Conducting a multi-sited psychology study on how Malawian participants perceive Western-oriented non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) gendered development approaches, it became apparent that perceptions of ufiti (the Malawian term for what loosely translates as witchcraft in English)—and its gendered inclination—was highly relevant. As in many parts of the world, people in Malawi may relate themselves and their social world in connection to spiritual and supernatural dimensions, manifested in practices and discourses often closely linked to communal norms and values. Many international NGOs in Malawi run individualized development initiatives, often particularly focusing on women and girls’ personal empowerment. When local communal ways of experiencing and knowing are not taken account for in the NGOs’ interventions, this indiviualized approach can spur interpersonal resentment, and in worst-case ufiti assaults. This article explores the link between individualized development incentives and perceptions of ufiti. Using decolonial and feminist cultural psychology as a lens, we ask how the individualized focus of the NGOs plays out in Malawi, and what negative and unintended consequences individualized interventions can lead to. Our results indicate the need for contextually grounded and informed development approaches, to avoid that effort to empower individual women and girls lead to their disempowerment, social disruption, and ufiti accusations and assaults. The article speaks to the need for decolonial and feminist cultural psychological approaches that consider subjective intentional worlds.
This article analyzes the intersection of psychology with global development policy and practice, reviewing how gender as a concept is negotiated and understood amongst men and women in rural Malawi. We argue that gender, considered from a psychological perspective, has been narrowed down to meet the standards of global policy actors. By empowering individuals to “self-actualize,” policy implementers expect social and economic spin-off effects such as lower birth rates, higher education levels, and poverty reduction. The focus on individuals acts to obscure the broader structural power inequities, is especially prevalent in rural Malawi. To explain this, we use Haslam’s idea of “concept creep,” on how psychological concepts tend to affect other institutional traditions. The everyday understandings of gendered life described here show how gender is a fluid concept that shifts according to cultural, social, and ideological norms.
Empowerment is a prominent concept in psychology, and for decades, it has been a key term in global development policy, theory, and practice. However, in line with similar turns toward individualism in psychology, the prevalent understanding of the concept centers on individual capacity to change circumstances, with less focus on empowerment as a context-dependent or communal approach. In this article, adopting decolonial feminist psychology as a lens, we analyze how rural Malawians make meaning of the overarching empowerment and development approach of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in their villages, and how they perceive the approaches as fitting with local contexts. When development implementers largely ignore Malawi’s communal lifestyle, individualized empowerment initiatives can lead to individual and communal disempowerment and distress. Given psychology’s large influence on other arenas, and psychology’s implication with the individualized gender-development-empowerment nexus, we argue that it is imperative to explore the effects and experiences of this empowerment approach in different contexts. A more context-appropriate understanding of empowerment—as with most other psychological concepts—is needed.
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