Pathways News

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), situated in the south-eastern corner of Bangladesh, is a distinct region in terms of its ethnic, cultural and environmental diversity. The CHT people have been deprived of many socio-economic and political rights and an armed insurgency was waged against the government until the signing of a Peace Accord in 1997. …

Pathways of Women’s Empowerment South Asia based at the BRAC Development Institute launched four research reports in Bangla at the Ekushey Book Fair, the largest and the most prestigious book fair in Bangladesh. The reports are aimed at reaching a wide spectrum of Bangla speaking audiences around the country. Dr. Imran Matin, Deputy Executive Director of the BRAC Africa Programmes, launched the publications on 20 February 2010 at the ‘Nazrul Moncho’ within the grounds of Bangla Academy, where the month-long Book Fair was held. …

This morning I ran into some of my oldest friends. We chatted as old friends do, hugged, commented on new looks, graying hair, weight gained and lost as friends always do. We met on the steps of Egypt’s State Council (Majgis el Dawla)*; a grand building in a very busy part of greater Cairo. Upon these steps stood a hundred or so men and women who, like myself, had been alerted by text and e-mail messages to the decision by feminist advocacy groups to stage a protest against the near unanimous decision taken by the general assembly of the highest level of state council judges to ban women from entering the administrative judiciary as judges. …

The “Ana el-Hekkeya” (I am the Story) project based at Pathways Middle East selected 20 trainees with varied backgrounds in journalism, short story writing, literary criticism and others, to be trained on gender issues. …

As part of the Pathways West Africa research project monitoring and evaluating the implementation of UN Resolution 1325 in Sierra Leone, Hussainatu Abdullah took part in a training workshop on Gender and Peacebuilding in early July. International Alert in collaboration with Civil Society Peacebuilding Engagement Committee (CSPEC), Sierra Leone organised the joint monitoring and evaluation training and cross-regional learning workshop in Freetown, Sierra Leone on 8-9 July 2009. …

The Social Research Center at the American University Cairo recently ran and were involved with hosting two back to back workshops on Family Law. The first one on ‘Reforming Family Laws in the Middle East’ aimed to disseminate the findings of the research that the SRC team has been conducting on the reforms in Egyptian family laws. The second, which ran from 9-11 January 2009, was hosted by The Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief on ‘Guidelines for Islamic Family Law: Women’s Equality, Male Guardianship, and Legal Objectives’. …

On 30 and 31 January 2008, the Social Research Center (SRC) in Cairo hosted a workshop aimed at gathering insights and experiences for the design and implementation of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) pilot in Egypt. Both local and foreign experts (from Latin America and the UK) discussed current CCT programmes and how they could be adapted to suit the Egyptian social, political and economic landscape. …

In this BBC article Hania Sholkamy comments on the ‘marriage crisis’ in Egypt which pervades around religious expectations and the affordability of marriage. Hania believes that the harassment and rape women suffer which has reached unprecedented levels in Egypt is not necessarily linked to the fact that men are single and sexually frustrated. …

The Pathways West Africa Team took the opportunity of participating in the 51st Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Chicago in November 2008 to convene their annual Dialogue on Empowerment. The theme of the panel was 'Women’s Empowerment and Development Policy'. Members of the team presented on the Pathways West Africa work. The session was well-attended and provoked a lively discussion. …

One of the elements within the Global Hub research programme has been a research project of reflective practice with a small and self-selected group of feminist policy practitioners working on women’s rights and gender equality issues in the head offices of international development organisations. In October 2008 they met together for a weekend workshop to share and reflect on their experiences of success and failure and to identify practical ways of sharing more broadly what they have learnt, with the aim of being more effective policy practitioners in the future. …

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, the Nucleus of Women’s Interdisciplinary Studies based at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador held a National Symposium on Women and the Constitution from the 16 to 17 October 2008. The meeting provided feminist reflections on the legal legacy of the Brazilian feminist movement’s political lobby – also known as the ‘lipstick lobby’, twenty years after it was originally formed. The meeting was supported by the National Secretariat for Women’s Policies. …

Popular music is a powerful medium for reinforcing and dictating what is in vogue or considered the norm for society. The songs are played on radio, television and the internet, and in the two latter cases are typically accompanied by musical videos which often depict women’s bodies through dance (often quite provocative). Music is heard daily booming from shops, restaurants, taxis, buses, lorries, and other social spaces. Social gatherings such as marriage and naming ceremonies, funerals, commissioning of projects are deemed dull without music. …

A friend recently said that ‘Conscious Dreaming’ contained a strong sense of longing. She said this in the context of the current economic and political breakdown of Zimbabwe, where I spent much of my childhood. I hadn’t previously seen the film in this light, although certainly a strong aesthetic motivation for the piece was about developing an aesthetic that felt African. …

Twenty five years ago progressive staff in international development institutions argued that women as well as men should be beneficiaries of development. Hard-nosed neo-liberal male economists interpreted this argument as women as consumers rather than as producers of wealth. When thought about at all, they were seen as a category of the population that had specific needs, such as water and firewood (men apparently never going thirsty or needing to eat). Women had babies. …

Pathways of Women’s Empowerment joined with the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex to celebrate the inaugural annual International Day for Sharing Life Stories on 16 May 2008. The event showcased the life history work being done at the university and invited people to find out more about telling their lives in a variety of ways. …