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Susie Jolly’s chapter is a nuanced account of how Chinese activists have drawn on the possibilities afforded by international forces, agendas and discourses, to broaden openings available in the flux and ambivalence of processes nearer to home. Jolly highlights the great overlap among donors, government and activists, showing that the boundaries between these institutional spaces are in fact porous, rather than partitioned from one another. …

Studies and discussions at a workshop of four aid‐funded initiatives in different countries in South East Asia show that the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness offers a useful framework for assessing and strengthening government‐ed efforts towards greater gender equality and the achievement of the MDGs. The Paris principles provide the opportunity for governments, civil society and donors to work together in more genuine partnerships provided the search for efficiency gains is not at the expense of securing long term impact and that donors change their own organisational behaviour where this constrains gender equality efforts.    …

To what extent does gender equality contribute to economic growth? And to what extent does the reverse relationship hold true? There are a growing number of studies exploring these relationships, generally using cross-country regression analysis. They are characterized by varying degrees of methodological rigour to take account of the problems associated with econometric analysis at this highly aggregated level, including the problems of reverse causality. Bearing these problems in mind, a review of this literature suggests that the relationship between gender equality and economic growth is an asymmetrical one. The evidence that gender equality, particularly in education and employment, contributes to economic growth is far more consistent and robust than the relationship that economic growth contributes to gender equality in terms of health, wellbeing and rights. …

Migrants and migrant support groups work in a global environment which is increasingly anti-migration, linking migration with encroachment on the employment opportunities of local workers, with bringing in ‘alien’ values and ways of living and, in recent years, with terrorism and issues of national security. Migrant women live in a world where most women are still struggling to be able to exercise their rights, including the basic right to decent and productive work. Poorer migrant women workers work in a global environment which promotes temporary work and places more and more women in what is called the informal economy, a term which allows corporations and employers to evade their responsibilities to their workers but makes little sense to migrant workers who are subject to an intimidating array of rules and regulations, governing all aspects of what they can and cannot do. The only thing that is informal about the lives of poor migrant workers are the conditions under which they work and how they are paid. …

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. …

This paper presents an overview of the processes, interventions, policies and personal experiences that lead to, or are associated with the somewhat ambiguous concept of women's ‘empowerment’ in Ghana. The task the authors set themselves was to find out from existing literature and key civil society organisations in Ghana today what kinds of actions have been implemented, and the policies and processes that seem to be associated with women's ‘empowerment’. …

This is a report of the first meeting of the Global Programme Advisory Group (GPAG) of the Global Programme of the Research Programme Consortium (RPC), Pathways of Women’s Empowerment, a five year programme led by the Institute of Development Studies and funded by the UK Department for International Development. The GPAG brings together a representative peer group that will help to ensure the Global Research Programme is academically robust and has an effective communications strategy. GPAG membership has been drawn from civil society, academic institutions and international development agencies. It is convened by One World Action. …

A summary of a longer scoping paper based on a consultation process and literature review that took place over six months from February to August 2006 with the aim to identify research issues in relation to the question “How can global policy and international practice better respond to the challenge of securing and sustaining tangible improvements in women’s lives? Another aim was to recruit a group of stakeholders to stay in contact with the research and contribute in one way or another in the programme over the next five years. …

This report covers the second meeting of the Global Programme Advisory Group (GPAG) of the Pathways to Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC), which is a five year programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). A group from civil society, academia and international development agencies, the GPAG’s purpose is to help ensure academic quality of research and effectiveness of the Global Hub communications strategy. This second GPAG meeting follows that held on 16-17 November 2006 where the advisory group reviewed initial research project proposals. Findings to date from these projects were presented to this second meeting. …

Hania Sholkamy talks about the 'Talking Empowerment in Plain Arabic' project which aims 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. …

The Big Question for Development podcast produced by the Institute of Development Studies, examines what International Women's Day means for women around the world. …

The Millennium Declaration commits itself to gender equality as part of its broader vision of human rights and social justice, The commitment is expressed in terms of two rationales: one intrinsic, seeing gender equality as a fundamental human right, the other instrumental, recognizing the powerful contribution that women make to the eradication of poverty in all its dimensions – and indeed to development itself. This paper takes as its starting premise the intrinsic case for gender equality, that it is a matter of human rights and social justice. Its primary aim is to analyse the pace of progress on gender-related goals, targets and indicators in different regions of the developing world, to explore the factors which have contributed to this progress as well as those which have blocked it. The paper homes in on those Millennium Development Goals and objectives that have the most direct gender dimensions to illustrate the nature of the constraints that block progress on gender equality and the kinds of interventions that can help to advance it. …

The story of Brazil’s national federation of domestic workers’ union (FENATRAD) and their strategies of alliance building, mobilisation and tactical engagement is one from which broader lessons can be learnt about mobilizing informal sector workers. This chapter tells this story as recounted in a series of life historical interviews carried out in the period 2006-2009 with one of the key figures in the struggle for domestic workers’ rights in Brazil, Creuza Oliveira, then leader of FENATRAD, as part of a participatory research project on domestic workers’ rights. …

This article is based on the discussions that took place at an internal reflection workshop organized by the Bangladesh team of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. The reflection workshop created a space for our group, which includes both feminist academic and activists, to come together and reflect on our own journeys of empowerment; how our own experiences have shaped our work; and the dilemmas and contestations that we have in how we interpret and understand empowerment. The process of the workshop was intensely personal and allowed us to encounter our own biases and raise questions about how we experience and interact with power in our lives. The questions we raised are context specific but some also have broader resonance for people working on empowerment. …

Understanding what works to promote, support and sustain ‘women’s empowerment’ calls for a greater appreciation of what the term means to different policy actors in different contexts. In Ghana, there is a strong commitment to women’s empowerment from government administrative officials, particularly female staff. However, there appears to be limited knowledge about the dimensions, pathways and strategies for women’s empowerment within government and the bureaucracy. Officials often base their interventions on a desire to address women’s individual situations rather than on analysis of the deeper-rooted structural constraints that women face, and remedies that might address them. …