The Millennium Development Goals were adopted by the world’s leaders at the start of the new millennium and represented a commitment on the part of the international community to halve world poverty by 2015. That deadline is now approaching and the international community is now taking stock of what has been achieved and also looking ahead to what will replace the MDGs.
This presentation will assess the MDGS from a feminist perspective. It will track some of the different ways in which feminist scholars and activists have engaged in the global processes leading to the adoption of the MDGs and following on from it. It will examine how gender equality has featured within the MDGs and the politics which gave rise to these particular interpretations. And it will explore the extent to which feminist priorities are finding their way into emerging post-MDG agenda.
About the speaker
Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to that, she was Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University and Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex where she worked for many years.
She has also worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the Department for International Development, UK between 2009-2010. She was the Kerstin Hesselgren Professor at the University of Goteberg, Sweden in 2004-2005 and Senior Sabaticant with IDRC Regional Office in South Asia in 2005-2006. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection and citizenship and much of her research is focused on South and South East Asia.
Her publications include Reversed realities: gender hierarchies in development thought, The power to choose: Bangladeshi women and labour supply decision-making in London and Dhaka and, more recently, Gender and social protection in the informal economy and Can the MDGs provide a pathway to social justice? The challenge of intersecting inequalities.
She has carried out extensive training and advisory work with national and international NGOs (including Oxfam, ActionAid, Women for Women International, BRAC, PRADAN and Nijera Kori) as well as for a number of international development agencies (including the UNDP, UNICEF, World Bank, SIDA, NORAD and UN Women). She is currently on advisory editorial committee for the journals Feminist Economics, Development and Change, Gender and Development and on the board of the Feminist Review Trust.
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