Resources

Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to a basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enables people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. …

Writing as a woman living with HIV, Alice Welbourn focuses on the forced asexuality that is often foisted on women when they are diagnosed with HIV. She argues that a focus on sexual rights and pleasure can enhance our analysis of the ways in which legal, religious and medical discourses can reinforce fear of women’s unfettered sexuality. Welbourn’s chapter offers a poignant reminder of the extent to which HIV positive women experience the pain of forced retirement from sexual pleasure. Welbourn describes how positive women’s pleasurable sexual experiences are constrained by the grief of a positive diagnosis; like trauma or rape, she argues, this can lead to forced asexuality which denies women their rights to their own autonomy with regard to their sexual and reproductive pleasure. …

In recent years in Latin America, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have received greater institutional attention, and legislative gains have been made across the continent. Using a typology of legal frameworks, this article explores trends, challenges and prospects for advancing efforts to address discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Latin America. It argues that deepening and adequately understanding LGBT rights and how they can be protected and promoted at multiple levels is an indispensable task for legal authorities, professionals and civil society. By proceeding in this direction, a fruitful dialogue can be established between law-making and jurisprudence, public policies, and civil society initiatives. …

Wendy Harcourt highlights the most interesting and contentious issues to emerge during a conversation held among 25 people from key women’s networks, UN agencies, research institutions and think tanks at the 54th Commission of the Status of Women (CSW) in New York March 2010. Using charterhouse rules, the dialogue was an attempt to hold a new kind of conversation in the CSW space. The participants candidly held up to scrutiny the key concepts of gender and empowerment in the context of the new development institutions. …

This seminar held in Dhaka on 21 January 2008, brought together work and discussions around concepts of empowerment, among academics, practitioners and activists, both within and outside the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC. There were researchers and activists from Sierra Leone, Ghana, Palestine, Egypt, and Brazil present. The day’s programme was arranged around three themes: livelihoods and labour, political spaces and institutions, and civil society discourses. The discussions addressed common questions and the presenters applied them to their individual experiences. …

The theme of the Annual Dialogue on Empowerment of the West Africa Hub held in Chicago from 13-16 November 2008, was “Women’s Empowerment and Development Policy,”. More than 50 participants attended the session, whose presentations were entitled: “Consuming Nollywood: Young Women’s Perspectives on Popular Films in Nigeria”, ”Women’s Empowerment in Post‐Conflict Sierra Leone”, “Exploring Women’s Empowerment in Everyday Lives: Intergenerational Perspectives in Ghana” and “Changing Representations of Women in Ghanaian Popular Culture”. The presentations were followed by a discussion and concluding remarks. …

This article reflects on a digital storytelling project undertaken for research, communication, and advocacy purposes in Bangladesh. The project trained young women from different regions of the country to make digital stories about their everyday struggles and journeys of personal growth. Excerpts from selected digital stories are shared to highlight how these short films can be used to understand struggles against class and gender hierarchies, sexual harassment, and the need to establish full citizenship rights for minority groups. The article makes a case for digital stories as a new methodology for doing and communicating research. …

This presentation made to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011, reflected on the Digital Story-Telling Workshops organized by the Pathways Programme. Digital Stories are 2-4 minute “films” that individuals create by combing their own narration with personal photographs, scanned artefacts and music to share a story about their own life. These workshops, which focused on stories of empowerment, were held in order to counter mainstream narratives of women’s lives and create an opportunity to document stories that may not be heard otherwise. Empowerment means different things to different people and the participants brought their own experiences and understandings of it to the workshop, some of which the organisers attempted to challenge and others which challenged us. …

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. …

This paper presented at Fazendo Genero (Doing Gender) 8 held at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina from 25-28 August 2008 focuses on the Pathways Latin America project which examined the struggles for the realization of reproductive rights in Brazil, following and retracing campaigns for the legalization of abortion. The project also identified and analysed the strategies employed, and the particular contributions and roles of feminists in NGO networks, and in the academic world. …

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. …

In 2007, the West Africa Hub of the Pathways in collaboration with ABANTU for Development organized a three-day gathering with district assembly women to talk about their experiences in the 2006 local elections in Ghana. The aim of the dialogue was to create the opportunity for the local female politicians to reflect on their experiences in participating in the local elections. They were encouraged to link these experiences to their life histories as a way of exploring the meaning and sense they have developed about participating in the election process and how it may have empowered them. …

The debate about the relationship between paid work and women’s position within the family and society is a long standing one. Some argue that women’s integration into the market is the key to their empowerment while others offer more sceptical, often pessimistic, accounts of this relationship. These contradictory viewpoints reflect a variety of factors: variations in how empowerment itself is understood, variations in the cultural meanings and social acceptability of paid work for women across different contexts and the nature of the available work opportunities within particular contexts. This paper uses a combination of survey data and qualitative interviews to explore the impact of paid work on various indicators of women’s empowerment ranging from shifts in intra-household decision-making processes to women’s participation in public life. …

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. …

This is a preliminary report of research on domestic violence and women’s access to justice in Brazil conducted under the coordination of NEIM - the Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies of the Federal University of Bahia, in partnership with OBSERVE-the Observatory for Monitoring the Application of Maria da Penha Law, and the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Program Consortium. The study is intended to provide subsidies as a country case study to UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women and Access to Justice Report. It focuses primarily on specialized police stations for women in Brazil as a means of access to justice for women in situations of domestic violence. …