Empowering Work

Taking the ‘work’ entry point into investigating the relationships between paid work and empowerment and exploring the implications of changing markets in the wake of globalization for women’s rights, security and wellbeing as workers as a pathway of empowerment.

Projects which will be initiated under this theme include:

Cluster 1 : Changing Labour Markets and Opportunities for Women and their Influence on Women’s Lives and Relationships

Paid Work and Women's Leadership

Project Coordinator: Naila Kabeer, IDS, UK

Project Description: This project will explore the circumstances under which engagement in paid work translates into collective action around women’s economic needs, interests and rights.

Project Update:

A planning meeting on the women and work research was held at BRAC in early April. See the South Asia Hub Project News page.

See Naila's commentary on Sarah Gavron's recently released film of Monica Ali's novel, Brick Lane on the IDS News website.

Women's Voice in Policy Spaces Shaping the Global Economy

Project Coordinators: Stephanie Barrientos, Global Hub with colleagues in SRC, CGSA, BRAC and NEIM

Project Description: This project will look 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.

Project Update:

'Women Treading the Corridors of Corporate Power', Stephanie Barrientos, April 2008 (pdf file 32KB).

Inter-Generational Perspectives on Women's Lives and Empowerment

Project Coordinators: Dzodzi Tsikata and Akosua Darkwah

Project Description: The study explores 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 will examine how women's experiences of empowerment and disempowerment are associated with particular moments in their lives from childhood to adulthood.

Cluster 2 : Generating New Data and Analysis of Women’s Labour Market Participation

Analysing the Egypt Labour Market Survey

Project Coordinator: Hania Sholkamy, SRC, Egypt

Project Description: The working group will use as the basis of its research the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey of 2006 (and its predecessors) to foster both qualitative and quantitative studies on various aspects of gender and work in Egypt, as well as building research capacity in this area.

Working Women Creating Particular Pathways of Change

Project Coordinators: Naila Kabeer, IDS, UK, Simeen Mahmud, BIDS, Imran Matin, Maheen Sultan and Mahjabeen Rahman BRAC, Bangladesh and Ayesha Khan, Collective for Social Research, Pakistan

Project Description: This project will involve establishing a panel of 3,000 women of different socio-economic backgrounds, and using work as an entry point to explore pathways of change in women’s lives. The panel will serve as a source of quantitative data and a site for experimentations with indicators of empowerment and will feed into the Measuring and Assessing Empowerment project.

Project Update:

A planning workshop on the work research was held in Bangladesh from 15-18 April. See South Asia Hub Project News. The team have finalised the census questionnaire, household survey questionnaire and sampling framework. Two rounds of pilot tests were completed in the summer and the census is due to take place from mid-October to mid-November and the survey from mid-December finishing in February 2008.

The Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi is partnering with BRAC under this research theme and will be conducting a study on women's paid work and empowerment. The title of their research is 'Lady Health Workers Changing Lives: The Unintended Consequences of a Government Programme in Pakistan'. The project seeks to explore whether the government project has unintentionally positioned the Lady Health Worker to be an instrument of social change in her community. Ayesha Khan, who is conducting the research, has completed the first round of interviews with community-based Lady Health Workers, who represent the largest force of health outreach workers in Pakistan. The second phase of this qualitative research project, which explores how their work has affected their own personal lives and impacted gender relations and social inequalities in their communities, is starting in October 2007.

Continuity and Change in the Lives of Ghanaian Marketwomen

Project Coordinators: co-ordinated by Akosua Ampofo Adomako, CGSA, Ghana and in collaboration with Gracia Clark, Indiana University, USA

Project Description: This restudy will document changes in the economic and political climate, particularly hostile government policies, price controls, and neo-liberal influence, on labour force demographics, credit and capital dependency, in relation to women informal traders.

Cluster 3 : How to Enhance Women’s Empowerment through Access to Greater Rights, Security and Recognition as Workers

Cash Transfers for Poor Families in Egypt

Project Coordinators: Hoda Rashad and Hania Sholkamy, SRC, Egypt

Project Description: This project will undertake a number of activities to gauge the processes of design, implementation, capacity building, and impact of this top-down conditional cash transfers programme on women’s empowerment.

Project Update:

The fieldwork for this project began in March 2007. See report of Conditional Cash Transfers Workshop held in Cairo in January 2008.

Empowering Domestic Work: The Organising of Domestic Workers in Brazil

Project Coordinator: Terezinha Gonsalves, NEIM, Brazil

Project Description: This project will trace how some of the most marginalized workers in Brazil came to unionize, press demands for professionalisation to government and achieve a major policy shift and will draw out broader lessons on how marginalized workers can gain rights, security and wellbeing, addressing the intersections of race, class and gender.