Research Projects

A documentary film by Yaba Badoe which tells the story of a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana. …

This project examined the discourses of empowerment used by specific actors, particularly in relation to understandings of women’s disempowerment, and explored the effects of these discourses on efforts to bring about gender equality. …

Pre-war discourses of empowerment which were mainly around issues of development have now changed, in this post-war era, to include issues of gender equality, participation and voice, among others. This project has tracked these changes in relation to women’s conceptions of empowerment during this period. …

This bulletin addresses a theme that mainstream development has persisently neglected: sexuality. Drawing on a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2005, it seeks to show why sexuality matters. It features papers from the workshop which provide diverse accounts of sexual rights conceptions, mobilisation, and new approaches to implementation. …

This study aimed to illuminate the pathways of women's political empowerment, the relationship between political participation and change and interrogate the effectiveness of the decentralisation commission in empowering women in Sierra Leone. …

This research considered whether and how the work done by Women Health Workers leads to changes at the individual, family and societal levels. Researchers explored how Women Health Workers are introducing new role models for women, challenging purdah, encouraging mobility, and creating pathways of empowerment. The study compared public (government) women health workers with non-government women health workers. …

This project investigated the enabling conditions for women’s participation in local governance and its influence on women’s empowerment. The objectives for this study were to explore the challenges faced by women councillors, how they negotiate these challenges, their own interpretation of their engagement patterns and processes, and whether new gender norms and roles are being created for women in the public domain. …

Through this study researchers investigated the ‘criss-cross’ processes through which women in Pakistan become empowered, focusing on how the larger institutional set-up (whether military or non-military) helps women achieve their goals. They explored how some of the major initiatives from civil society have contributed to women’s voices at the local government level, and also looked at individual case studies of women when they either surmount or fail to surmount societal pressures in their individual lives. …

In June 2009, the Egyptian parliament passed a new quota law adding 64 additional seats, for which only women can compete in the 454-seat parliament. This project looked at the various instruments to support women's political participation in Egypt, including the National Council for Women’s political empowerment training programme, and asked how effective these have been in challenging power hierarchies and empowering women politically? …

This project looked at the challenge of how to maximise the gains and minimise the constraints of globalisation in order that women can access markets as a pathway to their empowerment in different regional and local contexts. …

This research looked at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities in Bangladesh. The aim was to see whether the new forms of Islam in fact open up new spaces thereby ‘permitting’ women greater sexual rights than has been popularly perceived, and what might be learnt by the secular women’s movement from women’s organising in these new spaces. …

This project has aimed to enhance the empowerment of Arab women through a rereading and rewriting of traditional representations of their roles. In the first phase, writing workshops focused on analysing, critiquing and recreating traditional Arab folklore through a gender sensitive lens were held in Palestine, Sudan and Egypt. The resulting stories were then used in storytelling performances. In Phase II the project was developed to provide training and awareness activities with journalists, writers, bloggers and poets. …

This book explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organisation and mobilisation. The book offers accounts of how women working on farms, as sex workers, maids and waste pickers, in fisheries and factories, have come together to carve out new identities for themselves, define what matters to them, and develop collective strategies of resistance and struggle. …

This project aimed to create the opportunity for Arabic speakers to set an agenda of priorities in a language that they can use to communicate and give a wider currency to their ideas. If, as has been often noted, women’s empowerment is a cause without a following and a message without an audience, then there is an obvious need to talk and tackle women’s empowerment and develop the coherence and capacity to do so in Arabic. The conflation between Arabic and Islam has focused researchers on religion as the equivalent of language. This project ran a series of workshops held in plain Arabic to discuss the agendas of women’s empowerment and the flows that influence, set, shape, critique and communicate them. …

Using topical life stories, focus groups, data and discourse analysis, this project explored the experiential diversity and thematic commonalities in the lives of Palestinian unmarried women, in the context of a society experiencing prolonged warlike conditions, political crisis, and social disruption. In particular, the researchers examined the dynamics of choice, embodiment, responsibility, and survival, as well as attempted to identify structural, social, political and economic factors shaping Palestine’s rather unique pattern of early, but not universal marriage, with a relatively high proportion of never-married women (but not men) over time. …