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3G Three Generations of Women, is an interactive multimedia project that attempts to move beyond the media stereotypes and statistics about women, and look at their real lives. The makers photograph and interview three different generations of women within one family about aspects of their experience, growing up, learning, happiness, love, and more. The aim is that this will give people some sense of the changes that have happened in the lives of these women over the past few decades. …

A witness account from Abbia on the politically motivated sexual assaults targeting female protestors of the Arab revolt in Cairo. These have been taking place since the revolution in 2011 which deposed President Mubarak. …

Many developing countries are undergoing rapid socio-economic changes that impact on health and its social distribution. These changes can occur so rapidly that there is a resulting co-existence of diseases of affluence and diseases of poverty. Priority setting for nutritional programmes has focused on the alleviation of undernutrition in low income settings. However, evidence shows that in many Low-and-Middle Income Countries the prevalence of obesity among women is increasing and can coexist with childhood stunting. …

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. …

Hania Sholkamy examines the disempowering aspects of women’s work and calls for a more progressive agenda to empower work and re-position it not only as an income generating activity, but as a social role, an ideal, and political engagement. …

McFadden argues that societies in the South have been approached from a particular research gaze that is derived from a liberal epistemology that focuses on the individual; it simplifies women’s lives and is both methodologically and politically inadequate and deeply problematic. Empowerment as a notion is, too, embedded in liberal and neo-liberal worldviews and is ideologically flawed. With this liberal and neo-liberal development discourse in mind, McFadden looks at empowerment, MDGs, gender and human rights, and citizenship, entitlement and rights and analyses how they are embedded in this ideology. …

In moving away from prescriptive one-way communications exercises, participatory development communications use better strategies to engage communities and capture nuance. This article examines a communications case study in Egypt: a photography competition aimed at understanding how local photographers depict women and empowerment in their images. Opportunities for discussion and self-reflection provide cultural producers the space to delve into how they see women and how they then choose to represent them. This type of communications initiative actively courts a richer understanding of empowerment, leaving room for the complexities this might entail. …

The aim of Changing Focus was to encourage local photographers to use representations of women in their work that actually reflect the empowerment that women may experience in their lives. These portrayals can then be used to show that images of women need not only be the kind of stereotypical depictions found in many popular music video clips or films, nor should images of women be relegated purely to the home and family. Photographers participated in a workshop on gender awareness and equality before setting out to produce images incorporating ideas and techniques from the workshop. These images were then displayed in a widely disseminated and accessible exhibition. …

This concept paper focuses on the politics of sexuality. Its focus is on the normative construction of heterosexuality in mainstream narratives of sexuality produced by institutions such as the media, the law, religion and the development industry; by cultural arenas such as popular music and soap operas, as well as for counter narratives produced by women themselves. Foregrounding concepts of heterosexualty, sexuality and gender, the paper explores the connections between them and connections to norms that reinforce compulsory heterosexuality and male supremacy, and the implications for the workings of power and privilege. Narratives of sexuality serve both to affirm and also to challenge these norms. …

Changing Narratives of Sexuality examines the tensions and contradictions in constructions of gender, sexuality and women's empowerment in the various narrations of sexuality told by and about women. From storytelling to women's engagement with state institutions, stories of unmarried women and ageing women, a sex scandal and narrations of religious influence on women's subjectivities and sexualities, this impressive collection explores sexuality in a wide range of national contexts in the global South. …

Tessa Lewin draws on the work done by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research and Communications Consortium from 2007 to date. She explores both the broad approach to communicating empowerment and highlights the work of various projects undertaken. …

Sholkamy discusses the paradox of provenance for ‘women’s empowerment’ and explains how this has clear implications for policies and programmes on the ground. The strategic approach to women’s empowerment has yielded great gains and has punctured some taboos by making women’s empowerment a public good that can deliver welfare and development. This operational definition of empowerment has limited utility in addressing questions of basic injustices and inequities. On the other hand the more politicized and to some extent westernized and purist meaning of empowerment as a right for women has created distances, misunderstanding and animosities and has in many parts of the world failed to convert the sceptics and create popular support. …

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become a popular method of offering state support to ultra-poor families. They are designed to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, with the idea that families are active participants in a scheme that has developmental objectives, rather than a ‘band aid’ mentality. The CCTs programme in Ain el-Sira, Cairo, one of the first of its kind to be launched in the Arab world, was shaped by a Pathways conference which brought together experts from Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador. The conference looked at the proposed CCTs design, discussed best practices and potential obstacles to effectiveness and, in particular, how existing programmes both empowered or disempowered women. …

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) provide mothers of school-age children in extreme poverty with a cash subsidy conditional on their children's attendance at school and health clinics. This paper builds on the author's earlier gender analysis and critique of these programmes by examining evaluations of CCTs in order to assess the evidence for their claim to empower women. It analyses the assumptions underlying the definitions of empowerment used in the evaluations, questions their adequacy, and advances alternative measures of empowerment. In so doing it hopes to stimulate debate about theory, methodology and policy. …

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) provide mothers of school-age children in extreme poverty with a cash subsidy conditional on their children's attendance at school and health clinics. This paper builds on the author's earlier gender analysis and critique of these programmes by examining evaluations of CCTs in order to assess the evidence for their claim to empower women. It analyses the assumptions underlying the definitions of empowerment used in the evaluations, questions their adequacy, and advances alternative measures of empowerment. In so doing it hopes to stimulate debate about theory, methodology and policy. …