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A summary of the changes that have taken place in Sierra Leonean women’s lives in the last 20 years in the three thematic research areas of voice and participation, work and access to resources, and bodily integrity entails a situation analysis of women’s pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict reconstruction activities in these fields. This is because the primary defining feature of the period 1986-2006 is the civil war years of 1991-2002. Armed conflicts, whether inter or intra state, leave behind not only human carnage, massive destruction of physical and socio-economic infrastructure (the Sierra Leone civil war was no exception to this reality), but also at the political level a weak and collapsed state. At the socio-cultural level, war also destroys the patriarchal structures of society like morals, traditions, customs and community, that confine and degrade women and opens up and creates new beginnings. …

This research project sought to document and analyse strategies and approaches used by selected women’s organisations in Bangladesh to mobilise and advocate for women’s rights and raise demands to the State and other rights holders. The research selected a few key movements to analyse and fed back the findings and analysis to the groups being studied so that they could use that to further reflect on their practice and identify what changes they would like to make to be more effective in the future. …

The project explored the identity formation of Bengali Muslim women by investigating the cultural and political history of Bangladesh spanning the 20th Century. Researchers investigated how women placed themselves in the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the early twentieth century; the import of language, culture and national identity for Bengali Muslims during the middle decades; and the contestations between nation, culture, progress, modernity and women's sexuality in a globalised world towards the end of the millennium. …

Islah Jad's research examined the role of the newly elected local councils in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, elected in 2005-2006. The Islamic Resistance Movement - HAMAS - participated in this election for the first time and was supported by large numbers of women.  …

The collection of essays in the book aims to capture the variety of policies, discourses, debates and interventions that have influenced the lives of women in South Asia and to identify those that have led to greater empowerment of women. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what the quota has meant as a motorway to women's accession to political power. It draws on research findings from Pathways, as well as presentations given at a special seminar held in the Brazilian National Congress. The bulletin raises the questions of who are the women who are best positioned to benefit from the quota as a fast track option, what are they enabled to do once in office via the quota seats, and what kind of gender agendas does the critical mass of women who have come to power via the quota espouse and advocate? …

This project links talented young documentary filmmakers with academics from the Pathways consortium to collaborate on a series of shorts broadly exploring concepts around women’s empowerment. …

This project aimed to create the opportunity for Arabic speakers to set an agenda of priorities in a language that they can use to communicate and give a wider currency to their ideas. If, as has been often noted, women’s empowerment is a cause without a following and a message without an audience, then there is an obvious need to talk and tackle women’s empowerment and develop the coherence and capacity to do so in Arabic. The conflation between Arabic and Islam has focused researchers on religion as the equivalent of language. This project ran a series of workshops held in plain Arabic to discuss the agendas of women’s empowerment and the flows that influence, set, shape, critique and communicate them. …

The research investigated the definition of empowerment in Palestinian women's organisations and contextualised it in Palestinian practices of mobilisation and resistance. …

This study aimed to illuminate the pathways of women's political empowerment, the relationship between political participation and change and interrogate the effectiveness of the decentralisation commission in empowering women in Sierra Leone. …

This project investigated the enabling conditions for women’s participation in local governance and its influence on women’s empowerment. The objectives for this study were to explore the challenges faced by women councillors, how they negotiate these challenges, their own interpretation of their engagement patterns and processes, and whether new gender norms and roles are being created for women in the public domain. …

Through this study researchers investigated the ‘criss-cross’ processes through which women in Pakistan become empowered, focusing on how the larger institutional set-up (whether military or non-military) helps women achieve their goals. They explored how some of the major initiatives from civil society have contributed to women’s voices at the local government level, and also looked at individual case studies of women when they either surmount or fail to surmount societal pressures in their individual lives. …

In June 2009, the Egyptian parliament passed a new quota law adding 64 additional seats, for which only women can compete in the 454-seat parliament. This project looked at the various instruments to support women's political participation in Egypt, including the National Council for Women’s political empowerment training programme, and asked how effective these have been in challenging power hierarchies and empowering women politically? …