Appraising the Vulnerability of the Female Gender and the Disruption of Social Protection in the Light of Sdgs 1 and 4: Issues in African Literature

Abstract

Female vulnerability — characterised by helplessness, economic marginalisation, and constrained access to education — remains a persistent structural condition in African societies, sustained by poverty and the pervasive operation of patriarchal institutions. Social protection systems, in principle, constitute the state's primary buffer against such vulnerability; yet, as a 2023 UNDP report documents, 47.6 per cent of the world's population remain entirely outside formal social protection coverage (UNDP, 2023). This protection gap is acutely gendered: women and girls bear a disproportionate share of unprotected poverty, a condition that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — particularly SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 4 (Quality Education) — identify as requiring urgent remediation by 2030.
This paper employs qualitative literary analysis to interrogate how African fiction represents, theorises, and critiques female vulnerability and the disruption of social protection. Drawing on Trauma Theory (Caruth, 1996; Herman, 1992) and Social Protection Theory as dual analytical frameworks, the study examines three primary literary texts — Kaine Agary's Yellow Yellow (2006), Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's Trafficked (2014), and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) — as documentary imaginaries of female dispossession across sub-Saharan African contexts. The analysis demonstrates how literary representation illuminates the lived dimensions of SDG 1 and SDG 4 deficits that aggregate statistical indices cannot fully capture, and argues that the characters' traumatic experiences of poverty and educational exclusion constitute narrative evidence of systemic social protection failure. The paper calls for accelerated, community-anchored implementation of SDGs 1 and 4 across African nations.