ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a preliminary effort to explore some of the questions posed by women's components in large integrated rural development projects. It examines the implications of women's projects that emphasize the production of use values over exchange values. The chapter aims to compare arid contrast two women's components that were added to large rural development projects in the early 1980s—to the II Integrated Rural Development Project in Jamaica and to Plan Sierra in the Dominican Republic. Both women's components were afterthoughts in that neither was included in the original project designs or mentioned in the project. In their initial stages, both women's components were deliberately aimed at improving women's productivity in subsistence-generating, rather than income-generating, activities. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, development experts grew increasingly concerned that the benefits of development were not reaching the poor majority in rural areas of Third World countries.
