Pathways News

The Ghana Team had a unique experience on the weekend of 25-27 April 2008, learning photography and video techniques, under the tutelage of Tessa Lewin, the RPC Communications and Learning Officer and Anna Kari and Guilhem Alandry of Documentography. Participants were from the Foundation for Female Photojournalists (FFP), Memento Films, and one each from the Institute of African Studies and RPC Ghana and the training took place at the University of Ghana, Legon campus. …

The Global Hub held its 2nd Advisory Group Meeting on 13 February 2008 following a workshop on its Conceptualising Empowerment project. The advisory group is made up of members from civil society, academia and international development agencies with the purpose of helping to ensure the academic quality of research and effectiveness of the Global Hub communications strategy. The meeting included presentations of four research projects which started in 2007 and a report back on how the year had progressed. …

The Global Hub research includes a one year project to critically review conceptual assumptions about women’s empowerment that are being globally developed and communicated and to examine the relation between these assumptions and evolving international policy and practice. Andrea Cornwall and Rosalind Eyben are leading this project that has three main elements (1) analysis of documentation (2) semi-structured interviews (3) two day opportunity to reflect for policy actors, practitioners and researchers. …

On 4 and 5 January 2008, the Pathways Middle East Hub had their first Talking Empowerment in Arabic workshop in Cairo. This was a meeting of editors and translators working on gender readers in Arabic. Also present were some translation theory academics. …

Dr Mulki Al Sharmani from the Middle East Hub attended the 106th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC from 28 to 30 November 2007. Her paper was part of a panel entitled ‘Negotiating Conceptions of Family, Intimacy, and Marriage’. The panel was reviewed by the Association for Feminist Anthropology. There were five presentations in the panel. …

On 15 November the House of Commons Select Committee on International Development released its report on the Department for International Development (DFID) Annual Report 2007. One of the key issues the Committee takes up is the inadequate implementation of DFID’s Gender Equality Action Plan, launched in February this year. …

Dr Aisha Fofana Ibrahim from the University of Sierra Leone attended the Feminist Pedagogy Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York on 12 October 2007. She presented a paper entitled ‘Decentering a “Traditional” Classroom through War-Talk and/or Trauma’. Here is her report from the conference: …

The Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research programme promoted academic exchange among the Consortium’s partners by supporting a limited number of internships of IDS MA students at partners’ offices. Sara Callegari, an IDS student reading for a MA in Gender and Development, was awarded a grant to conduct research at the Social Research Centre of the American University in Cairo in July 2007. Thanks to the grant, Sara spent a month in Cairo, researching on gender myths which influence the development practice of microcredit in Egypt. …

NEIM held a two day conference on Dialogues of Empowerment from 21 to 22 June 2007 in Salvador, Brazil. Among the issues discussed were women and the politics of the Middle East and women and economics and development. The debate which was held in the auditorium of the Municipal Council rooms in Salvador included Suha Barghouti from the NGO Network of Palestine, and Andrea Cornwall and Naila Kabeer from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Ana Alice Costa, Terezinha Goncalves and Maria de Lourdes Schefler from NEIM provided facilitation. …

On 19-20 June 2007, NEIM co-hosted an international seminar on ‘Women’s Pathways into Power: International Experiences of Affirmative Action’ at the Brazilian National Congress, in collaboration with AGENDE (Actions in Gender, Citizenship and Development), Casa da Mulher do Nordeste’s Mulher e Democracia (Women and Democracy) project, the network of women representatives in the National Congress, the Commission on Participatory Legislation (CLP), the Commission on Social Security and the Family (CSSF), the Commission on Human and Minority Rights (CDHM) and the Commission on the Constitution, Justice and Citizenship (CCJ) of the Chamber of Deputies. The seminar, which took place within the Chamber of the National Congress, discussed and analysed experiences of the use of affirmative measures to enhance women’s political participation in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Speakers included Julie Ballington of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Rwandan MP Juliana Katengwa, IDS researcher Naila Kabeer and Palestinian women’s rights activist, Suha Barghouti.  …

Hazel Reeves from BRIDGE and Rosalind Eyben from Pathways reflect on the 8th triennial Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting (WAMM) held in Kampala from 12-14 June 2007. …

At the end of March 2007, Rosalind Eyben helped organise a workshop on gender equality and the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness at the request of DFID’s regional office in SE Asia in Bangkok on behalf of a tripartite steering group, including the World Bank and UNIFEM. This complimented her global hub research into examining whether new international aid policy and practice is either a pathway or bottleneck for supporting women's empowerment. …

What do you do if the government you’ve worked so hard to elect reneges on their promises once they get into office? And your attempts to name and shame them in letters to the newspapers aren’t getting results? Take to the streets! But the protest Cecilia Sardenberg, Ana Alice Costa and their colleagues from the  Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre a Mulher (NEIM) organsed to declaim Bahia’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) Governor Jacques Wagner for breaking faith with what his campaign promised the women of  Bahia wasn’t an ordinary kind of protest. This was, after all, Bahia and the build up to Salvador’s famous carnival had begun. …

A joint meeting was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London on 19 February 2007 hosted by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC, Gender and Development Network and Women’s Study Group of the Development Studies Association to examine the potential for external pressure and lobbying on gender equality and women’s empowerment. …

The first advisory group meeting for the Pathways Global Hub took place in London on 16 and 17 November 2006. The group has developed from the ideas and participation at the May scoping workshop. The group discussed the Scoping Report from the Global Hub and also the research proposals put together as a result of the shaping of the research agenda for RPC as a whole at the Inception Workshop. …