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Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to a basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enables people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. …

This paper presented at Fazendo Genero (Doing Gender) 8 held at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina from 25-28 August 2008 focuses on the Pathways Latin America project which examined the struggles for the realization of reproductive rights in Brazil, following and retracing campaigns for the legalization of abortion. The project also identified and analysed the strategies employed, and the particular contributions and roles of feminists in NGO networks, and in the academic world. …

For generations of workers in the sugar cane plantations of north-eastern Brazil, the long months between harvests have been a time of hunger. Sugar cane cutting is hard labour. Women workers rise in the early hours to prepare food for their families and leave for work before dawn, working long hours in the scorching sun. Alternatives are limited. …

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. …

In this chapter the authors discuss how feminists in Brazil have responded to the challenge of dealing not only with tensions from existing inequalities within their ranks, but also with the task of devising strategies to channel very diverse women’s demands. They look at the national conferences for women held over the last decade  - the Conference of Brazilian Women (2002), and the I and II National Conferences of Public Policies for Women (2004 and 2007, respectively) – and examine their products: the Feminist Political Platform and the I and II National Plans of Public Policies for Women.  …

Within the constraints of bureaucratic straitjackets and institutional turf battles, this chapter examines the workings of cross-agency gender theme groups (GTGs) to strengthen the gender equality programming of three UN country teams (UNCTs) through an action-learning approach facilitated by Gender at Work. …

This ground-breaking collection investigates the relationship between feminist activism and legal reform as a pathway to gender justice and social change. …

The first of three chapters within this book which analyse the research findings from the Pathways Feminist Activists in Global Policy Organisations project, using the device of five fictionalised characters to preserve the anonymity of participants. …

Every day in international development organisations, feminists make use of strategy, tactics, wisdom and skill to act for their principles. Most of their strategies are invisible and their tactics subtle. They draw on networks of friendships and relationships that create ripples of effect in enabling their organisations to be pathways of women's empowerment. …

Meena Seshu as guest editor of this issue of Contestations suggests that by viewing 'sex work' through the framework of patriarchy and the objectification of women's bodies, feminists foreclose any discussion over whether women can actively choose sex work as a livelihood option. It is this narrow approach linking sex work with violence against women, she argues, that leads many feminists to the assumption that all sex workers are victims who need 'rescuing', which is not always the case. Seshu contends that a far better lens is the rights-based approach which recognises sex workers' rights as human beings and allows them to break out of the victim mode. …

On behalf of Meem, the community of and for Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LBTQ) women in Lebanon, Nadine delivered one of the most exciting and talked about speeches at the Opening Plenary of the International AWID Forum: The Power of Movements held in Cape Town November 2008. She looks at sexuality in relation to feminism from the perspective of an activist working to have women's self-defined expression of sexuality accepted openly in mainstream culture. …

An enduring legacy of the Beijing Conference, gender mainstreaming has been widely implemented and widely critiqued since the 1990s. But the basis of these critiques has changed over time: this article charts a typology of critique approaches. It shows how the central problem is diagnosed variously as the loss of the political dimensions of gender in the course of mainstreaming; or technical shortcomings; or the gendered nature of organisations as the causes of technical failure. For others, the problem has been the failure to scrutinise the connection between gender mainstreaming and changes in gender relations in women’s real lives. …

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. …

Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to a basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enables people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. …

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. …