Pathways
Empowering Work
This theme explores how women in different categories of work try to reposition themselves in public (including markets) and domestic spheres to change attitudes, break barriers, achieve recognition, enhance their bargaining power and exercise their rights at home and at work?
Research looked at: how the sexual division of labour in the domestic sphere is being restructured and at how the disconnect between women’s paid and unpaid work can be reduced; how women as economic actors, cross-border traders and migrants can enhance their incomes, influence, assets and personal safety, especially in post conflict contexts; how women’s rights as workers and caregivers can be enhanced, and what mechanisms and forms of recognition can best support women’s work as a tool for empowerment.
How do women workers organise to claim rights and recognition?
Featured Research Projects
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Working Women Creating Particular Pathways of Change in Bangladesh
This research project explored how paid work can change women’s lives in terms of dealing with the public sphere and institutions, accessing services, commodities, resources, information, reducing isolation, increasing negotiation/bargaining skills, ability to protect themselves, etc. The context under which work can be empowering and the kinds of work that change lives was compared through comparisons of similar research undertaken by the West Africa and Middle East Pathways regional hubs in Ghana and Egypt. …
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Conditional Cash Transfers - Ain es-Sira
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. …
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Empowering Domestic Work - The Organizing of Domestic Workers In Brazil
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. …
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Changes and Continuity in Women's Everyday Lives in Ghana
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. …
