Resources

In contemporary post-conflict Sierra Leone, women have managed to secure 13. 5 per cent of seats in parliament – without affirmative action in place, thanks to women's groups' and coalitions' mobilisation and activism. While the political resistance to Sierra Leone having a quota was high, the women's movement has succeeded in forcing the political parties and the government to recognize that it is no longer politically viable to sidestep women's rights, should they wish to capitalise on women's voting power. As women's organisations, in particular the 50/50 group, continue the struggle to introduce a quota, the challenge for Sierra Leonean women is how to ensure that the quota project is not hijacked by the male-dominated political establishment. …

In Colombia on 10 May 2006, a Constitutional Court decision decreed that abortion is a constitutional right for women and should not be considered a crime in particular circumstances. In order to monitor the acceptance and take-up of this new decision, Women’s Link started a mapping exercise to identify obstacles and resources to work facing the proper implementation of the law. Many challenges were found, including: lack of information, confusion around conflicting laws, legal and moral conflicts among service providers leading to subjective decisions and lack of service provision, and the challenges of abiding by lawful requirements for access to services during armed conflict. Mapping and recording continues and women’s organisations continue the struggle to realize women’s sexual health rights through ensuring the judicial and disciplinary accountability of service providers and ensurers. …

The language of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women’s rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies the language of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place among their major development priorities. …

Despite the vibrancy of mobilisation in Egypt after Mubarak, Hania Sholkamy’s account of the 8th of March demonstration in Tahrir square to mark International Women's day bears witness to the persistent resistance to women’s political participation. …

The Egyptian Conditional Cash Transfer Pilot Programme (CCT) is a social policy programme implemented by the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MoSS). The Egyptian CCT is designed as a pro-women cash transfer intervention, focusing specifically on aiding women’s well-being. The reason women are put at the centre of the social policy design is the unequal burden of poverty that they, married or not, carry in the context of Egypt’s urban and rural settings. The CCT is part of a raft of positive programme reforms and capacity development of social units (the smallest department of MoSS at the community level) to become community service centres, linking citizens to service providers, be it public, private or NGO. …

This article explores how, 20 years after Beijing, women's rights are being discussed within processes to develop a post-2015 sustainable development agenda and the parallel international disaster risk reduction framework. It is based on analysis of documents produced to date from the various processes, and also personal experience of seeking to influence both the post-2015 development and disaster agendas. It highlights how attempts to marry the environmental and development agendas reveal a continued problematic conceptualisation of sexual and reproductive rights. It suggests that in gender terms, while the post-2015 development agenda and the related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are over ambitious to the point of being mere rhetoric, gender rhetoric is yet to enter the international disaster risk reduction discourse. …

An enduring legacy of the Beijing Conference, gender mainstreaming has been widely implemented and widely critiqued since the 1990s. But the basis of these critiques has changed over time: this article charts a typology of critique approaches. It shows how the central problem is diagnosed variously as the loss of the political dimensions of gender in the course of mainstreaming; or technical shortcomings; or the gendered nature of organisations as the causes of technical failure. For others, the problem has been the failure to scrutinise the connection between gender mainstreaming and changes in gender relations in women’s real lives. …

Article on the debate around abortion legislation in Brazil. Currently abortions are only legal in Brazil when the pregnancy results from rape or when it puts the mother’s life in risk. Unlike middle and upper class women, who can afford to pay for a clandestine abortion in modern, safe clinics, many young, poor, black women die from illegal abortion. …

Institutions in the global development industry play a pivotal role in governing people's sexual and familial lives. Amy Lind addresses how forms of intimacy are governed through national and global development institutions, both through the visibilization and invisibilization of lesbians, gay men and other individuals who do not fulfill prescribed gender and sexual norms in their societies, with the overall aim of challenging heteronormativity and gender normativity in development thought and practice. …

Heteronormativity is a term yet to be widely linked to HIV and AIDS work in Sub-Saharan Africa. Andy Seale argues that a greater appreciation of heteronormativity offers an opportunity to identify effective strategies to address harmful social norms that drive HIV infection and build synergies between work currently focused exclusively on women and girls, gender and men who have sex with men. A focus on heteronormativity in HIV work can act as a catalyst to the coalition-building needed for accelerated HIV prevention activism in Africa. …

Fewer than 40 per cent of Kenyan women use some sort of contraception, leading to unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions. Nearly 50 per cent of maternal deaths are linked with unsafe abortions and national law still criminalizes those involved in the provision of an abortion, holding a possible penalty of 15 years imprisonment if found guilty. In its mandate to promote sexual and reproductive rights, including safe abortion services, the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance of Kenya planned a Mock Tribunal with the view of informing and engaging citizens, the media, policy-makers and advocates publicly on the negative consequences of the criminalization of abortion in Kenya. Over 400 participants gathered to hear testimonies from four women who had abortions, health professionals and counsellors. …

The paper seeks to intervene in debates about the role of crisis in Post Washington Consensus (PWC) policymaking. Gender and, especially, sexuality are largely absent from that debate. My paper asks: What do experiences of crisis reveal about the inter-connections between crisis, gender, and sexuality? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present (Nikolas Rose) get unsettled, which get re-entrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process? Using policy texts, interviews with Bank policymakers, and fieldwork on a family strengthening loan in Argentina, I argue that the denaturalization of free markets in the PWC is articulated, in part, through the re-naturalization of monogamous heterosexual couplehood. With the injuries of neoliberalism framed as injuries to loving couplehood, the Bank and its allies resolve to (re)generate intimate partnership as defining feature of the post-crisis era, raising crucial questions about the new regimes of heteronormativity under construction in contemporary development practice. …

Meena Seshu and Nandinee Bandhopadhyay who work with sex workers speak with Cheryl Overs, a sex rights activist, at an open floor session during the IDS conference on Sexuality and the Development Industry. …

Women’s rights organisations have been central to progress on women’s rights and gender equality since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA). Drawing on interviews carried out in January 2015 with twelve of Womankind Worldwide’s partner organisations, the myriad ways in which women’s movement actors draw strategically on the BPfA as appropriate to their context are explored, along with universally-shared challenges in implementation. …

This scoping article gives a global picture of dynamics, trends, policies and mechanisms for engaging with women's representation in political office. It discusses the kind of affirmative action introduced, and where it features vis-à-vis electoral cycles. It describes and compares candidate and reserved seats quotas and shows how electoral systems influence the possibilities of challenging power hierarchies in politics. The second part of the article reflects on the extent to which implementing quotas have been effective in engendering political representation and the conditions that allow or inhibit this. …