Resources

This article looks at a particular participatory methodology – Digital Storytelling (DST) – and how it can be used in a development setting to draw out stories and engage both storytellers and their future audiences. Through this example, Lewin examines the extent to which it is possible to practice communication that is both truly participatory and produces ‘useable’ results – communication as engagement rather than communication as marketing. …

Successive post-independence governments have embraced women’s empowerment in one form or another, either because of their own ideological positioning, or because of demands by their ‘donor friends/partners’ and/or organized domestic groups and NGOs. What has emerged is a varied landscape on women’s rights and empowerment work comprising the state bureaucracy, multilateral and bilateral agencies, NGOs, and women’s rights organisations, with their accompanying discourses. In the Ghanaian context, Nana Akua Anyidoho and Takyiwaa Manuh look at what the discourses of empowerment highlight, ignore or occlude, the convergences and divergences among them, and how they speak to or accord with the lived realities of the majority of Ghanaian women. Given that the policy landscape in Ghana is highly influenced by donors, they ask which discourses dominate, and how are they used for improving women’s lives in ways that are meaningful to them. …

For many countries, despite their adoption of quotas, women's political participation remains low. Costa Rica, however, presents a success story in terms of increasing women's descriptive representation and, as a country which has tried a variety of quota systems, it represents a unique case study. This article looks at the processes which have influenced the evolution of the Costa Rican experience, and the struggle to achieve effective quota law highlights the importance of clear, unambiguous legislation that leaves no loopholes for those resisting its implementation. However, there is also a cautionary note that although quotas can be effective in increasing numbers, the quest by women's organisations to seek transformation can be co-opted by others leading perhaps to undesired outcomes. …

Grown discusses her work on the Gender Analysis Programme on Economics at American University and its connection between teaching and research. She elaborates on her project with colleagues to conduct a household survey to gather sex- disaggregated information on physical and financial asset ownership and control, and to develop for designers and implementers of household surveys a parsimonious set of questions that can be added to every single household survey. The survey will show that this information can be collected at low cost and that it is important for public policy. She hopes that the survey will show that women own more assets than is commonly perceived to be the case, although ownership on its own is not enough for true empowerment. …

This article introduces an issue of writing on the ways in which religion enters cultural and social life. The papers in this issue concentrate on the way that Islam impacts on the everyday aspects of the lives of people in Muslim societies or communities where Islam plays a part. This issue emerged from a panel presentation on ‘Women Negotiating Islam’, about how women cope with the ways that religion enters their lives, and brings out the cultural aspects behind women’s negotiations of the positions made available to them and their struggle to carve their own spaces. The issue aims to show how women, culture and religion form a difficult and complex terrain in which our political and social lives are lived. …

In this article, Harcourt argues that conventional development approaches to gender and empowerment are constraining and unimaginative, and do not foster lively, authentic debate. Instead, in development, people tend to limit their definitions of gender and empowerment to acceptable terms to avoid conflict or funding cuts. She looks at pop culture that celebrates and sells images of empowered women (Lady Gaga in particular) and compares this to the depoliticized notion of ‘empowerment’ in development, and suggests that development practitioners need to reach out further than the constraining environment of development and in the process change development itself. Harcourt points to new media and communications technologies that can be harnessed to create spaces and engage a variety of people with development debates and to make development more adventurous and creative, arguing that doing so would do much to help us get out of discourses of professionalism that create institutions afraid to open up because they fear argument and difference. …

Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this article makes the case that the benefits of education for women is context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. This study shows that more than twice as many women aged 18–29 have had some form of education compared with those above 50. …

A significant new law was passed by Egyptian legislators in 2004 introducing family courts to arbitrate family conflict in an effort to promote non-adversarial legal mechanisms. The aim of this paper is to examine how this new legal system is working for female plaintiffs. Through an analysis of court practices in a number of divorce and maintenance cases, this essay will make two central arguments: First, I will argue that the benefits family courts are currently providing to female plaintiffs are limited due to a number of gaps and shortcomings in the legislation, mechanisms of implementation, resources, and the capacity and the training of court personnel. In addition, the legal process in the new courts as well as the substantive family laws that are being implemented continue to reflect gender inequality and biases against women. …

The Egyptian family law system regulates matters such as family property, marriage and divorce, alimony, child custody, and paternity disputes. Until the introduction of a new legal framework which came into effect in 2000 and 2004 women attending the country’s law courts were offered no guarantee of their civil rights or human dignity. This new legislation was a real advance, but as with any attempt to bring about social change through legal reforms the new system has had complex and multidimensional effects. In this light, Mulki Al-Sharmani examines here one aspect of the reform package - mediation-based family courts - in order to assess how far Egypt’s women have travelled in achieving “empowerment through law”. …

This chapter is a tale of women reaching the height of political activism and the pit of their political representation all in one year (January 2011-January 2012). It is a year that began with women and men rising in revolt against the thirty year dictatorship of President Mubarak and ended with the parliamentary elections a year later that brought an Islamist-majority bloc to the Egyptian parliament. …

In this reflection on ‘empowerment’, Taylor looks at how development proponents have instrumentalised women’s role in development and poverty reduction, arguing that development should be about access to rights and freedoms. She points out that empowerment as a concept needs to be rethought – that real change needs to start with a democracy and human rights culture, a foundation of equal access to all the amenities of public life. Women’s visibility in work and politics is good, but is not the structural change that is needed because it doesn’t address power. She looks at human development as a valuable approach for women’s empowerment, and argues that the realization of women’s human rights into reality is necessary for empowerment. …

In this article, Schwenke reflects on women’s empowerment from a trans perspective, arguing for the need to include morals in development discourse and to navigate and be guided by moral values in order to think critically and reflectively, and to make a persuasive justification based on moral sensibilities allows us to evaluate our priorities, confront the status quo, and expand our human agency. Empowerment is rooted in societal acceptance of variant gender identities, and transformation of empowerment begins with a change in gender assumptions – a dialogue in which trans people have a unique perspective and can be extremely valuable. She stresses the importance of ‘human’ in human development and as a precursor to women’s empowerment. …

In this article, Connell argues that true empowerment of women requires radical institutional change – a democratizing of institutions. She reflects on MGD3’s claim that development requires gender equality, arguing that much development is done with the subordination of women. She discusses the rhetoric of empowerment as being politically effective but also problematic in its simplification of the category of women, and says that in order for progress in women’s empowerment and for gender justice, men need to be involved. She argues that any worthwhile concept of development must involve communities, institutions and populations as well as institutions, and must have a sense of limits and justice. …

Eileen Kuttab contextualizes empowerment historically in Palestinian practices of mobilisation and resistance. She draws on interviews and focus group discussions to explore the meanings the term has come to acquire in the Palestinian context. Kuttab examines alternative ways of understanding empowerment that go beyond instrumentalism to recapture some of the original associations the term had with power and resistance. …

This paper explores Muslim women's experiences of empowerment in northern Pakistan by drawing upon the life history of a woman informant named Dana. It also outlines some of the methodological concerns related with researching empowerment in a situation where the researchers and the researched share common context. The paper re-conceptualises the utility of empowerment by unveiling it as an intricate process, which involves the negotiation of roles, responsibilities and values by individuals. The findings evidence that empowerment is not always exhibiting absolute power over others or open defiance against standard norms; neither is it resistance against coercion at all times. …