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This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …

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? …

What do you do if the government you’ve worked so hard to elect reneges on their promises once they get into office? And your attempts to name and shame them in letters to the newspapers aren’t getting results? Take to the streets! But the protest Cecilia Sardenberg, Ana Alice Costa and their colleagues from the  Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre a Mulher (NEIM) organsed to declaim Bahia’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) Governor Jacques Wagner for breaking faith with what his campaign promised the women of  Bahia wasn’t an ordinary kind of protest. This was, after all, Bahia and the build up to Salvador’s famous carnival had begun. …

NEIM held a two day conference on Dialogues of Empowerment from 21 to 22 June 2007 in Salvador, Brazil. Among the issues discussed were women and the politics of the Middle East and women and economics and development. The debate which was held in the auditorium of the Municipal Council rooms in Salvador included Suha Barghouti from the NGO Network of Palestine, and Andrea Cornwall and Naila Kabeer from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Ana Alice Costa, Terezinha Goncalves and Maria de Lourdes Schefler from NEIM provided facilitation. …

This ground-breaking new collection edited by Mulki Al-Sharmani in the Pathways Zed Feminisms and Development series investigates the relationship between feminist activism and legal reform as a pathway to gender justice and social change. …

If messages about equality are for all, gender and development practice should not be about elite meetings and confusing jargon argues Mariz Tadros in this article for The Guardian.  …

Join Gender at Work on Thursday 17 March at 4.30 pm at the UN Church Center, 777 UN Plaza to listen to key messages from their new book and individual stories of change. …

As glib and glossy visions of women’s empowerment, designed to avoid actual power structures, are being avidly promoted by corporations and the development industry alike, Andrea Cornwall says that Srilatha Batliwala's new book on Engaging with Empowerment compels us to revisit and revalue what we mean by 'empowerment'. …

Shaming the Shameless - The Politics of Sexual Assault in Post-Mubarak’s Egypt Exposed In preparation for the 30th of June millioniyya [one million person protest] against the current Muslim Brotherhood-led regime, youth coalitions, women’s organizations and human rights activists are bracing themselves for a wave of politically motivated sexual assaults. Groups like ShoftTa7rosh are co-ordinating monitoring, ensuring women are equipped with self-defence measures and that volunteer men are well prepared to pull women targets of assault out from the crowds. These collective actors have not mobilised in a vacuum, but in response to the organised operations of sexual violence targeting them in public spaces over the last two years. A pattern has emerged which suggests that these were politically motivated assaults, aimed at discouraging women from participating in protest action against the powers that be. …

The eruption of protests, violence and civil disobedience in Egypt this month is a replay of the scene in 2011 before the status quo was ruptured, but the Muslim Brotherhood regime’s attacks on women and religious minorities in order to quell opposition is more pervasive than anything seen before, argues Mariz Tadros in this article for Open Democracy. …

This new IDS/Pathways/GIZ Working Paper by Mariz Tadros examines the nature of the political struggle over the status, role and identity of women in Egypt in between the two revolutions (January 2011 and June 2013). …

Voicing Demands, a new book by Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan, is a collection of analytical narratives of what has happened to feminist voice, a key pathway to women’s empowerment. These narratives depart from the existing debate on women’s political engagement in formal institutions to examine feminist activism for building and sustaining constituencies through raising, negotiating and legitimizing women’s voice under different contexts. …

In the lead up to the Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in a few months’ time we’ve seen a renewed focus on health systems from the international development sector in the UK. …