Under the Linnaeus Palme International Exchange Programme between the Department of English and Humanities, BRAC University and Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umea University, Sweden, the ENH department hosted a public lecture titled, “Exporting Social Policy to the Global South: Swedish international development policies, gender equality and violence against women” by Professor Ann Öhman on January 28, 2016 at the BRACU auditorium.
Professor Öhman is a Swedish gender researcher with a focus on gender and public/global health, who has extensive experience of collaborating with developmental projects in low and middle income countries. She has been teaching in the Umeå International School of Public Health for 15 years, and is also a social activist.
Professor Dr Saad Andalib, vice chancellor of BRACU, welcomed the guest, while Dr Rifat Mahbub, assistant professor of the ENH department, read the opening note.
Based on her long academic career in the fields of gender and public health, in her lecture, Professor Öhman provided the audience with a critique of the Swedish development policies in relation to the promotion of gender equality and mainstreaming in less-developed countries, global health, along with a few critical reflections on gender and development. The speaker successfully problematised and discussed the strategies and goals of Swedish development policy, gender and development. As well as their links to preventing violence against women, promoting gender equality, fighting gender-based violence and intimate partner violence that is prevalent in many societies. The Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA), like many other international development organisations such as the United Nations, gives strong emphasis on gender mainstreaming as a means to reduce poverty and head towards sustainable development. The speaker, however, like many feminists concerned about the problematic outcomes for women of such policies, argued that despite improvements of women's conditions in many poor countries, in the broader context of policy discussions and developments, women from the "Global South" are still being marginalised. The different phases of international aid and policy transfer from the Global North to Global South in the last four decades, as the speaker noted, has given birth to debates about the reproduction of global hierarchy between the rich and poor countries. The gap between policies and practices while actualising development and gender-related programmes, the politics of global aid and the neoliberal discourses of "goal" and "target" oriented advocacies and interventionist programmes have been identified as the key pitfalls of the policies moving from the Global North to Global South. Professor Öhman also stressed that Swedish development policies on gender mainstreaming in general may have a good intention, but to be effective, they need to be more solidly integrated with both activist movements in the Global South and with current gender theories developed in gender studies.
The lecture was followed by a lively question and answer session where the students and the members of the audience have discussed important issues about feminism in Bangladesh and the ways in which many young women and men may claim their positions within its ever-changing terrain.
