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This chapter examines the development of a pilot conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme which was carried out in the Cairo neighbourhood of Ain el Sira from 2008‑2012 by the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity and its partners, with technical and research support provided by the American University in Cairo and the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme. The aim was to test out the programme in one urban setting in Cairo as a learning model for future national-level implementation. CCTs are seen to be efficient, effective, popular and even progressive because they divert resources to women. This programme sought to be even more progressive in that it contested the gender dynamics usually associated with CCTs that validate women’s roles as mothers and ignore their productive roles and agency. …

The aim of this paper is to introduce and analyse the “Stories/Storytelling for Change” Project by the “I am the Story” Group that was held under the auspices of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Project. The paper describes the methodologies used in holding two re/writing workshops using social and anthropological research as raw material for the writing. Another aim of this methodology paper is to propose that creative writing and storytelling can be effectively used as advocacy tools in gender training workshops. Works of art are maintained to help participants in gender training workshops to acquire gender knowledge and to write gender sensitive stories in the most subtle of ways. …

Ana el-Hekkeya is a group of academics, writers and artists, working on raising public awareness on gender issues. The group worked with young Arabic journalists, writers, poets and bloggers, to re-examine the gender stereotypes dominant in popular culture through a series of writing workshops. As the participants were important producers of popular culture and played a part in shaping how their readers perceived women, producing gender sensitive stories through these workshops was one of the group’s main achievements. In total, 63 gender sensitive stories were written with 12 of these stories included in a performance for the public. …

Western-led discussions of sexual health have foregrounded warnings of the dangers of sex. Yet, pleasure is one important reason why people have sex. Sexual health work must open up discussion of how pleasure can be experienced with less risk. There are challenges in addressing pleasure in work on safer sex. …

This chapter argues that the instrumentalist approach to women’s empowerment has created a broad near consensus around some rights, but has failed to engage with the political processes which determine how rights in general are defined and made operational in society. The timid approach to gender rights as an avenue to well-being has failed to question why these rights have been denied, and how this denial has been ideologically legitimized. Unitary and rigid interpretations of religion, culture, and tradition have been doled out as reasons why the structural meanings of empowerment are unsuited to and unpopular in Arab Muslim countries. The contest between the basic needs approach to empowerment and the more radical rights-based approach defines current approaches to gender and empowerment. …

In this article, Koggel reflects on the various influences on her thinking on gender and development, including a research project in Indonesia to explore the possible gaps between the World Bank’s understanding of empowerment and social science theory and NGO practice prior to mainstreaming the concept; capabilities theory and the difference between empowerment and agency; and the rhetoric of empowerment. She discusses the importance of contextual analyses and of the limitations of generalized policies or principles designed to promote ‘development’ or empower women. An important lesson for development ethicists is the need to pay attention to and analyse relations of power – including the overarching factor of economic globalization in the form of neo-liberal and capitalist assumptions and structures. Another important lesson is the one she learned from Sen's complex analysis of poverty: that ethical issues of development are as relevant to ‘developed’ countries as they are to poor ‘developing’ countries. …

This chapter situates the analysis of the Palestinian women’s movement in a colonial context and conceptualises the relation between the national liberation struggle against the Israeli occupation and social emancipation. It traces the historical development of the women’s movement including the contemporary professionalisation and institutionalisation of women's activism in the nineties, and its impact in expanding the gap between women’s leadership and grassroots. …

A panel from the the AWID Forum held in Cape Town from 14-17 November 2008. Dzodzi Tsikata discussed how women’s NGOs in Ghana have responded to some of the challenges they face because of NGOization. She recounted the history of NGOization in Ghana and the lessons that women’s NGOs learned from it, and concluded that “while NGOization still remains a huge issue for the women’s movement in Ghana, I think that women’s organisations in Ghana have come to recognize by their work that NGOs are not synonymous with civil society nor with the women’s movement. ” Saba Khatak placed the women’s movement in Pakistan in the larger context of Pakistani politics. …

Tessa Lewin introduces Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC, explaining its purpose in bringing together academics and activists from five hubs to understand the factors influencing women’s empowerment. The article elaborates on the four themes of Pathways, namely ‘Conceptions of Women’s Empowerment’, ‘Building Constituencies for Equality and Justice’, ‘Empowering Work’ and ‘Changing Narratives of Sexuality’, before identifying some of the common factors which hamper women’s empowerment and highlighting some of the research being done by Pathways researchers. …

This paper 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). …

In this paper, presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' Analysis Conference, Cairo, 20-24 January 2009, I want to argue against a common and perhaps a temptingly easy understanding that posits a direct and problematic link between the challenges of reforming Egyptian personal status laws and their seemingly inescapable religious identity. Such a reading has a homogenizing effect that: 1) collapses those who take issue with the proposed changes in the substantive laws from a religious perspective into one unitary position, 2) fails to appreciate the interconnectedness of secular (e. g. human rights) and religious discourses that frame the debates about the new legal reforms, and 3) conceals a number of underlying issues which go beyond the question of the religious boundaries of the family laws. …

This article explores the pathways of political action pursued by the Sudanese women's movement leading up to the introduction of a women's quota in 2008 and its implementation in the most recent 2010 national parliamentary elections, the country's first in 24 years. The article argues that the main achievement of the quota was the extent to which it mobilized women to engage in politics, rather than the increased representation of women in parliament. The form the quota took however, has not significantly challenged political parties to put forth women candidates in core geographic constituencies, restricting them instead to separate women's lists. The need for revisiting the quota, healing divisions within the women's movement and negotiating a robust common programme in the next phase are all critical for translating numbers into positive changes in Sudanese women's lives. …

The aim of this paper, presented at Oxford's Health, Illness and Disease Conferenced held from 3-5 2009 July is to present the findings of an ongoing research project conducted in the Cairene slum of Ain Es-Sira. It examines the effects of financial capacity and conceptions of citizenship on the health-seeking behaviour of mothers for their children. Ain Es-Sira, a slum neighbourhood of approximately 6,000 inhabitants, has been selected to benefit from a pilot study of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme. Implemented in dozens of countries across the world, CCT programmes give families living below the poverty line cash and, in exchange, require that families fulfill certain conditions, which are assumed to facilitate the breakdown of the intergenerational transfer of poverty. …

Directed by Paulina Tervo, Thorns and Silk tells four unusual stories from Palestine, featuring women who work in jobs that are conventionally associated with men in their society. All four of them have the courage to break traditional rules, though not without challenges. We dip into the life of a wedding filmmaker, who films women-only weddings in the most conservative part of Palestine; hear the stories of a female taxi driver who works in the Israeli parts of Jerusalem; discover a young police trainee at the Palestinian Police Academy and learn about the hardships in occupied Nablus from a mother who takes on male roles in order to keep her family toilet paper factory going. …

Jerker Edström argues that common interpretations of vulnerability in gender and development discourse, policy and practice tend to reinforce essentialisms about men and women. These interpretations compromise our ability to think clearly about the structural influences on HIV and sexual health, as well as its relations to gender inequity and women’s empowerment. He examines some predominant constructions of women in the AIDS response, based on the notion of vulnerability, and suggests how unhelpful the notion of vulnerability is to the political project of women’s empowerment in redressing inequality and injustice. …