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Hania Sholkamy talks about the 'Talking Empowerment in Plain Arabic' project which aims to create the opportunity for Arabic speakers to set an agenda of priorities in a language that they can use to communicate and give a wider currency to their ideas. …

This book is about taking an upside down approach to women’s political empowerment. Its starting point is that the academic and policy focus on getting the electoral system right in order to narrow the gender gap in representation needs to be complemented with a bottom up approach that examines women’s pathways of political engagement. …

Quotas have become increasingly popular as a fast track option for securing enhanced political representation largely because of their proven impact on increasing the number of women in parliament. As more countries have adopted one form or another of the quota, it is now timely to reflect on what the implications have been for transforming gender relations and the nature of politics at large. This introduction examines from the country case studies presented in this IDS Bulletin, the insight offered into the dynamics of motorways and pathways of increasing women's decision-making power (with or without a quota) and the underlying assumptions about gender, power and politics as well as the policy issues for consideration. …

One in four world citizens across the globe identify themselves as Muslim, and they represent a striking diversity of values and interpretations of Islam’s tenets towards female sexual behaviour and abortion. This is characterized both in the social stigma associated with abortion, and the varying legal status abortion holds in Islamic countries, ranging from legalization to decriminalization in certain cases to full criminalization. In many places, the changing face of society and attitudes towards family size have not kept current with policies and access to contraception, resulting in an increase in the number of abortions and high levels of maternal mortality rates where abortion remains a criminal offense. This article illustrates how a range of strategies including documenting and sharing women’s experiences, advances in abortion techniques, and learning from model countries can be used by a variety of actors and organisations to advocate, on religious, human rights and political grounds, to gain greater access to safer abortion and sexual health services. …

The Pathways Middle East Team had to scope a broad territory and probe deeply so as to ground the work of the RPC in the concerns of the region and its concerned citizens. The work of the inception phase attempted to answer three questions so as to insure the future relevance and success of the RPC on Pathways of Women’s Empowerment: 1) Why is women’s empowerment un-claimed and seemingly unpopular with grass-roots women and those who are most dis-empowered despite decades of feminist activism and of state support in most Arab countries? 2) Why is women’s empowerment perceived to be an alien import despite decades of apologia that have elaborated on the just and progressive potential of Islam, of Arab social organization and institutions? And 3) Why have the projects and programs implemented not had a transformative effect on women’s daily lives? This paper reports on the scoping workshop held from 10- 12 September 2007 in Cairo Egypt. The workshop invited a variety of activists, scholars, academics and researchers to three days of presentation and discussion to imagine an informed, evidence-based agenda for future RPC work that is liberated from stereotypes and prejudice. The report reports on each session by placing the subject matter of the session in context of the concerns and development in this hub and articulating the proceedings of the session with the planned activities of the RPC. …

This article, translated into Portuguese by Cecilia Sardenberg, adopts an upside-down approach to women's political empowerment. While the number of women we need to get into legislatures has often assumed centrestage, this paper takes women's pathways as its starting point. In so doing, it challenges the narrow conception of women's political engagement as occupying formal positions and seeks to present a more nuanced perspective on the spaces, relationships and ways of working that influence power hierarchies and dynamics.  …

This chapter argues that the Sudan experience puts into question the quota as a pathway for political power. It also argues that an explicit concern with numbers, and by extension quotas, can lead to unexpected pitfalls, since centralised and authoritarian regimes (and parties) can readily impose quotas from the top down. Quotas do not by default widen or transform political opportunities for women who come from diverse backgrounds and who carry with them complex identities, and in fact, quotas can serve to consolidate the status quo ‑ both at the level of party politics as well as in regards to patriarchal conceptions of women’s place. …

At the Millennium Summit world leaders committed to reducing extreme poverty through a series of targets encompassed within the MDGs, with a deadline of 2015. One of these was to promote gender equality and empower women, and the ‘proportion of seats held by women in national parliament’ was set as a key indicator. With the MDG Review Summit meeting in September 2010, this is an opportunity to consider whether the proportion of women in parliament continues to be the most adequate proxy for women’s political empowerment. This IDS Bulletin explores what the quota has meant as a motorway to women’s accession to political power by drawing on research findings from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (‘Pathways’), as well as a series of articles from a special seminar in the Brazilian National Congress as part of this programme, and contributions from other country case studies. …

This paper adopts an upside-down approach to women’s political empowerment. While the number of women we need to get into legislatures has often assumed centre stage, this paper takes women’s pathways as its starting point. In so doing, it challenges the narrow conception of women’s political engagement as occupying formal positions and seeks to present a more nuanced perspective on the spaces, relationships and ways of working that influence power hierarchies and dynamics. The paper’s aims are two-fold. …

While security and women’s empowerment are both prominent development concerns, there has to date been little sustained analysis of the relationship between the two. An unexamined assumption appears to be that insecurity – violence and rights abuses – prevent women from gaining power over their lives through full social, economic or political participation. But how and how much does insecurity structure women’s agency? In which domains and contexts are these insecurities prominent? And what are the policy and practical implications of the relationship between women’s security and processes of empowerment in contemporary developing countries? This paper reports on an effort to derive lessons about how security and insecurity shape processes of women’s empowerment in developing countries through a thematic synthesis of a collection of research outputs from a five-year programme of research on the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. The programme covered four broad thematic areas: voice (political mobilisation), paid work, body (or changing narratives of sexuality) and concepts of empowerment. …

This article explores the pathways of political action pursued by the Sudanese women's movement leading up to the introduction of a women's quota in 2008 and its implementation in the most recent 2010 national parliamentary elections, the country's first in 24 years. The article argues that the main achievement of the quota was the extent to which it mobilized women to engage in politics, rather than the increased representation of women in parliament. The form the quota took however, has not significantly challenged political parties to put forth women candidates in core geographic constituencies, restricting them instead to separate women's lists. The need for revisiting the quota, healing divisions within the women's movement and negotiating a robust common programme in the next phase are all critical for translating numbers into positive changes in Sudanese women's lives. …

This paper adopts an upside-down approach to women's political empowerment. While the number of women we need to get into legislatures has often assumed centrestage, this paper takes women's pathways as its starting point. In so doing, it challenges the narrow conception of women's political engagement as occupying formal positions and seeks to present a more nuanced perspective on the spaces, relationships and ways of working that influence power hierarchies and dynamics.  …

Women the world over are being prevented from engaging in politics. Women's political leadership of any sort is a rarity and a career in politics is rarer still. We have, however, begun to understand what it takes to create an enabling environment for women's political participation. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what the quota has meant as a motorway to women's accession to political power. It draws on research findings from Pathways, as well as presentations given at a special seminar held in the Brazilian National Congress. The bulletin raises the questions of who are the women who are best positioned to benefit from the quota as a fast track option, what are they enabled to do once in office via the quota seats, and what kind of gender agendas does the critical mass of women who have come to power via the quota espouse and advocate? …

This project aimed to create the opportunity for Arabic speakers to set an agenda of priorities in a language that they can use to communicate and give a wider currency to their ideas. If, as has been often noted, women’s empowerment is a cause without a following and a message without an audience, then there is an obvious need to talk and tackle women’s empowerment and develop the coherence and capacity to do so in Arabic. The conflation between Arabic and Islam has focused researchers on religion as the equivalent of language. This project ran a series of workshops held in plain Arabic to discuss the agendas of women’s empowerment and the flows that influence, set, shape, critique and communicate them. …