WOMEN, FAITH AND DEVELOPMENT
Women play vital roles in religious institutions and in all facets of international development work. A continuing area of Berkley Center dialogue, research, and exploratory action is to understand how gender, religion, and development are linked. The topic is woven through work across all development topics but is the subject of specific investigation through the Luce/SFS Program on Religion and International Affairs.
A centerpiece of this work is the report: Challenges of Change: Faith, Gender, and Development, published in May 2008. The report explores the nexus among three quite distinct topics: how development institutions approach women and gender; gender issues within religious traditions; and the relationships between issues and actors for. Each of these three topics is the subject of a large literature, a plethora of institutions, and often sharp debates. However, the areas where they come together are surprisingly barren of both scholarship and policy discourse.
The report highlights especially relevant literature, research, and experience. It also sketches the landscape of institutions involved and presents a representative sample of issues under discussion, particularly those with a policy dimension. It also presents voices of a range of leaders in the field. It is a "work in progress," and covers only fractions of available knowledge about the overlapping topics, intellectually, and more significantly, of the work of preachers, scholars, and activists in the field.
Perspectives on both gender and on development issues among the vast array of institutions inspired by faith are as diverse as can be imagined. They run the gamut from the ultra conservative, seeking preservation of or return to ancient traditions and teachings about life and gender relations, to radically new visions of what society and relationships could and should become. Within the institutions working in the field of international development, there is, in contrast, something that approaches a broad consensus about the central importance of women in development work and modernization, linked in good measure to contemporary understandings of human rights. This understanding is country specific, and grounded in international law, research on development experience, and lessons emerging from practice. Equality between women and men is widely seen today as central to meeting the goals of development work through social change. But this consensus is less robust than it appears on the surface. The common language of gender equality can sometimes obscure important contested areas around international development. The issues at stake deserve a sharper look, including through the lens of women, faith, and development, because they pose fundamental questions about the shape of future societies and what constitutes equity in the contemporary world.
The Report serves as a background document for the Women, Faith and Development Alliance’s Summit Breakthrough: The Women, Faith, and Development Summit to End Global Poverty at the Washington National Cathedral on April 13-14, 2008. The “Breakthrough” Summit focuses on the issue of global poverty, and its theme is “Women, Faith and Development”.
A seminar on Religion, Women, and Development discussed the draft report on April 10, 2008 at the Berkley Center.
Source: http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/topics/development/50055.html
P.S. As in Georgetown University, the Ivy Leauge, Jesuit Institution of Higher Learning in Washington, D.C.