Israeli Aid and the “African Woman”: The Gendered Politics of International Development, 1958–73

In the late 1950s, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Division for International Cooperation launched an initiative to present the state of Israel as a champion of women’s advancement in the developing world. One of Israel’s earliest initiatives for African women was the Kenya-Israel Rural Social Workers Training School. Drawing upon archival material from Israeli aid workers and politicians, United Nations advisors, and British officials who remained in Kenya after independence, this article explores the gendered dimensions of Israel’s international development program in Africa. The article brings into focus the importance of African domestic affairs for the evolution of Israeli development aid, the tensions that sometimes characterized relations between Israeli government officials and aid workers, and the discrepancy between the image of Israeli women’s empowerment promoted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the experiences of Israeli women working in Africa as technical experts.