Research Projects

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. …

The assembly is a sort of District Council in Ghana. Its members are 70 per cent elected and 30 per cent - of which half must be women - appointed. This research project asked: How did the women get into office? How was getting into office a catalyst for participation? What results did they gain in office for themselves and their communities? …

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over the last three generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. The project began in July 2007 and involved working with a panel of 400 women from different generations living in the Plataforma region of Bahia, Brazil. Young girls from the region and university students were trained to use media equipment to interview their mothers and grandmothers on how life has changed in the region. …

This project has traced how some of the most marginalised workers in Brazil came to unionise, press demands for professionalisation to the government and achieve a major policy shift. The project draws out broader lessons on how marginalised workers can gain rights, security and wellbeing, addressing the intersections of race, class and gender. …

Ekushey Book Fair is Bangladesh’s most important cultural and literary annual festival. In 2010 Pathways South Asia took the opportunity to launch four research reports there in the Bangla language which were written in clear, accessible, jargon-less terms to enable them to be more appealing to a wider Bangladesh public. …

This research project looked at a small number of cases of local, national or regional initiatives on sexual rights and women’s empowerment that have succeeded in creating spaces for challenging repressive social norms concerning female sexuality. It looked at the interactions with international influences, including religious and development institutions. …

This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …

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. …

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. …

By exploring the link between the denial of women’s reproductive rights and the denial of women’s sexual agency under patriarchy, the researchers sought to elucidate the conditions under which feminist demands around abortion have been successful by drawing together experiences from across Latin America. …

This bulletin explores how religion has been used in an instrumental manner by global, local and national actors as a means of engaging with gender issues in Muslim communities. …

This project involved looking at policy texts of organisations (civil society, donor agencies and government) dealing with women's issues to see what kind of empowerment is present in the texts. What ideas do they have? How are they conceptualised? What strategies do they use to bring about empowerment? …

This bulletin arises from a conference of the same title that was held at the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007 in collaboration with Birkbeck College. It sets out to provoke reflection on the now ubiquitous notions of 'empowerment' and 'agency' within neoliberal development discourses on gender. It also seeks to raise broader questions about the politics and political economy of Gender and Development. …

Pathways South Asia used digital storytelling to document the experiences of growth and transformation in women's lives from their own perspectives, in their own words and voices. The workshops the team held in Dhaka and Chittagong enabled participants to make a 3-4 minute multimedia presentation by themselves, providing moving testimonies of individual lives and the contexts in which empowerment/disempowerment is experienced. …

The purpose of this study was to explore the empowerment-related possibilities experienced by women in a major public sector community health initiative in Pakistan. The Lady Health Worker (LHW) scheme has engaged almost 100,000 women across Pakistan to work in their local communities as primary health and family planning service providers through visiting households door to door to document basic health indicators and offer selected services. The study locates the LHW experience within the geography of gender in diverse parts of Pakistan, and attempts to identify whether the work has any transformative effect on LHWs themselves, and/or has affected the views of communities regarding women’s paid work. …