Religion and spirituality are central to women's and men's lives across the world, yet mainstream development policy and practice rarely takes account of this. This collection of articles explores the complex links between social and economic development and religious and spiritual belief and assesses the cost to development of ignoring these links. Writers of many faiths, and of none, explore the scope for promoting women's rights and needs offered by religious belief and practice, and analyze feminist responses to fundamentalist regimes which use religious doctrine to justify women's...

Young girls are kept at home to care for dependants and miss out on education, while others face sexual exploitation. Elderly women's health needs are ignored when their reproductive years end, and many face the economic and social marginalization which accompanies widowhood.
This collection from development practitioners and feminist activists considers how age interacts with gender identity to create particular forms of economic and social marginalization, as well as different kinds of opportunity, for women and men in different contexts throughout the world.
Contributors include...

This collection of articles addresses the issue of health from a gender perspective. Health is not only a matter of science and biology, but also social and gender issue. While a biological advantage means female life expectancy should be longer than men's, in many contexts around the world women's rates of sickness and premature death outstrip those of men.

Issues covered include women's comparative lack of access to medical care throughout the life-cycle; mental health; why infectious diseases are a gender issue; the role of older women in health promotion; gender-sensitive...

This book explores areas of human experience that are highly complex and which evoke powerful and contradictory feelings among those attempting to understand them. The institution of slavery has a long and terrible history, and many view it as a purely historical phenomenon. Yet slavery remains widespread today, taking many forms, often clandestine. One aspect of modern slavery that elicits particular revulsion is the trafficking of women and young girls and boys into the sex industry, and this is the focus of many of the authors in this book.

-Gender, Trafficking, and Slavery -...

In the face of extreme weather events, desertification, and a rise in sea levels, governments and communities around the world increasingly recognize that the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change is urgent. The global agenda and negotiations focus on what governments, corporations, and institutions can do in the search for large-scale technological solutions. Yet women, men, and local communities all have roles, responsibilities, and interests that hold the potential either to harm or to benefit their environment.

This book considers the gendered dimensions of climate...

This collection of articles explores how marriage is linked to gender inequalities, women's human rights, and development policy. It examines the economic, social, cultural, and health impacts of women's marital status and the implications for development initiatives.

A range of issues are covered including:
* early marriage in Eastern Nigeria and the health consequences for young mothers
* marriage and male-female relations among poor urban African-Americans
* trends and effects of early marriage in the South
* negotiating violence and non-violence in...

Women all over the world are increasingly joining the bottom rungs of the global supply chain. Whether by picking fruit in Chile, processing cashews in Mozambique, sewing in China's export Processing Zones, or providing biotech companies with indigenous knowledge in India, women's labor and skill is a crucial element of the scaling-up of globalized production processes. It can be argued that increased opportunities to join the cash economy are a positive development for women, whose additional income has the potential to increase both their status and the well-being of the family. But what...

Women are active players in reconciliation and post-conflict reconstruction processes. Moreover, sustainable peace depends on equal representation of all citizens in peacetime decisionmaking.

This collection of articles explores conflict prevention through development projects in places where resources are scarce, and age-old agreements between groups come under strain. Other activities take place to arrest existing conflicts, by forming alliances across warring forces - the authors argue that women play a significant but underestimated role in this type of work. Most of their...

The progress of the world's governments towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be reviewed in 2005. This timely collection of articles provides feminist perspectives on the MDGs and critically evaluates their potential impact on gender equality and women's empowerment. Authors differ in the degree of engagement with the MDGs they advocate, but many point to the urgent need to explore the linkages between the Goals and other international women's rights instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and...

This collection of articles critically assesses the degree to which gender inequality has been addressed in the work of development organizations. Contributors scrutinize the efforts of governments and NGOs, at the national and international levels, in order to assess the difference that gender mainstreaming has made to advancing women's interests in development. In addition, they consider the progress that development organizations have made in ensuring women's fullest participation at all levels of their own organizations.

Contributions to this volume include case studies from...