Search

In 2020, the United Nations will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women when 189 countries signed on to the Beijing Platform for Action. This must be a game-changing year, an opportunity for the feminist and women's movement to produce a transformative framework and new alliances. Soon-Young Yoon and Melissa Upreti, along with Krishanti Dhamaraj, founders and drivers of the Feminist and Women's Movements Action Plan (fwMAP) and members of the Beijing +25 Global Advisory Working Group established the goals, principles of organising, and hopes for this process in the context of Beijing +25 in July and August 2019. Organising under the fwMAP is premised on a reaffirmation of human rights principles and feminist values of agency, autonomy, and inclusion as the basis for a collective roadmap and approach for achieving gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing acknowledgement among policymakers and private-sector partners that we cannot overcome the challenges of our time without harnessing the potential of emerging technologies. As blockchain technology is rapidly being introduced to support work across a wide number of areas of humanitarian action, this article considers its potential impact on women and girls. The article draws on experiences emerging from UN Women's explorations of blockchain technology and the first gender-responsive pilot targeting Syrian refugee women in UN Women's cash-for-work programme in Jordan. The article reminds us how important it is to introduce technologies in ways that maximise their potential to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in humanitarian settings, and minimise the risk of doing harm. Without conscious commitment to these aims, blockchain technology may exacerbate the marginalisation of women and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant women are often described as victims of the global economy: accounts of human rights abuses and economic exploitation have eclipsed more positive accounts of the impact of migrant work on women's lives. Some migrant women are positioned to make use of new opportunities which they see as empowering, in contrast to earlier experiences in their homes or sending countries. This study, based on qualitative interviews with 13 young Nepalese women working in manufacturing and agricultural sectors with Employment Permits in South Korea, highlights a rather positive window of women's empowerment. It shares the perspectives of young, mostly single women who gain self-confidence through their new ability to take care of their family (some becoming primary breadwinners). The women are also able to plan for their economic futures, and report their voices being heard more in important family decision-making. These material, relational, and perceptual improvements are all important dimensions of empowerment. In these experiences, gender intersects with age and other factors to produce a nuanced view of specific young women's experience of migrant work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender justice and women’s empowerment are both an end and a goal of sustainable development, and information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) policies and monitoring needs to be informed by this understanding. This article draws on research from Afghanistan exploring how women’s empowerment is conceptualised in relation to information and communication technologies (ICTs) currently, and how ICTs are used in processes intended to support empowerment. Our research shows that women in Afghanistan have high hopes that ICTs will be enabling and empowering. Yet the majority of women’s ICT activities do not realise that vision; with a few exceptions around women’s health, ICTs usually only enable women to meet their existing needs, and do not enable them to challenge patriarchal power relations. According to our respondents, using ICT for purposes that challenge patriarchy - e.g. using the internet to learn about rights to divorce or citizen’s rights, or sharing ‘private’ stories of abuse in social media spaces - has a high risk of social repercussions. We argue that these warnings and responses urge women to conform, and submit to control, and regulate women’s interactions and movements. They limit women’s choices, options, and power. However, some Afghan women in our research rejected these attempts to control and regulate - ‘I don’t care about their reactions’. This offers hope that for some individuals in some contexts, ICTs can put a dent in patriarchal power, supporting and furthering women’s empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way women’s issues have been conceptualised and acted on in the context of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) has changed over the past four decades. The discourses and trends in development studies – from the Women in Development approach of the 1970s to Gender and Development in the 1980s – were mirrored in the WASH sector. The WASH sector has contributed to, and been shaped by, debates on women’s needs and, latterly, on gender perspectives based on a combined argument for equity and efficiency. In addition, in the last decade, the WASH sector has developed its own distinctive initiatives, such as menstrual hygiene management and, recently, specific WASH considerations relating to gender-based violence. This paper assesses whether the result of this sector-specific response has been a dilution or distillation of gender issues. It concludes that the WASH sector has not disregarded the goals of women’s empowerment and gender equality; rather, it has contributed to understandings of how resources – such as infrastructure and services – underpin that empowerment. This allows an important recognition of the value and impact of WASH-sector priorities and actions for the wider well-being of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the new agenda for sustainable development adopted by the United Nations, to see if it contains policies for gender equity and equality as well as for sustainable development in tune with planetary boundaries. It finds that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not ambitious and lack a systematic policy approach. It therefore examines other internationally agreed conventions that address gender equality and sustainable development concerns, and contain policies. I examine the universe of policies needed to make sustainable gender equality real, for all women, going beyond the current economistic rationale. The article concentrates on several ‘domains’ widely considered to be core to the empowerment of women: namely work and incomes, access to health services, and the environment. I conclude by arguing that, by incorporating other, more progressive conventions and declarations, the SDGs can be used creatively and subversively, to move towards gender and climate justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the current trend for investing in women and girls as ‘smart economics’, which is a direct descendant of the efficiency approach to women in development (WID) prevalent in the wake of the economic crisis in the 1980s. We highlight the dangers of conflating the empowerment of women as individuals with the feminist goal of removing the structural discrimination which women face as a gendered constituency, and consider the implications for feminists in development if they adopt smart economics-speak and work in coalition with individuals and organisations who have fundamentally different aims. This has attractions in strategic terms, but risks recreating the very problems gender and development seeks to transform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]