A Framework for Intervention in Marital Conflicts over Family Finances: A View from Africa

One chief source of marital distress and pathology in today's Africa is the issue of which way to go on the sensitive matter of how to control and manage the family's finances, and who, of the two parties in a given marriage, is to contribute what to the upkeep of that marriage. This problem results from the collapse of the traditional African family economics which saw the husband as the chief breadwinner of the family and the wife, the director of the general family services, and the emergence in its place these days, of wage-earning family households. Here, a total crisis that arises is where the two parties concerned fail to introduce equity-based considerations in the settlement of the tension presented. In that case, the danger to be faced is the development of polarization and hassles to destabilize the family. This paper presents a research report suggesting how this danger can be averted.