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3G Three Generations of Women, is an interactive multimedia project that attempts to move beyond the media stereotypes and statistics about women, and look at their real lives. The makers photograph and interview three different generations of women within one family about aspects of their experience, growing up, learning, happiness, love, and more. The aim is that this will give people some sense of the changes that have happened in the lives of these women over the past few decades. …

This paper, presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' Analysis Conference held in Cairo, 20-24 January 2009, seeks to interrogate the extent to which change has occurred in the lives of three generations of Ghanaian women. This is to assess the extent of changes and continuities in the lives of women as a social group. Change here is being used as an indirect indicator of empowerment when it involves improvements. The significance of the various indicators in the lives of the different generations of women will also be explored. …

This paper was presented at the XIII Bahian Researchers Symposium on Women and Gender Relations held at NEIM/UFBA in Salvador from 4-7 November 2008. The purpose of the study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over three successive generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. …

This article identifies changes and continuities in gender relations in a working class neighbourhood in Salvador, Bahia, through the generations. Based on data collected over a period of nearly 20 years, it seeks to identify processes of women's empowerment. It confirms the relevance of women's economic independence to their participation in decision-making and in gaining autonomy; it gave them the power to assert control over their own lives. To this end, female solidarity has also played a special role, propitiating the exercise of power with to bring about the desired changes in one's lives. …

This chapter identifies change and continuities in gender relations in a working class neighbourhood in Salvador, Bahia, through the generations. Based on data collected over a period of nearly twenty years, it seeks to identify processes of of women's empowerment. …

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. …

What has changed for Ghanaian women since Ghana gained independence in 1957? What has driven these changes, and how have they been experienced by women of different generations? And to what extent do Ghanaian women feel empowered by changing contexts of work, education, institutions and associational life? Pathways researchers in Ghana set about finding out from women in three regions of the country – Northern, Ashanti and Greater Accra – what constellation of factors enable a woman to empower herself. …

A video of photos produced during the photography course given to researchers of the Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Studies on Women from the Federal University of Bahia as part of the research on three generations of women. …

Can research on empowerment be in itself empowering to those that take part in it? If so, how might that research be constructed and conducted, and what kind of empowerment might researchers and research participants experience? This article explores a series of research initiatives in Salvador, Brazil, that sought to integrate transformative feminist principles into the study of women's empowerment as part of an international research programme involving researchers from Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, West Africa, the UK and the USA. We reflect on debates about epistemology and methodology that gave rise to the design of these projects and on the research journeys that these designs brought into being. Contrasting research projects with very different foci, methodologies and participants, the article explores insights from these initiatives for feminist research on empowerment. …

Final synthesis report from the Latin American Hub of Pathways of Women’s Empowerment (Pathways) - an international research and communications programme that has focused for the five years from 2006-2011 on understanding and influencing efforts to bring about positive change in women’s lives. After an introduction to the Latin American research projects within the four research themes, the report analyses selected research. Highlights from the LA Hub are given along with a detailed list of research outputs. …

Final synthesis report from the Middle East Hub of Pathways of Women’s Empowerment (Pathways) - an international research and communications programme that has focused for the five years from 2006-2011 on understanding and influencing efforts to bring about positive change in women’s lives. After an introduction to the Middle East research projects within the four research themes, the report analyses selected research. Highlights from the ME Hub are given along with a detailed list of research outputs. …

In this paper, we address the methodological challenges as well as innovations made possible by a mixed methods analysis of empowerment in a multi-lingual environment. The linguistic challenge of translating empowerment fully reminds us that the concept is both time and place specific. Combining a survey with intergenerational interviews allows us to uncover both whether or not Ghanaian women are empowered and equally importantly the context that makes this possible. Such an approach also allows us to assess the extent to which researchers and the researched share similar understandings of what empowerment means. …

This paper presented at 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' conference held in Cairo from 20-24 January 2009, reflects on the linguistic and methodological challenges of researching aspects of women's empowerment in Ghana. It shows how by using both surveys and indepth interviews across three generations of women, researchers were able to highlight how various factors such as education changed in significance over time. The research process also drew attention to importance of selecting the right words to use during the planning stages in order to avoid biasing responses, for instance the words for 'empowerment' and 'empowering' had different significance in terms of strength and type. …

Stories of Change is a film by Kamar Ahmad Simon and Sara Afreen about five women aged between 16 to 60 years old, coming from different regions and religions within Bangladesh, different yet common in sharing their dreams. …

This paper was presented at Fazendo Genero (Doing Gender) 8 held at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina from 25-28 August 2008. The purpose of the study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over three successive generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. …