This article examines the relationship between women's economic and social empowerment in the context of extreme poverty. It is based on the findings of primary fieldwork on the char islands of north-west Bangladesh, investigating the processes resulting from the implementation of the Chars...

The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, was critical in making gender equality a development goal and adopted gender-mainstreaming as its primary mechanism to achieve this. Effective implementation of gender-mainstreaming involves changing both the internal organization...

This paper investigates how a development intervention which targets extremely poor households with investment capital influences relationships between those households and the landowning elite. It places this investigation in the context of the agricultural reformation of rural Bangladesh,...

Aid is not generally aimed at the poorest people, though most multilateral or bilateral agencies would like to think they get included. However, donors' strategies are generally blind to differentiation among the poor, and have not improved in this respect. The special provisions for the least...

Across the world, people in urban rather than rural areas are more likely to support gender equality. To explain this global trend, this paper engages with geographically diverse literature and comparative rural-urban ethnographic research from Zambia. It argues that people living in...