Lead Researchers: Dzodzi Tsikata , Akosua Darkwah
The study explored women's everyday lives in order to better understand their experiences of empowerment and disempowerment as they relate to the three themes of the RPC - empowering work, building constituencies for women's empowerment and changing narratives of sexuality. Through a pilot survey of 400 women in urban, peri-urban and rural areas in the Greater Accra Region, the study examined how women's experiences of empowerment and disempowerment are associated with particular moments in their lives from childhood to adulthood.
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. …
This paper presented at 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' conference held in Cairo from 20-24 January 2009, reflects on the linguistic and methodological challenges of researching aspects of women's empowerment in Ghana. It shows how by using both surveys and indepth interviews across three generations of women, researchers were able to highlight how various factors such as education changed in significance over time. The research process also drew attention to importance of selecting the right words to use during the planning stages in order to avoid biasing responses, for instance the words for 'empowerment' and 'empowering' had different significance in terms of strength and type. …