI is very important because women are seeing it as an opportunity to "humanize" adjustment policies. It is an opportunity also to redefine some of the concepts we have assumed we have understood like partnership, poverty, what the real economy is, and economic and human development. It will also enable women to be able to make connections between the policies and how they affect them at the grassroots level, and to understand what concepts such as macro, meso, and micro policies and levels mean, particularly for women who are involved in raising the economic base for southern countries. They would like to know, for example, how, with their unsubsidized subsistence farming, export-led growth affects what they grow and sell, their food security, and their nutritional level. SAPRI will also help the mainstream by integrating the so-called untraditional methodologies that they have been using, and what the economists otherwise classify as falling outside the economic paradigms. Those methodologies that they have been using to assess their growth and development is an opportunity for women at the grassroots level to have an input into the exercise. |