The Jaded Gender and Development Paradigm of Egypt

The people's solidarity in search for rights, dignity and justice in the days of the uprising against Mubarak's regime challenged the assumptions guiding the gender and development paradigm. Women who participated in their thousands trod very different paths from those engineered by gender and development policy advocates, about how to support women to engage politically. It highlighted more than ever, the limitations of previous approaches that supported an apolitical gender and development agenda in an authoritarian regime. This article argues that in post?revolutionary Egypt, gendered work is no longer the exclusive realm of development and is expressing itself differently, through political party activism and religious philanthropy charity. The extent to which a gender equality agenda will develop forcefully will depend on the nature of the state system, the extent to which there will be avenues for political engagement outside development, and the extent to which philanthropic organisations will assume centre stage in engaging with women's needs as religious subjects

How can Social Protection Provide Social Justice for Women?

Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enable people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. The question for Pathways of Women's Empowerment researchers was: how can social protection provide social justice for women? The answer to this question, Pathways researchers found, lay in taking a feminist approach to social protection. A feminist social protection programme recognises and enhances women's identity as citizens and enables women to assume the roles they choose and fulfil the obligations they value. It is an approach that defines, targets and alleviates poverty in accordance with the views, priorities and experiences of the women beneficiaries of social protection programmes. The objective of this type of programme is not simply to guarantee social protection as a short-term measure. A longer-term objective combines social protection with measures that seek to redress gender imbalances by restoring the accountability of the state to poor women and their families. Research into how women use conditional cash transfers in Egypt and experiences from Brazil demonstrate the effectiveness of a feminist approach to social protection in meeting women's needs. This brief shares somes of the lessons from this work.UKaid from the Department for International Development with co-funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affair

Family Planning to Reproduction Health, Women to Gender: Small Steps in a Circle

The second of two issues, this volume covers aspects of Egyptian society. Contributors include: Donald Cole, Soraya Altorki, Asef Bayat, Eric Denis, Enid Hill, Ziad Bahaeddin, Malak Rouchdy, Linda Herrera, Jim Napoli, Hussein Amin, Mahmoud al-Lozy, Cynthia Nelson, and Shahnaz Rouse.https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1994/thumbnail.jp

Creating Conservatism or Emancipating Subjects? On the Narrative of Islamic Observance in Egypt

Women activists, politicians and policymakers including international development experts are seeking to harness the power of the divine. The rationale is simple: if people are driven by faith, then let us use faith to drive them towards social and political change. This article problematises the instrumentalisation of religion, arguing that there are many risks in pursuing this route as a way of addressing gendered injustices. It also calls for a different approach to disentangling women's engagement with religion as politics, as morality and as personal piety, using women's hair as a case in point. This is set against the discussion of the proliferations of religiosity that are shaping the subjectivities of men and women and changing the Egyptian polity

No Path to Power: Civil Society, State Services, and the Poverty of City Women

In focusing on Ain el-Sira, a low-income neighbourhood of Cairo, this article challenges development theorists’ ideas that civil society as a development partner is best able to promote women’s empowerment, community development and justice. This article contests that development can avoid the machinations of the state or ignore the power imbalances that litter the relationships between state, civil society, citizens and donors! In Egypt, where the state relegates its development duties to civil society, women in Ain el-Sira experience service initiatives which are duplicated, microcredit loans they often cannot afford to repay, and benefit criteria which are strict and limiting. Programmes remain unchanged for years and long-term plans to relieve the burdens of disempowerment and destitution are non-existent. To achieve real gendered justice which provides women with the assets and capabilities to make choices requires citizenship rights. This can only be gained by engaging critically with state and civil society dynamics and challenging the structures that obstruct empowerment

Children's health and well-being: an ethnography of an upper Egyptian village

This thesis is about children's health and well-being as constructed and maintained by villagers in Upper Egypt. It is based on primary data collected during eighteen months of fieldwork in a small village in the district of Abnube in the east of Assiut Governorate in the south of Egypt. The thesis also relies on secondary statistical and qualitative sources. This work makes three propositions concerning children's health. The first proposition is that children's heal th is a distinct part of the traditional medical cultures of Egypt and one that should be integral to the analysis of medical culture, pluralism, and services. More over, the focus on child health and ill-health provides a critical commentary to on-going debates about health and healing in Egypt. The second proposition is that the study of child health and ill-health is an essential and missing component of the ethnography of rural Egyptians. An awareness of the relevance of children, and of the efforts of families to keep them healthy, to the cultural, social, political, and economic construction of family and village can significantly add to anthropological understanding of the Egyptian peasant and village. The third proposition is that the study of health as a socially and historically constructed category is as important, if not more so, than the study of ill-health. This work looks at processes whereby health is conceptualized and their relevance to the ensuing constructions of ill-health. The work also tries to establish the relationship between village discourses on health and the discourse dominant in the language, services, and structures of modern biomedicine in Egypt. In this thesis, health is viewed as an arena where cultural, historical, social, as well as economic relationships and structures come to shape family practices and choices

Addressing the double burden of malnutrition in Egypt: do conditional cash transfers have a role?

Many developing countries are undergoing rapid socio-economic changes that impact on health and its social distribution. These changes can occur so rapidly that there is a resulting co-existence of diseases of affluence and diseases of poverty. Priority setting for nutritional programs has focused on the alleviation of undernutrition in low income settings. However, evidence shows that in many Low-and-Middle Income Countries the prevalence of obesity among women is increasing and can coexist with childhood stunting. This dual burden of poor nutrition contributes to worsening health inequity between the poor and the rich. Global and national policy makers are looking for novel programs to replace social protection mechanisms deemed inefficient. Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have emerged as an increasingly popular poverty alleviation strategy with some positive results. However, there is evidence they may have a negative impact if the complexity of transition settings is not taken into account. In this paper, we review the nutritional situation in Egypt and compare two CCT programs (Mexico and Colombia) in an attempt to identify features that would address both child undernutrition and adult overnutrition. We conclude with suggestions for design of an Egyptian CCT program that would help maximise benefit to its beneficiaries

No Path to Power: Civil Society, State Services, and the Poverty of City Women

In focusing on Ain el?Sira, a low?income neighbourhood of Cairo, this article challenges development theorists' ideas that civil society as a development partner is best able to promote women's empowerment, community development and justice. This article contests that development can avoid the machinations of the state or ignore the power imbalances that litter the relationships between state, civil society, citizens and donors! In Egypt, where the state relegates its development duties to civil society, women in Ain el?Sira experience service initiatives which are duplicated, microcredit loans they often cannot afford to repay, and benefit criteria which are strict and limiting. Programmes remain unchanged for years and long?term plans to relieve the burdens of disempowerment and destitution are non?existent. To achieve real gendered justice which provides women with the assets and capabilities to make choices requires citizenship rights. This can only be gained by engaging critically with state and civil society dynamics and challenging the structures that obstruct empowerment

On Mainstreaming Social Thinking in Macroeconomic Policies

This paper questions the degree to which social thinking is guiding social policy in Egypt. The apparent fluctuations in social spending coupled with the lack of clear purpose and benchmarks for social programs attest to a conceptual and political compromise whereby the social is at the mercy of non-social considerations. The evidence that supports our main contention is derived from an analysis that poses and answers two seminal questions: first, to what extent social policies are mainstreamed in the design of macroeconomic policies and integrated in economic and development cycles; second, to what extent the Ministry of Finance can sustain its social spending without adding further pressure on its budget. Our main findings show that social protection is still an afterthought added to macroeconomic policies. Second, with a limited fiscal space, Egypt has to work on the revenue side of the budget to generate additional room for more-comprehensive social spending (whether explicit, such as social protection programs, or implicit, such as education and health spending). Moreover, a bottom-up approach that involves different stakeholders and is based on comprehensive datasets will lead to more socially-desirable outcomes. The findings and observations made in this paper serve to guide a post-COVID-19 policy world, as social protection and spending are essential for a post-COVID social recovery, especially as the society and country come face to face with the consequences of limited social support amidst crises

Why is Anthropology so hard in Egypt?

The political difficulties of writing anthropology and ethnography in Egypt persist despite the newly found fame of certain anthropological methods. These difficulties are about readership and about the consumption - not just the production - of texts. Missing from the 'universal' anxiety over power and representation, often referred to as post-modernism (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rabinow 1991; Said 1991, 1989), are considerations of the anthropologist in her/his national setting when this is a non-Western one. Also missing is the problematization of audience and readership for the non-Western national working at home. The consequences of such collegiate exclusion can be explored by examining the structures and considerations marking the borders of anthropological research written by locals working locally