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The contents reflect discussions from a Pathways workshop held in May 2008 with participation also from Diane Elson, James Heinz, Sue Himmelweit, Sue Holloway, Ruth Pearson and Janet Veitch. In 2006 the World Bank coined a catchy slogan ‘Gender equality is smart economics’. Said the World Bank’s President in June 2008, “The empowerment of women is smart economics … studies show that investments in women yield large social and economic returns”. Many international aid ministries and United Nations organisations are adopting the World Bank’s argument. …

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. …

In Latin America, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing has been a milestone in the history of the feminist and women’s movements. Twenty years have passed and despite important achievements in gender equality, for issues of economic equality the results are still meagre and there remains a long road ahead in the fields of employment, access to resources, and social protection for women. Unsurprisingly, it is in economic matters that the feminist and women’s movements have renewed their themes and strategies. This article identifies a gender economic agenda that is broad in its transformative scope and in its determination to challenge core aspects of the current economic and social organisation. …

Pakistan's Lady Health Workers' programme has trained over 1,000,000 women to provide community health services in rural areas. Not only has the programme revitalised the primary health care system, it has also helped overcome the gendered division of public and private space that is a major obstacle to women's access to basic services, including education, and employment opportunities. However, there are a number of shortcomings that need government intervention to ensure that it fulfils its aims. …

The Lady Health Workers Programme is a major public sector initiative to provide reproductive health care to women in Pakistan, employing almost 100,000 women. This qualitative research study is based on interviews with LHWs and community members in four districts to explore dimensions of women’s empowerment. They are analysed in terms of how context and circumstance can positively shape the LHW experience. Four possible trajectories are illustrated based on case studies. …

Drawing on household survey data collected in Egypt, Ghana and Bangladesh as part of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Partners’ Consortium, this report provides insights into the ‘resource’ pathways that enhance women’s agency and thereby contribute to the inclusiveness of the economic growth process. Moreover, it looks at the the extent to which the structure of economic opportunities, generated by a country’s growth strategies, translated into positive impacts on women’s lives in these three country contexts.  …

The Lady Health Worker Programme (LHWP) is a major public sector initiative to provide reproductive health care to women in Pakistan, employing almost 100,000 women as community health workers. The LHWP directly addresses women’s reproductive health needs by providing them with information, basic services and access to further care. The experience of LHWs can provide valuable insight into the impact of paid work on their lives and communities, and how processes of women’s empowerment are shaped. The LHWP is a huge employer of women and the most important link between communities and primary health care in the country. …

Women’s participation in the workforce remains low in India. This low participation is apparently a cumulative outcome of a complex web of factors. Yet, why it continues to remain so low in the current changing economic and social environment is far from clear. Given the suggested association between paid work and women’s empowerment, higher participation rates may be desirable. …

The present study explores the topic of empowerment through the experience of women in the Lady Health Workers Programme, a government-run project that employs almost 100,000 women across Pakistan as community health workers. The LHWP directly addresses women’s reproductive health needs by attempting to provide them information, basic services and access to further care if necessary. It is also a major employer of women, and therefore the experiences of LHWs can provide valuable insight into the impact of paid work on their lives and gender relations in their homes and communities. The discussion that follows will begin with some background information on women and paid work in Pakistan, followed by details of the LHWP, and an analysis of selected interviews with LHWs. …

The subject of women’s paid work has been much researched and debated, with many proponents of women’s empowerment seeing it as the most important means to achieve this. However, the experience of work has been nuanced, with discrimination reproducing itself in access to work, the kinds of work available to women and the terms of their engagement. Nevertheless, paid work has a tremendous potential to bring about change sin gender relations and women’s position. This chapter looks at trends in women’s employment in Bangladesh, and the various sectors and types of women’s paid employment and at the successes and constraints in each. …

The agenda for change is based on an alternative vision – one in which the economy is shaped for people rather than people for the economy. …

The purpose of this study was to explore the empowerment-related possibilities experienced by women in a major public sector community health initiative in Pakistan. The Lady Health Worker (LHW) scheme has engaged almost 100,000 women across Pakistan to work in their local communities as primary health and family planning service providers through visiting households door to door to document basic health indicators and offer selected services. The study locates the LHW experience within the geography of gender in diverse parts of Pakistan, and attempts to identify whether the work has any transformative effect on LHWs themselves, and/or has affected the views of communities regarding women’s paid work. …

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 research project explored how paid work can change women’s lives in terms of dealing with the public sphere and institutions, accessing services, commodities, resources, information, reducing isolation, increasing negotiation/bargaining skills, ability to protect themselves, etc. The context under which work can be empowering and the kinds of work that change lives was compared through comparisons of similar research undertaken by the West Africa and Middle East Pathways regional hubs in Ghana and Egypt. …