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Date Added to Site: 28th August 2009 |
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Short Summary
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| Title |
The Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium
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| Author |
Lewin, T. |
| Publication Date |
July 2008 |
| Publisher |
Oxfam |
| Volume |
Gender & Development |
| Series |
16(2), July |
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Short Summary
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The Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC) is a research and communications initiative funded by the UK Department for International Development (DfID). It is coordinated by a network of institutions organised in regional 'hubs' based in South Asia, West Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and by a Global Hub based in the UK. The programme comprises diverse research and communications projects that bring academics, activists and policy actors together to better understand the factors influencing women's empowerment. The main aim is to understand how women themselves experience processes of empowerment, to what extent these processes are context-specific, and to what extent generic strategies can be fostered by development agencies, for example, to enhance “empowerment”. The Programme is organised into four themes: Conceptions of Women's Empowerment and Change; Building Constituencies for Equality and Justice (focusing on how to create more demand and support for women's empowerment); Empowering Work; and Changing Narratives (and norms) of Sexuality. The Regional Hubs conduct intra- and inter-regional comparative research that is geographical and context-specific, whereas the Global Hub looks at the global policy processes that influence women's empowerment. The researchers have identified some common factors which hamper women's empowerment across all of the regions, including: poverty and economic vulnerability; traditional gender norms and associated roles, and - related to this - the lack of recognition of women's worth and contributions; and the limited political spaces available to women. Yet they have also identified ways of promoting women's empowerment through unconventional interventions. The West Africa Hub, for instance, runs a project looking at the representation of women in music lyrics and television soaps and at how new, more empowering representations of women can be created using popular media.
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