Search All

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. …

This paper is meant to inform the NWRO on the link between characteristics of work, domestic violence, and personal status as a platform for addressing the gaps in policy that leave women vulnerable. This paper looks at the results of the Working Women’s Characteristics Survey (WWCS) that was carried out as part of the “Understanding Women’s Work and its Empowering Potentials in their Everyday Life” project by researchers Hania Sholkamy and Ragui Assaad. The WWCS looks empirically, for the first time in Egypt, at the relationship between labour-market participation for women and different empowerment indicators, asking whether work is empowering for women in Egypt. Assuming an inextricable link between women’s work and their private lives, the WWCS looks at engagement in different types of labour-market participation, namely formal, informal and from-home employment, in relation to various empowerment indicators that reflect on women’s access to resources, and their agency within the home and outside of it. …

The Changing Focus photography competition invited local photographers to visually present their visions of the exchanges between women and their communities and to capture their representations of women’s empowerment and agency. The project addressed a Pathways commitment to working with various modes of communication in an effort to grasp a broader and fuller idea of how women experience empowerment in their local contexts. …

The conditional cash transfer (CCT) pilot in the Cairene slum of Ain es Sira started in May 2009 and was scheduled to last for two years. The Social Research Center (SRC) of the American University in Cairo provided technical assistance to the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity (MOSS) in designing, implementing and evaluating this pilot to inform national social policy decisions. Within the pilot, 380 most vulnerable families with children were registered to participate, receiving monthly cash payments in exchange for fulfilling child development goals related to health and education. …