In charting Bangladesh’s remarkable progress on a range of social indicators since the 1970s, Naila Kabeer explores the critical role played by women’s agency. How were women able to challenge existing gender norms in the context of the “lived” Islam of their culture? What are the lessons of this episode  – and what nuances are offered vis-à-vis the more “universal” path to progress and emancipation generally assumed by Western feminists?

Millions of women across the globe farm and look after land – yet are excluded from owning it, hurting their incomes, depriving them of wealth and undermining their other basic rights. Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija on a wide-ranging issue of the Oxfam-edited Gender and Development journal that not only examines structural obstacles to women owning land but also looks at broader themes, including the way deprivation of land rights adds to women’s care workload – and, crucially, how securing women’s land and water rights will be essential for global food security and climate resilience.

The lack of consistent attention to gender was concerning, as was the failure to tackle the Global South debt crisis – and the blinkered expansion of private finance, despite evidence of its harms. But, says Rachel Noble, as the world turns to implementation of the Financing for Development commitments, there are valuable opportunities to seize and build on, including for the women

What does it mean for international NGOs to truly shift power? At Oxfam, we think our fund for grassroots women’s rights organisations, which is founded on the principle that our partners should decide what to spend money on, holds some of the answers. Oxfam GB CEO Dr Halima Begum writes here about a project that last week won two 2025 Charity Awards. 

The UK government needs to listen to Iceland’s progressive prime minister when she says robust welfare policies are the antidote to far-right extremism. And what’s more, investing in social infrastructure – in care, in health, in schools – is essential to driving the growth the government wants, says Amy Brooker of the Women’s Budget Group.

Amid a worldwide backlash against women’s rights, and after its own aid cuts that further threaten those rights, it has never been more urgent for the UK government to speak up loudly for global gender equality, says the Gender and Development Network.

Anam Parvez Butt is a Gender Justice Research Lead in the research team at Oxfam GB. Gopika Bashi is the Asia Campaigner for the Enough Campaign at Oxfam International. As researchers and campaigners in development organisations we constantly grapple with the question of how to design research that is useful to influencing change. At Oxfam, we’ve been thinking a lot

Irène Bahati is a teaching assistant at the Department of Commercial Sciences at ISP/Bukavu and researcher at the Research Group for Violent Conflict and Human Secutity GEC-SH. This piece is part of the new “Bukavu Series” blog posts by the GIC Network.  Research is often seen as a man’s job, and in a patriarchal society it can be socially difficult for a woman

Rajashree Ghosh is a Resident Scholar at WSRC, Brandeis University, USA. Combining experiential and desk research, she explores the broader connections between women’s struggles and urban living in India.  Within the realm of social development, I have fervently used a gender lens to understand the “smart city” as an urban policy mechanism. Why? Because the city as a living space

March is women’s history month and Fabiola Esposito shares her reflections on the aid sector’s slow progress on women’s empowerment. Last week I went to a networking event for women working in international development about ‘women’s empowerment’ (WE) in Syria. During the Q&A one of the attendees asked an astonishing, but revealing, question: “Why do you think donors are now

Guest post by Emily Brown of Oxfam GB), and Rebecca Haines and Tam O’Neil of CARE International UK. For many development professionals, political economy has become the gold standard of foundational analysis for programming. It helps us to understand how power and resources are distributed in a society or sector and is important for ensuring our programmes and campaigns avoid cookie-cutter

This guest post is by Bushra Rehman, a Research Officer with the Humanitarian Academy for Development, which is the research and training arm of Islamic Relief Worldwide. The post is based on her prize-winning Masters dissertation. It is mid-afternoon in Jordan and the weather is stiflingly hot. I arrive at a derelict building in Irbid, a city located 20 km