As If Women Mattered?

Since the latter part of the 20th century, the development discourse has been characterized by a paradigm shift from categorical frame works such as the basic needs theory and trickle down theory to a capability and functionings approach to development envisaged in the Rights Based Approach to Development. This paradigmatic shift has been occasioned by the lack of equipoise between the earlier development discourses and the gender praxis. This book critiques the rhetoric explicit in the Rights Based Approach to development (RBAD) in light of the subsisting patriarchal social dichotomy in the Ugandan social milieu between the self-and other. It contends that RBAD will at best give lip service to the gender injustice and particularly women's subjugation and alienation from the development process, if it does not address the deep-rooted unequal power relations perpetuated by the androcentric ontology that demeans and devalues the person of women by treating them as superimpositions and extensions of the masculine self.