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Fewer than 40 per cent of Kenyan women use some sort of contraception, leading to unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions. Nearly 50 per cent of maternal deaths are linked with unsafe abortions and national law still criminalizes those involved in the provision of an abortion, holding a possible penalty of 15 years imprisonment if found guilty. In its mandate to promote sexual and reproductive rights, including safe abortion services, the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance of Kenya planned a Mock Tribunal with the view of informing and engaging citizens, the media, policy-makers and advocates publicly on the negative consequences of the criminalization of abortion in Kenya. Over 400 participants gathered to hear testimonies from four women who had abortions, health professionals and counsellors. …

The paper seeks to intervene in debates about the role of crisis in Post Washington Consensus (PWC) policymaking. Gender and, especially, sexuality are largely absent from that debate. My paper asks: What do experiences of crisis reveal about the inter-connections between crisis, gender, and sexuality? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present (Nikolas Rose) get unsettled, which get re-entrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process? Using policy texts, interviews with Bank policymakers, and fieldwork on a family strengthening loan in Argentina, I argue that the denaturalization of free markets in the PWC is articulated, in part, through the re-naturalization of monogamous heterosexual couplehood. With the injuries of neoliberalism framed as injuries to loving couplehood, the Bank and its allies resolve to (re)generate intimate partnership as defining feature of the post-crisis era, raising crucial questions about the new regimes of heteronormativity under construction in contemporary development practice. …

Women are making a difference in their communities in Ghana. Decision-making structures must recognise this and support the entry of more women to advance women's rights and their empowerment. This documentary film entitled "Honourables" and directed by Yaba Badoe, shares the experiences of three District Assembly Women in Ghana. …

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. …

Meena Seshu and Nandinee Bandhopadhyay who work with sex workers speak with Cheryl Overs, a sex rights activist, at an open floor session during the IDS conference on Sexuality and the Development Industry. …

This chapter challenges the assumption that sex workers get no pleasure from their work, citing research in several locations including India, China, Spain and Finland. This research demonstrates that placing sex workers’ experience of pleasure at the forefront can provide a fresh angle on familiar arguments. This is particularly important in the study of sex work, where ideological conflict and political necessity have tended to harden into fixed positions and inflexible ways of thinking. This chapter follows the lead provided by sex workers themselves in taking pleasure seriously. …

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. …

Women’s rights organisations have been central to progress on women’s rights and gender equality since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA). Drawing on interviews carried out in January 2015 with twelve of Womankind Worldwide’s partner organisations, the myriad ways in which women’s movement actors draw strategically on the BPfA as appropriate to their context are explored, along with universally-shared challenges in implementation. …

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 scoping article gives a global picture of dynamics, trends, policies and mechanisms for engaging with women's representation in political office. It discusses the kind of affirmative action introduced, and where it features vis-à-vis electoral cycles. It describes and compares candidate and reserved seats quotas and shows how electoral systems influence the possibilities of challenging power hierarchies in politics. The second part of the article reflects on the extent to which implementing quotas have been effective in engendering political representation and the conditions that allow or inhibit this. …

Feminist activists have looked to the law and to law reform as a key instrument for advancing women’s rights because of the broad reach of the law and its ability to produce social change, especially for less powerful and marginalised groups in society who have used legal reform to compensate for their lack of power (Lobel 2007). But as "while the formal rules can be changed overnight, the informal norms [i. e. "norms of behaviour, conventions and codes of conduct"] change only gradually. …

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. …

This chapter examines the political pathway of women who choose to run as independent candidates, against all odds. It argues that while these women have many of the prerequisites to win, the stakes against them are high. A constellation of factors, described at length in this chapter, work against opting for independent candidacy as a pathway of engaging politically. …

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. …