Failing women and girls during Covid-19: The limits of regional gender norms in Africa
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231204311 |
| Author | Matt Barlow,Jean Grugel,Lilian Saka,Peg Murray-Evans |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231204311
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2024, Vol. 26(2) 254 –276
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481231204311
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Failing women and girls during
Covid-19: The limits of regional
gender norms in Africa
Matt Barlow1, Jean Grugel2,3,
Lilian Saka4,5 and Peg Murray-Evans2
Abstract
How do we account for the ability or otherwise of regional organisations in the global South to
enable equitable and inclusive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question
with a focus on Africa and in relation to the rights of women and girls. Drawing on theoretical
insights from Feminist Global Health Security and from data on the African Union, other regional
organisations in Africa and from non-governmental organisations, local activists and medical
centres, we show that regional organisations acted quickly to identify the gendered socio-
economic and health needs of women and girls and alerted member states to their responsibility
to consider gender rights in their policy responses. But weak gender norms led to a disconnect
between this early recognition of the importance of policies to protect women and girls and the
behaviour of regional organisations, which could not lead a gender sensitive response or engineer
one in member state governments.
Keywords
Africa, COVID-19, gender, norms, regionalism
Introduction
In addition to killing almost seven million people (at the time of writing), the COVID-19
pandemic exposed the devastating consequences of inequality, between the global North
and South and within countries (Sow, 2022; Wang and Huang, 2021). These inequalities
are profoundly gendered (Al-Ali, 2020; Grugel et al., 2022). How did regional organisa-
tions respond to the pandemic and how do we account for their ability or otherwise to
protect the rights of women and girls? There were expectations that regionalism could
play a progressive role (Byron et al., 2021; Oloruntoba, 2021; Riggirozzi, 2020),
1School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
2Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
3Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Barcelona, Spain
4Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC), University of York, York, UK
5UNICEF, New York, NY, USA
Corresponding author:
Matt Barlow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12, 8QQ, UK.
Email: matthew.barlow@glasgow.ac.uk
1204311BPI0010.1177/13691481231204311The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsBarlow et al.
research-article2023
Original Article
Barlow et al. 255
reflecting the view that regional organisations have the power to promote the adoption
of and adherence to gender equality norms on the part of their member states. We con-
tribute to the debate about the normative capacity of regional organisations and gender
by analysing their responses to COVID-19, with a focus on Africa.
A significant body of constructivist research has highlighted the capacity of regional-
ism to shape member states’ behaviour through the spread of norms, whether through
socialisation or rhetorical entrapment (Börzel and Risse, 2003; Risse, 2010;
Schimmelfennig, 2001). Meanwhile a separate literature with a more substantive focus on
the global South explores the expansion of regionalism to include social and health policy
cooperation over the last 15 years (Bianculli and Hoffmman, 2016; Grugel, 2006;
Riggirozzi, 2017; Riggirozzi and Yeates, 2015) – the so-called ‘social dimension’ of
global South regionalism (Sanahuja, 2010). Yet, both the constructivist literature and
work on the social dimension of regionalism lack an exploration of how governance
through regional norms impacts individuals and groups living within those regions, or the
ways in which these effects are shaped by gender and other societal inequalities. This
article draws on recent research from Feminist Global Health Security, which not only
speaks directly to pandemic policy making but also provides conceptual tools that enable
us to make links between the existence of hierarchies of attention and priority in regional
governance and the impact of regional policies on women and girls on the ‘receiving end’
of policies. Deploying these concepts in the context of regional governance for the first
time, we show how the gender biases embedded in regional governance are reflected in
the everyday experiences of women and girls. Furthermore, we suggest that hierarchies
of priority and attention persist at the regional level despite the articulation of progressive
norms in relation to gender equality, suggesting that a deeper analysis of regional govern-
ance structures and their impacts is required before placing faith in regional organisations
to deliver gender-equitable development through norm-based governance.
We first set out our conceptual approach by reviewing existing understandings of the
normative power of regions before turning to Feminist Global Health Security to
develop a critical framework for understanding the role and impact of gendered hierar-
chies in regional governance. We then present our methods and case selection and dis-
cuss some of the challenges of conducting research on the normative power of regions.
Finally, we demonstrate how gendered hierarchies played out in the regional govern-
ance of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, with a focus on the impact of these hierar-
chies on the lives of women and girls. We show that regional organisations signposted
the gendered needs of women and girls at the onset of COVID-19, but that these needs
were not addressed in policy responses to the pandemic. Indeed, their importance
dropped down the agenda as the pandemic progressed, becoming, at best, a second-
order priority. Crucially, we show that this failure reflected not only a lack of imple-
mentation of gender-responsive regional policies on the part of member states, but a
process through which the needs of women and girls slipped down the agenda in
regional governance hierarchies too. We suggest that this was a function of perceptions
of the issues and people who mattered which informed the regional governance of the
crisis, which were in turn shaped by the ways in which African regions are inserted into
both African inter-state politics and a wider global architecture of health and develop-
ment governance. Furthermore, we show that outcomes of these hierarchies of attention
and priority on the ground were acutely gendered. Our findings, as such, point to the
need to temper enthusiasm about the willingness with which regional organisations
have apparently embraced gender equality norms with a more holistic analysis of the
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