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Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. …

Globalisation is transforming the lives of women workers. Civil society campaigns over workers' rights in global production have begun to open up global spaces for women's organisations. Examples can now be found where women's concerns have been given some voice in mainstream commercial corridors of power. This paper examines this process. …

The researchers have used the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) of 2006 (and its predecessors) to foster both qualitative and quantitative studies on various aspects of gender and work in Egypt, as well as building research capacity in this area. …

This project explored the meanings and debates around women’s empowerment within and among sets of actors with a global reach, and how they are shaping values, ideas and policy actions (or absence of actions) on women’s empowerment. …

This research project sought to document and analyse strategies and approaches used by selected women’s organisations in Bangladesh to mobilise and advocate for women’s rights and raise demands to the State and other rights holders. The research selected a few key movements to analyse and fed back the findings and analysis to the groups being studied so that they could use that to further reflect on their practice and identify what changes they would like to make to be more effective in the future. …

Contestations is an e-journal whose aim is to elicit lively disagreements and to offer a platform for argumentation. It is inspired by a vision of deliberation that is about people feeling able to air their views, listen to a plurality of positioned responses and take from that what they will - without any pressure to arrive at a consensual conclusion. It is, above all, about the freedom to dissent with any of the orthodoxies that exist in the field of women's empowerment - and there are many - and take the opportunity to provoke others to think again about the things they take for granted. …

This special issue of 'Development' picks up some of the contentions and contestations that have accompanied the uptake of 'women's empowerment' by the development industry. Contributors reflect on their own personal and political engagement with the term and what it has come to represent. …

This special issue of Development originates from work presented at the AWID Forum on the 'Power of Movements' held in South Africa in November 2008. …

This ongoing study has been carried out by NEIM since the 1980s, focusing on feminisms and women’s movements in Brazil. It is the study that underpins the Pathways Latin America programme, in that the feminist movement has set the stage for the specific struggles and campaigns examined in the other projects. Pathways Latin America's research has been conducted from a feminist perspective, sustaining a “liberating empowerment” approach and, as such, their primary focus is on collective action as a pathway of women’s empowerment. …

This project researched the reforms that have been taking place in Egyptian personal status laws since 2000. The aim was to examine the unfolding reform story and what it entailed in terms of successes and challenges for women's rights activists in their pursuit of justice and equality in marriage and divorce rights, and for Egyptian women at large who seek legal redress in family courts. The focus of the study was on two aspects of the reform story: 1) the process of mobilising for the new laws, building alliances, choosing strategies, and making concessions, and 2) the implementation of the legal reforms in the new family courts that were introduced in 2004. …

The collection of essays in the book aims to capture the variety of policies, discourses, debates and interventions that have influenced the lives of women in South Asia and to identify those that have led to greater empowerment of women. …

This project concerned the significance and impact of official external financing for women’s organising at global, regional and national levels. It used participatory methods of critical reflection involving both donor staff and representatives of women’s rights organisations and networks in Bangladesh and Ghana as well as at regional and global levels. …

Articles by Pathways of Women's Empowerment researchers for Open Democracy's 50:50 section which features and analysis and news from women working around the world on issues of women's rights and empowerment. …

This book explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organisation and mobilisation. The book offers accounts of how women working on farms, as sex workers, maids and waste pickers, in fisheries and factories, have come together to carve out new identities for themselves, define what matters to them, and develop collective strategies of resistance and struggle. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …