Feminist Analysis and Interventions: Understanding the Social and Economic Crises in East Africa

Feminist economics and feminist political economy remain marginal within mainstream economics teaching, research and policymaking across Africa. Economic policy frequently overlooks gendered power relations and the essential contribution of unpaid and underpaid work to sustaining households, communities and economies.

The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), and Akina Mama wa Afrika (AMwA) co-hosted the fourth Feminist Economics Summer School under the theme Feminist Analysis and Interventions: Understanding the Social and Economic Crises in East Africa. Held in Kampala, this was the first Feminist Economics Summer School convened outside Southern Africa.

The School brought together activists, researchers, policymakers and practitioners to examine the interconnected social, economic and political crises affecting women across East Africa. Participants explored how neoliberal economic policies, austerity, rising debt, environmental degradation, militarisation and unequal global production systems shape women’s lives and livelihoods.

The five-day programme combined feminist economic theory with practical and methodological approaches to policy analysis and advocacy. Sessions examined six interconnected areas:

• social reproduction and care work;
• access to land, nature and the commons;
• climate change and governance;
• migrant labour and decent work;
• social protection and austerity; and
• militarisation and gendered war economies.

Participants considered how reductions in public services transfer additional care responsibilities to women; how conflict and displacement reshape social reproduction; and how climate change, agrarian transformation and insecure employment affect women’s access to land, livelihoods and social protection. The programme also explored the structural relationship between gender-based violence, state policy and global capitalism.

Drawing on African feminist thought, intersectionality and decolonial approaches, the School challenged economic frameworks centred narrowly on markets, growth and accumulation. It instead foregrounded human needs, wellbeing, care, rights and the economic systems of both production and reproduction.

FESS 2024 strengthened a growing pan-African network of feminist scholars, activists and policy practitioners. It equipped participants to apply feminist economic analysis to their research, organising and advocacy, and supported the development of policy proposals grounded in the lived realities of women across the region.