Search All

Human Rights Watch’s experience, in particular in Latin America, has reaffirmed that women’s ability to decide if, when, how often, and with whom to have children is fundamental to their ability to make independent decisions about work, education and family life. Restrictions imposed on access to safe and legal abortion, in addition to other sexual and reproductive health services, violate women’s rights to health, to non-discrimination and equal treatment, to privacy, to be free of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and the right to the benefits of scientific progress, among others. This article draws links between abortion and human rights while illustrating the scope for advocacy in the varying abortion contexts in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. The authors explore entry points for activism and change as they highlight regional commonalities and contextual differences with respect to abortion. …

‘Gender equality’ may have made it into the language of mainstream development. But in most parts of the world, inequalities between women and men in the workplace, in political institutions and in the home have proven exasperatingly persistent. For all the valiant efforts that have been made, gender mainstreaming has largely failed live up to its promises. The dilution and depoliticization of the ‘gender agenda’ as it has come to be taken up by development institutions calls for more attention to be paid to what it takes to make a difference to women’s lives. …

This article reflects on the lessons learnt about strategies for increasing access to abortion from an 11 country comparative policy analysis known as the Johannesburg Initiative. It reflects on the value of learning and sharing strategic thinking while remembering that opportunities for litigation, policy change, shifts in programming, or even changing public opinion are often place and time specific, so that what leads to victory in one place cannot necessarily be repeated in another. The task is to build the evidence, the legal and health system capacity, the engagement with the public and policymakers to be able to take advantage of windows of opportunity as they arise. The article also suggests that while many gains have been made in winning a broader base of support for the idea of sexual and reproductive rights internationally, there is an urgent need to reinvigorate this movement, particularly through greater leadership, organisational and strategic engagement by activists from developing countries. …

Patti O’Neill talks with Rosalind Eyben about being a feminist bureaucrat at the OECD. …

Following the round of UN Conferences on Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, many states in the developing world established national machineries to first 'integrate women into development', and later to spearhead the task of gender mainstreaming adopted in the Beijing Platform for Action.  …

In this paper presented to the Sexuality and Development Workshop, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, 3-5 April, Sardenberg proposes to reflect upon some of the dilemmas faced by women over fifty living in the “culture of eternal youth” which, nowadays, rules Brazilian society. She recognises that the battle against age is one that cannot be won, and therefore proposes a new discourse - a feminist discourse on the female body in the process of aging. She shares some reflections, based on her own person experience, around the control over the body that the culture of eternal youth imposes on us and looks at these issues from a feminist perspective, reflecting upon how gender, age and generation, along with race and class, structure the construction of body and self. She focuses here primarily on how narratives of decline and the positive ageism of the cosmetics industry at large speak to aging white, middle-class women. …

The contents reflect discussions from a Pathways workshop held in May 2008 with participation also from Diane Elson, James Heinz, Sue Himmelweit, Sue Holloway, Ruth Pearson and Janet Veitch. In 2006 the World Bank coined a catchy slogan ‘Gender equality is smart economics’. Said the World Bank’s President in June 2008, “The empowerment of women is smart economics … studies show that investments in women yield large social and economic returns”. Many international aid ministries and United Nations organisations are adopting the World Bank’s argument. …

This report in Bangla focuses on the project which investigates the enabling conditions for women's participation in local governance and its influence on women's empowerment. The objectives for the study were to explore the challenges faced by women councillors, how they negotiate these challenges, their own interpretation of their engagement patterns and processes, and whether new gender norms and roles are being created for women in the public domain. …

Lydia Alpı´zar Dura´n was invited to address the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She shares her reflections as someone who joined the women’s movement in the midst of the Beijing preparations as a youth activist. She discusses the importance of the development community focusing on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and going beyond the Millennium Development Goals. She presents key insights from the work on advancing women’s rights and gender equality over the last 15 years along with a review of some relevant current trends and concludes with a set of action-oriented recommendations. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), celebrated by feminist activists as a triumph for women's rights, is 20 years old. The world that it once described has changed profoundly in some respects, and yet in others remains surprisingly similar. This IDS Bulletin reflects on those changes and continuities, tracing the trajectories of the Beijing conference in different policy arenas, national settings and domains of practice. …

Twenty years after the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action it is worth looking at the achievements regarding Chapter K ‘women and the environment’. The complexity of the links between rights (inter alia women’s rights), social dimensions and sustainable development is a remaining challenge that has so far not been addressed adequately. This article aims at identifying this interdependence from a grass-root perspective. Women in Europe for a Common Future’s (WECF) project work with grass-root women in Tajikistan provides an insight into the challenges related to the links between ecologically sustainable development and gender equality when looking at the realisation of the right to land and natural and productive resources. …

Within the last decades, feminist movements in Brazil have advanced significantly beyond borders, gaining increasing recognition in global spaces, UN ones in particular, for positively influencing Brazil’s official position. Unsurprisingly, Brazil has served four terms in the CSW and, in the eyes of more progressive delegations, is a much needed presence to ensure no lost ground on what has been achieved in previous conferences. However, the actual presence of Brazilian feminist activists in the delegations and the NGO Forums has dwindled considerably. What have been the strategies and mechanisms at play in maintaining a radical vein in our official position? Can it be sustained without the more active involvement of feminist activists – say, throughout Brazil’s new role as president of the 60th CSW session? These are some of the issues I address in this article, sharing the views of activists present at those events. …

This article examines the experience of mobilizing for the right to safe, legal abortion in Brazil. It focuses on exploring the strategies pursued by the feminist and women’s movements to ‘win hearts and minds’ both within these movements, and beyond them, through collective struggle, dialogue and coalition building. Tracing the trajectory of the Brazilian campaign for the legalization of abortion, Jornadas pelo Direito ao Aborto Legal e Seguro (Brazilian Journeys for Legal and Safe Abortion), the article looks at avenues of action and modes of activism. It describes how the efforts of campaigners have focused not only on engaging support from the public and the media, but also on working with the Ministry of Health and health professionals to guarantee the availability of services for abortions that are legal under current restrictions, monitoring changes in public opinion and the media, and on legislative change, which has recently become especially difficult in the wake of increased activism by the Church. …

This case study presents the events and outcomes of a workshop on Media, Gender and Representation which was organised by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC), based at the BRAC Development Institute of BRAC University in Dhaka from 11th to 15th November, 2007. The purpose of the workshop was to equip researchers, practitioners, journalists and students to develop a conceptual framework to analyse media as well as equip them with practical tools to decipher its many meanings. …

Kate Raphael of KPFA Radio speaks with with Brazilian feminist Professor Cecilia Sardenberg about Dilma Roussef, Brazil's first woman president (35:45). …