Contenu du sommaire : Femmes, précarités, résilience

There are many and detailed studies of Chinese migration to the West and beyond. The Chinese diaspora represents one of the most ancient, widespread and still topical forms of human mobility. Since the reforms at the end of the seventies, it is within China itself that the largest movement of people in the world has taken place. Migrations connected with work (mingong) in China and Hong Kong have attracted the attention of academics, politicians and media professionals since the 90s. Since then an increasing number of academic circles in the West have taken an interest, along with the international organisations (International Labour Organisation, International Organisation for Migration). In the new millennium civil society has followed suit.

The insecurity of women has a number of different facets. For example, it is women who are largely responsible for reconciling responsibility for the life of the family with the demands of work. Whilst they have invaded the work market since the sixties, the slow growth of the economy has restricted job opportunities for women in particular. The shape of the family has moved on at the same time. Sep-arating couples are no longer exceptional, there are many more one-parent families and the legal status of unions has altered. Lack of security is two- faced : the ideas of instability, career interruption, difficulties experienced in joining the job market or of returning to it, define lack of security in the traditional sense. But we also have to take into account stability in under-employment, in particular in part-time work, where many more women are employed than men. Lack of security has intensified with the economic crisis of 2008-2009.

Public policy aiming to encourage job-seekers makes professional training the key to employment. Starting from the results of a survey made of 840 job-seekers who have availed themselves of job training partly financed by the Agency of the European Social Fund for Brussels and Wallonia, the writers reveal the difference in social and professional opportunity between women and men. However, the use of statistical categories based on gender and status (e.g. ‘job-seeker'), taken in the abstract, can obscure people's real situations and the conditions of their lives. The authors emphasise the need to see through the standardizing effect this produces. They follow this up by presenting a typology of different experiences of training and employment resulting from the analysis of 21 interviews with women job-seekers who had followed up the opportunities for training set up in line with public policy. These differences show that the categories of ‘job-seeker' and ‘woman' in fact include a wide variety of different situations which need to be understood when framing workable public policies.

The neo-liberal model has failed in Cameroon and has led to crisis situations and multiple deprivations. The State answers only to the expectations and diktats of its international debtors. In this context women working in the informal economy are organising to find alternative solutions, so witnessing to the struggle to counter the feminisation of poverty and foster local development for the benefit of all. The drive and initiative of Bayam-Sellam women from the peoples' markets of Douala and Yaoundé, who go back a long way in the history of Cameroon, work to break the financial stranglehold and offset the effects of the modernisation and the lack of security it has inflicted.

According to most official reports, the lack of security endured by thousands of women stems from the accumulation of a number of factors that put people at risk. However, at the Women's Collective it is these variables which provide the ground for sharing experiences. They are the springboard for new life-projects, and this is how experience can be recycled. How to account for this paradox ? To answer this question and find a guiding principle of analysis, we followed the daily life of the Collective for six months. The information gained from observation and discussion led us to the notions of resilience, repercussion and empowerment.

This text presents the results of a case study which shows how a local initiative can carry osional, social and personal point of view. It is based on a holistic approach, one which takes into account all the problems experienced by these women and every dimension of their lives. The study of this project illustrates the capacity for innovation of such social experiments, ones which break free from the frame of government projects and the prevailing approaches which are often too sectorial (interested only in a single group or slot). It sets itself apart from these traditional methods in order to develop a new approach.