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Begin New Search Topic Empowerment Publication Year within 25 Years

21. We Will Not Silence the Guns Without Women

Author:
Bineta Diop
Publication Date:
12-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Conflict Trends
Institution:
The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD)
Abstract:
This reality has been further exacerbated by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which threatens the progress made over the years towards gender equality. It has also shown, as in many previous crises, that women and girls continue to be disproportionately affected, hence stressing the need for a strong women, peace and security (WPS) agenda in response to societal threats. It is from this perspective that the Office of the Special Envoy (OSE) of the Chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission on Women, Peace and Security virtually convened the first Africa Forum on Women, Peace and Security, from 10 to 12 November 2020. The Forum brought together representatives of member states, women peacebuilders, youth peace ambassadors, women peacekeepers, women refugees, media and centres of excellence on WPS, with the aim to federate efforts to accelerate actions for peace. These actions are located in the broader agenda for peace and security in Africa and its clarion call to “silence the guns by 2020” – the guiding theme that represents the overarching aspirations of the AU’s Agenda 2063.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Peace, COVID-19, Equality, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Africa

22. Beijing+25: Accelerating Progress for Women and Girls

Author:
Peace and Security (GIWPS) Georgetown Institute for Women and Jeni Klugman
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS)
Abstract:
Beijing+25: Accelerating Progress for Women and Girls is a roadmap to advance global gender equality authored by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security (GIWPS), with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and in collaboration with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton. Marking the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing, China in 1995, the new report builds upon the original Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Since 1995, there have been some important gains for women and girls, including parity in education in many countries, far fewer deaths in childbirth, more women elected to parliament and leadership positions in government and business, and reduced discrimination under the law. Yet major inequalities have persisted, only to be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Part I of the report documents serious challenges such as the stagnation of women’s income and wages, discrimination depriving women of fair wages, and how women still carry the burden of unpaid work at home. Violence against women also remains a global scourge, and women remain largely excluded from decision-making in governments (from local to the highest levels), in peace negotiations, and in corporate leadership. With this as the backdrop, Part II provides a deeper dive into five key areas for progress including: (1) changing problematic gender norms; (2) enforcing and resourcing policies that promote equality; (3) countering growing backlash to gender equality; (4) fostering inclusive democracy and climate justice; and (5) harnessing technology as a means to promote women’s economic empowerment and protection from violence. Part III proposes a course of action to leverage multiple actors—from civil society and youth, male allies and traditional authorities, through to the business community and multilateral agencies. When taken together, they not only accelerate progress for women and girls, but also build a better world for all. The report was written by a GIWPS team led by Dr. Jeni Klugman, Managing Director of GIWPS.
Topic:
Civil Society, Science and Technology, United Nations, Women, Inequality, Income Inequality, Economy, Youth, COVID-19, Girls, Empowerment, and Gender
Political Geography:
Global Focus

23. Development of Local Governance and Decentralization to empower Citizens in Pakistan: A Historical Analysis

Author:
Zain Rafique, Yeni Rosilawati, and Shahid Habib
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Revista UNISCI/UNISCI Journal
Institution:
Unidad de investigación sobre seguridad y cooperación (UNISCI)
Abstract:
Contemporary development discourse confers a protuberant role to decentralization and local governance. To comply with this developmental demand, the Government of Pakistan introduced local governance and decentralization measures to use local governance system as a platform for localizing development and engaging local citizens. This article explores the historical level of the local governance system in Pakistan and the manifold problems that contributed to the absence of an adequate and capable local government system. Empowerment, accountability and transparency mechanisms in local governance systems are not functioning properly and hence the performance and results of the local governance system are very unsatisfactory.
Topic:
Government, Citizenship, Decentralization, Participation, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Pakistan and South Asia

24. Demographic Trends and Youth Empowerment in Africa

Author:
Janet Fleischman
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Abstract:
Many of the fastest growing populations are in the world’s poorest countries, putting them at a critical threshold: either they will accelerate economic growth and innovation by investing in their burgeoning youth population or the rapid population growth coupled with a shortage of opportunities for young people will undermine advances in health, development, and ultimately security. These demographic trends, most notable in sub-Saharan Africa, are often referred to as a “youth boom” or a “youth bulge.” Given the enormous implications of these demographic shifts, U.S. assistance should promote young people’s health and development, with particular emphasis on empowering young women. Investments in human capital and gender equality would yield enormous benefits in improving health, reducing poverty, and increasing economic and political stability. Given that these goals align so strongly with U.S. national interests, they benefit from strong bipartisan support. The U.S. government has an important role to play in helping countries address these demographic issues by expanding access to adolescent health, voluntary family planning, HIV services, educational opportunities for girls, and youth employment, and ensuring the meaningful engagement of young people in program design and implementation. This builds on a remarkable legacy of U.S. engagement in many areas that could help countries to empower young people and build critical life skills and resilience. This paper outlines a number of policy options that Congress could undertake to advance these goals, including: establishing a youth health and empowerment fund within USAID to incentivize USAID missions to develop a cross-sectoral package of services to address both the root causes of the demographic trends and the immediate needs of young people; holding hearings on the demographic trends and their potential impact (both positive and negative) on U.S. health, development, and security goals for the region, to determine if a new, multi-sector approach is needed; ensuring that the new U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) invests in women’s economic empowerment and health in developing countries; and requesting more in-depth analysis from the intelligence community examining how gender inequality and the demographic trends—including youthful age structure and rapid urbanization—in fragile states contribute to economic and political instability and pose threats to regional security.
Topic:
Demographics, Economic Growth, Innovation, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Africa

25. Towards Sustainability and Empowerment: Reforming America’s Syrian Refugee Policy

Author:
Sahar Aziz, Joanna Gardner, Tamara Anaie, and Omar Rana
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Rutgers University School of Law
Abstract:
The number of refugees and displaced people worldwide has reached unprecedented levels. Of the world’s 68.5 million refugees and displaced people, by far the largest number are Syrian. The nearly 13 million Syrian refugees and internally-displaced persons account for sixty percent of Syria’s pre-war population. While media coverage has focused on Syrian refugees seeking asylum in third countries, such as Europe and the United States, eighty percent of the seven million externally displaced Syrians have sought refuge in the countries neighboring Syria: Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon resulting in an enormous strain on government services and the local economies. As an influential player in Middle East politics, the United States has a national interest in sustaining the capacity of international systems to respond to protracted refugee crises. Toward Empowerment and Sustainability: Reforming America’s Syrian Refugee Policies examines Jordan as a case study for informing U.S. Syrian refugee policy. Jordan’s experience exemplifies the myriad challenges facing neighboring countries that warrant a rethinking of America’s approach to the Syrian refugee crisis. Four recommendations for government policy makers would contribute toward more sustainable and effective U.S. refugee policies: Increase U.S. aid to fund programs that empower refugees to be economically independent in their host countries rather than indefinitely dependent on international aid. Refugees unable to survive off of limited international and domestic subsidies are forced to take their sons out of school to work, borrow money from friends and family, and marry off their daughters at a young age. Use development aid to strengthen both state institutions and the private sector. A promising model is the Jordan Compact, an agreement between the Jordanian government and several European and international non-state actors launched in 2016. Fund humanitarian projects with need-based eligibility criteria not limited solely to Syrian refugees. Increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted into the United States. Less than 100 Syrian refugees were admitted in fiscal year 2018 as compared to 12,000 in 2017.
Topic:
Reform, Refugees, Asylum, Sustainability, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Middle East and Syria

26. Citizen Experiences and Challenges in Bringing Transparency and Accountability to Local Governments in Southern Mexico

Author:
Carlos García Jiménez
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
Despite Mexico’s constitutional provisions for transparency, accountability, and citizen oversight of government practice, in Guerrero—a southern state of Mexico which has historically fluctuated between periods of peace and violence—the entrenched elite continues to dominate. Nonetheless, grassroots citizens’ groups have been working against the current. With the accompaniment of the Universidad Campesina del Sur (The Peasants’ University of the South, or Unicam-Sur), a local organization that promotes alternative rural education and participatory research), they have been promoting and positioning these new concepts and practices of government. Citizen action for accountability continues, in spite of persistent practices of bad governance that include indifference towards citizen proposals and the use of the “fear factor” as a means of social intimidation. Modest citizen accomplishments—on issues of transparency in public works and the opening up of local municipal council meetings to citizen participation, for example—have opened cracks in the centralized and opaque structure of the entrenched elite. Over the last 15 years, these experiences of persistent voluntarism and self-taught citizen literacy, have led to the emergence of a pathway for citizen intervention in public affairs. We can describe the steps of this approach to citizen involvement as follows: 1. Recognizing a problem and building empowerment to tackle it. Citizen groups become involved in problems that affect them and that are related to government action, and commit to changing their situations. The exchange of views about what is and what should be—drives citizens to investigate the causes and consider possible solutions. 2. Exercising the right to know. Drawing on the public transparency laws and following the operating rules of government programs, citizens request and analyze official information, and then compare it to reality. In the process, they learn about the causes of the problems—and possible solutions. 3. Monitoring and social oversight over public affairs. In light of the information obtained, the group then organizes to monitor the government action. With their evidence and arguments in hand, citizens approach government officials to correct their actions and address the problem. This type of citizen action sometimes leads to clear information about the project, course corrections, or project completion. 4. Public policy advocacy. After evaluating the progress made, citizens conclude that to prevent the problem from recurring, flawed public policies or programs need to be changed, along with their decision-making and implementation processes. In order to engage the authorities in a dialogue among equals, communities must advance to a higher level of organization, knowledge, citizen education and training. These citizen intervention processes have resulted in modest outcomes and the construction of a basic level of citizenship. Nonetheless, they have not carried over into permanent forms of citizen involvement because of the prevalence of adverse governmental conditions and the lack of essential resources for keeping these initiatives alive. These experiences are highly localized and focused on specific situations. However, they can inform similar citizen-led processes elsewhere and inspire citizens to build sustainable initiatives that promote transparency and accountability in local governments. The historic victory of the anti-establishment coalition (led by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador) in Mexico’s 2018 election, signals the start of a more favorable context for these citizen initiatives.
Topic:
Government, Citizenship, Accountability, Transparency, Oversight, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
North America and Mexico

27. Pitfalls of Aiming to Empower the Bottom from the Top: The Case of Philippine Participatory Budgeting

Author:
Joy Aceron
Publication Date:
04-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
This paper explains why and how a reform program that opened up spaces for participatory budgeting was ultimately unable to result in pro-citizen power shifts that transformed governance. The study reviews the design and implementation of Bottom-Up Budgeting (BuB), the nationwide participatory budgeting (PB) program in the Philippines, which ran from 2012 to 2016 under the Benigno Aquino government. The findings underscore the importance of institutional design to participatory governance reforms. BuB’s goal was to transform local government by providing more space for civil society organizations (CSOs) to co-identify projects with the government and to take part in the budgeting process, but it did not strengthen CSO or grassroots capacity to hold their Local Government Units (LGUs) accountable. The BuB design had features that delivered positive gains towards citizen empowerment, including: (1) providing equal seats for CSOs in the Local Poverty Reduction Action Team (LPRAT), which are formally mandated to select proposed projects (in contrast to the pre-existing Local Development Councils (LDCs), which have only 25 percent CSO representation); (2) CSOs identified their LPRAT representatives themselves (as opposed to local chief executives choosing CSO representatives, as in the LDCs); and (3) LGUs were mandated to follow participatory requirements to receive additional funding. However, several aspects of the institutional design shifted power from local governments to the central government. This had a “centralizing effect”– namely: (1) there was a decision to bypass local government’s LDCs and create a new structure that was dependent on the central government; (2) the approval of each proposed project was subject to a tedious bureaucratic process and requirements by the national government which inadvertently created numerous veto players; (3) CSOs were limited to a pre-set menu of options of projects determined by national government agencies; (4) coordination was transferred from the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) to the Department of the interior and Local Government (DILG), and (5) the design failed to support a strong civil society component with a monitoring system that was well-coordinated, well-integrated, and had effective CSO oversight. This study argues that because of these design problems, BuB fell short in achieving its main political reform agenda of empowering the grassroots—particularly in enabling downward accountability that could have enabled lasting pro-citizen power shifts. It did not empower local civil society and citizens to become a countervailing force vis-à-vis local politicians in fiscal governance. BuB is a case of a reform that provided a procedural mechanism for civil society input into national agency decisions but was unable to improve government responsiveness. It provided civil society with ‘voice’, but was constrained in enabling ‘teeth’. Jonathan Fox (2014) refers to “voice” as citizen inputs, feedback and action, while “teeth” refer to the capacity of the state to respond to voice. Finally, the paper echoes the results of other studies which find that PB programs become successful when complemented by other institutional and state democratic capacity-building reforms and when they are part of a broader progressive change agenda. The BuB experience suggests that to bolster citizen oversight, it is essential to invest sufficient support and resources in citizen empowerment and in creating an enabling environment for citizen oversight.
Topic:
Reform, Budget, Accountability, Participation, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Philippines and Asia-Pacific

28. Women’s Work Amid Fragility and Conflict: Key Patterns + Constraints

Author:
Yvonne Quek
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS)
Abstract:
Investing in women’s economic empowerment is at the forefront of the global agenda, as recognized by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations secretary-general’s High-Level Panel (HLP) on Women’s Economic Empowerment, and more recently the G7 summit in Canada. The importance of women’s economic empowerment is increasingly accepted, but inclusive progress can only be made if attention is paid to empowering women in the most fragile and conflict-affected settings. Globally, about 264 million women live in the 36 countries classified as fragile and conflict affected (FCA) by the World Bank Group’s annual “Harmonized list of fragile situations.” These women face cross-cutting challenges of poverty, gender-based violence, and discriminatory norms. Evidence shows that they are more likely than men to experience displacement or have their education interrupted, and that they have less access than men to employment and income opportunities. Our analysis, while limited by data constraints, suggests that women’s economic opportunities in FCA settings are restricted on multiple fronts, with worse outcomes in countries in protracted conflict.
Topic:
Economics, Women, Conflict, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Global Focus

29. Advancing Women’s Work Amid Fragility and Conflict: What Works

Author:
Yvonne Quek
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS)
Abstract:
It is widely recognized that advancing women’s economic empowerment is central to gender equality, economic growth, and the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Multilateral institutions, nonprofit organizations, development finance institutions, and governments have engaged in a range of programs to promote women’s economic empowerment. Existing types of interventions that address women’s economic empowerment include increasing girls’ financial inclusion and access to education, enhancing their livelihoods through skills-based training, and reforming discriminatory laws for women to gain access to land, employment, inheritance, and property. This study builds on a companion paper that sets out what we know about the current status and patterns of women’s economic opportunities in fragile and conflict-affected countries (FCA). It aims to provide insights into which interventions have worked or hold promise in increasing women’s economic opportunities. Based on a number of systematic reviews examining the effectiveness of interventions in low- and middle-income countries, we find that technical and vocational training—paired with some kind of internships, life-skills training, or cash transfers—can be effective in increasing women’s employability and income. However, the implementation of such programs can be costly, and measures of effectiveness are mixed.
Topic:
Women, Economy, Conflict, Empowerment, and Fragility
Political Geography:
Global Focus

30. Infrastructure and Equipment for Unpaid Care Work: Household Survey Findings from the Philippines, Uganda and Zimbabwe

Author:
Sandrine A. Koissy-Kpein and Lucia Rost
Publication Date:
04-2018
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
Care work is essential for personal wellbeing, a healthy society and a functioning economy. But across the world, it is overwhelmingly done by women, which restricts their opportunities. Policy makers rarely recognize the public responsibility for facilitating unpaid care and domestic work through investments in infrastructure and care services. In 2017, Oxfam’s Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) initiative conducted a Household Care Survey (HCS), collecting data in the Philippines, Uganda and Zimbabwe, to inform the design of public policies and local development programmes. The study tests which infrastructure, equipment and other factors influence care-work patterns. It finds that access to improved water sources is associated with reduced hours of care work, and household equipment facilitates men’s participation in care. It also finds that heavy workloads related to long hours of unpaid care can impact women’s health and well-being. Perceptions of care work, community expectations and fear of sanctions for deviating from social norms play an essential part in maintaining the gendered division of care work. The report presents recommendations for government and private sector decision-makers, development practitioners and researchers in the area of women’s economic empowerment on how they can contribute to facilitate the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care work.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Gender Based Violence, Local, Norms, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Uganda, Africa, Philippines, Zimbabwe, and Asia-Pacific