“What Roles for Women?”: Gendering the New International Economic Order at the UN Regional Economic Commission for Africa

The 1974 declaration of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which came just ahead of the UN's International Women's Year (IWY) in 1975, attempted a major renegotiation of global inequality without reference to gender. Through the rest of the 1970s, women at the African Training and Research Centre for Women (ATRCW) in Addis Ababa, itself an initiative of the IWY, leveraged the power of the NIEO to support their undervalued work on African women's economic lives. Exploring their work sheds light on the geography of gendered intellectual labor of development work in international organizations during the age of decolonization and foregrounds the importance of small, apparently peripheral sites. Women at ATRCW advocated for women‐centered research designs and for development projects focused on women's work that would harness women as a resource for national development in ways that lasted beyond the NIEO. In doing so, they renegotiated the NIEO based on local evidence and gendered experiences but ultimately accepted its terms.