ABSTRACT
Throughout the Third World, particularly in the past fifteen years, there has been a proliferation of policies, programmes and projects designed to assist low-income women. Until recently, however, there has been little systematic classification or categorization of these various policy initiatives, other than the informative work of Buvinic (1983, 1986). This concern for low-income women's needs has coincided historically with a recognition of their important role in development. Since the 1950s many different interventions have been formulated. These reflect changes in macro-level economic and social policy approaches to Third World development, as well as in state policy towards women. Thus the shift in policy approaches towards women, from ‘welfare’, to ‘equity’ to ‘anti-poverty’, as categorized by Buvinic (1983), to two other approaches which I categorize as ‘efficiency’ and ‘empowerment’ has mirrored general trends in Third World development policies, from modernization policies of accelerated growth, through basic needs strategies associated with redistribution, to the more recent compensatory measures associated with structural adjustment policies.
