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In Nigeria, within marriage, women are expected to pleasure their husbands, and preparation for marriage focuses on teaching the girl how to do so. In contrast, non-married women were expected to enjoy sex with their boyfriends. Yet, what emerged from research by Aken’Ova’s organisation INCRESE (The International Centre for Reproductive Health and Rights) was women’s deep lack of sexual pleasure in their relationships, married or not. Some men mistakenly believed they were giving great pleasure to their lovers, and had not discovered the truth due to lack of communication. …

The paper will examine some of the critical issues raised by the women's movement in India on the violence experienced by women both within the family and through modes of development initiated by the state in India and the manner in which the state has sought to both counter feminist critiques as well as co-opt them through state initiated policies. It will particularly examine literacy and micro-credit programmes to argue that the rhetoric of empowerment functions as a new 'mantra' which does little to even dent the violence of women's everyday lives especially when they are poor and located on the social margins. …

This paper, presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' Analysis Conference held in Cairo, 20-24 January 2009, seeks to interrogate the extent to which change has occurred in the lives of three generations of Ghanaian women. This is to assess the extent of changes and continuities in the lives of women as a social group. Change here is being used as an indirect indicator of empowerment when it involves improvements. The significance of the various indicators in the lives of the different generations of women will also be explored. …

In this paper Cecilia Sardenberg discusses women's examination of the constraints imposed on them historically by gender ideologies and how this can be challenged for a new order. …

In this paper presented to the 2nd Annual Feminist Pedagogy Conference in New York on 12 October 2007, Fofana Ibrahim details how she uses her students’ experiences of the war in Sierra Leone, supported by feminist and critical pedagogies, to encourage them to think critically about their assumptions. She believes that including women’s experiences or alternative knowledge about the war and other issues result in a shift of perspective and lead to a better understanding of the way sin which systems of oppression intersect in academia. …

Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this chapter makes the case that the benefits of education for women in context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. …

Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this article makes the case that the benefits of education for women is context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. This study shows that more than twice as many women aged 18–29 have had some form of education compared with those above 50. …

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. …

Kamau draws upon her experience at ActionAid International Kenya to reflect on development interventions and what makes them successful. She views empowerment as both an individual and collective process of understanding and action, and highlights the importance of education and access to information as essential to empowerment. She concludes with an ActionAid Kenya case study that illustrates the success of the rights-based approach in aiding an empowering development process. …

Sylvia Tamale describes how women have become subject to moralism, shame and sex negativity. Tamale explores how the institution of Ssenga among the Banda in Uganda, has endured and changed. Formerly an education by aunts for nieces on how to become good wives and pleasure husbands, it is now as often a commercial service for better sex and relationships. Both earlier and current versions of Ssenga largely focus on conformist scripts, privileging men’s pleasure over women’s. …

Talk of ‘ensonga za Ssenga’ (Ssenga matters) among the Baganda of Uganda signifies an institution that has endured through centuries as a tradition of sexual initiation. At the helm is the paternal aunt (or surrogate versions thereof) whose role is to tutor young women in a range of sexual matters, including pre-menarche practices, pre-marriage preparation, erotics and reproduction. In contemporary Uganda, commercial Ssenga services abound, with Ssenga columns and call-in radio programmes and Ssenga booklets on sale in Kampala’s streets. The institution is being transformed by “modernization” and urbanization, re-drawing the boundaries of Ssenga to suit the times. …

Great strides have been made towards the realization of gender equity over the past fifteen years in Egypt. Since the last ICPD in 1994, a National Council for Women has been established, a number of prejudicial laws have been changed and over four million women have entered the labour force. This chapter not only documents the achievements but also gauges the distance left towards the realization of gender equity and justice. The case of Egypt illustrates the importance and limitations of formal and structural change. …

To what extent does gender equality contribute to economic growth? And to what extent does the reverse relationship hold true? There are a growing number of studies exploring these relationships, generally using cross-country regression analysis. They are characterized by varying degrees of methodological rigour to take account of the problems associated with econometric analysis at this highly aggregated level, including the problems of reverse causality. Bearing these problems in mind, a review of this literature suggests that the relationship between gender equality and economic growth is an asymmetrical one. The evidence that gender equality, particularly in education and employment, contributes to economic growth is far more consistent and robust than the relationship that economic growth contributes to gender equality in terms of health, wellbeing and rights. …

This paper presents an overview of the processes, interventions, policies and personal experiences that lead to, or are associated with the somewhat ambiguous concept of women's ‘empowerment’ in Ghana. The task the authors set themselves was to find out from existing literature and key civil society organisations in Ghana today what kinds of actions have been implemented, and the policies and processes that seem to be associated with women's ‘empowerment’. …

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. …