Naila Kabeer

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of International Development/Gender Institute

This article provides a contextual framework for understanding the gendered dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic and its health, social, and economic outcomes. The pandemic has generated massive losses in lives, impacted people’s health, disrupted markets and livelihoods, and created profound reverberations in the home. In 112 countries that reporte...

The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars on the grounds that their pioneering use of randomized control trials (RCTs) was innovative methodologically and contributed to development policy and the emergence of a new development economics. Using a critical feminist lens, this article challenges that conclusion by interrogating...

This paper argues that the theoretical model of causal inference underpinning RCTs is frequently undermined by the failure of different actors involved in their implementation to behave in ways required by the model. This is not a problem unique to RCTs, but it poses a greater challenge to them because it undercuts their claims to methodological su...

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Build...

This Introduction synthesizes the key themes of this special cluster of articles and explores the implications of the three contributions on garment supply chains after the Rana Plaza disaster. The three articles examine the perspectives of key stakeholders in garment value chains — global buyers, managers of garment factories in Bangladesh, and wo...

Garment Supply Chain Governance Project Final Report

This chapter provides a brief history of three or more decades of national and international efforts to improve labor standards for the workers in the garment industry. It concludes by looking forward to what could be done in the future. The author draws on her own research in this field to structure the wider literature on this topic. This chapter...

Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In particular, we try to disentangle the intertwined strands of choice, constraints posed by domestic work and care responsibilities, and the predominant understanding of...

This paper sets out to synthesize key lessons from studies using alternative methodologies to impact assessment. Drawing on Sen’s capability approach as a conceptual framework, it analyses two pairs of impact assessments which were carried out in West Bengal and Sindh around the same time and within close proximity to each other. Each pair consiste...

This interim report summarizes leading garment brands and retailers’ response to the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 comprising individual firm actions and collective initiatives, as well as key changes experienced by Bangladeshi workers and Bangladeshi factory managers in the years following the Rana Plaza disaster. We present findings based on origin...

This article analyses the evolving politics of claims making in relation to women workers in the global South. It asks what claims are being made and by whom, who these claims are addressed to and what strategies are being employed to press these claims. It distinguishes between women working for global markets and those working for domestic market...

Social progress needs to be considered from a grounded historical perspective and through a global rather than Eurocentric optic. We are now probably at the peak of human possibilities in terms of social progress but also facing a possible abyss if negative trends are not countered by society. Whether it is global inequality, uncontrolled climate c...

This paper sets out to explore a seeming puzzle in the context of Bangladesh. There is a considerable body of evidence from the country pointing to the positive impact of paid work on women’s position within family and community. Yet, according to official statistics, not only has women’s labour force participation risen very slowly over the years,...

The debate about the empowerment potential of women’s access to labour market opportunities is a long-standing one but it has taken on fresh lease of life with the increased feminization of paid work in the context of economic liberalization. Contradictory viewpoints reflect differences in how empowerment itself is understood as well as variations...

Social progress needs to be considered from a grounded historical perspective and through a global rather than Eurocentric optic. We are now probably at the peak of human possibilities in terms of social progress but also facing a possible abyss if negative trends are not countered by society. Whether it is global inequality, uncontrolled climate c...

This paper sets out to explore economic pathways to women’s empowerment and active citizenship in Bangladesh, a country where the denial of economic resources to women, and their resulting status as lifelong dependents on men, has long been seen as foundational to their subordinate status. While empowerment entails change in the lives of individual...

This article examines how scholarship in feminist economics has developed and used evolving definitions of voice and agency, analyzing their expressions in the key domains of households, markets, and the public sphere. It builds on a rich body of work that explores the voice and agency of women and girls using bargaining theory, as well as behavior...

Macroeconometric studies generally find fairly robust evidence that gender equality has a positive impact on economic growth, but reverse findings relating to the impact of economic growth on gender equality are far less consistent. The high level of aggregation at which these studies are carried out makes it difficult to ascertain the causal pathw...

The results of a systematic review of evidence on the effects of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes on household economic outcomes are presented. Out of 1076 original articles found through electronic and handsearches, 46 randomised and quasi-experimental impact evaluations were eligible for the review. The authors used statistical meta-ana...

This paper argues that while social policy as an explicit aspect of policy discourse has relatively recent origins within the international development agenda, concerns with “the social” have featured from its very early days seeking to challenge the conflation between growth and development. The paper focuses on key international conferences and p...

This paper provides a brief history of feminist contributions to the analysis of gender, poverty, and inequality in the field of international development. It draws out the continuous threads running through these contributions over the years, as the focus has moved from micro-level analysis to a concern with macro-level forces. It concludes with a...

This article tracks the gender politics of the processes that led to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and that continued to feature in subsequent policy debates. It suggests that this politics is rooted in tensions between conceptualisations of rights and capabilities that characterised the preceding decade. While feminist organisat...

The long-standing divide between universal and residual approaches in the field of social policy is also evident in the emerging agenda around social protection. Underpinning this divide are contrasting worldviews. Arguments in favour of residual approaches are frequently couched in a market-centred discourse that stresses efficiency, incentives an...

The vast majority of the world's working women, particularly those from low-income households in developing countries, are located in the informal economy in activities that are casual, poorly paid, irregular and outside the remit of formal social security and protective legislation. This book examines the constraints and barriers which continue to...

While Bangladesh has a large and active development non-governmental organization sector, it has undergone a steady process of homogenization, turning from its early focus on social mobilization to a market-oriented service provision model, dominated by microfinance. This article explores the impacts associated with Nijera Kori, one of the few orga...

The people most likely to be left behind by development are those facing 'intersecting inequalities', or economic deficits intersecting with discrimination and exclusion on the grounds of identity and locational disadvantage. • The experience of seven countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, India, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Nepal) shows that key ingredien...

South Asia is a region characterized by a culture of son preference, severe discrimination against daughters, and excess levels of female mortality, leading to what Amartya Sen called the phenomenon of “missing women.” However, the onset of fertility decline across the region has been accompanied by considerable divergence in this phenomenon. In In...

This article focuses on the challenges facing organisation among the hardest-to-reach working women in the informal economy. What gives some of them the impetus and courage to organise? What is distinctive about the strategies they draw on to transcend their structurally disadvantated position within the economy? What barriers do they continue to f...

To what extent does gender equality contribute to economic growth? And to what extent does the reverse relationship hold true? There are a growing number of studies exploring these relationships, generally using cross-country regression analysis. They are characterised by varying degrees of methodological rigour to take account of the problems asso...

Recent research in Bangladesh highlights an interesting paradox: impressive development outcomes combined with extremely poor quality of governance. The country’s active development NGO sector has been credited with some of the more positive development achievements. The question that this paper sets out to address is why the sector has not made an...

Struggles for gender justice by women's movements have sought to give legal recognition to gender equality at both national and international levels. However, such society-wide goals may have little resonance in the lives of individual men and women in contexts where a culture of individual rights is weak or missing and the stress is on the moral e...

"That 93% of India’s workforce today comes from the unorganised sector, fuelling over 63% of our nation’s GDP growth in an age of economic transformation is well known. Social protection is no longer a question of providing tide-over subsidy or shock relief as much as it is facilitating adequacy that is at the very core of achieving sustainability...

IDS gave little attention to issues of women and gender when it was founded. But in the 1970s, a programme of research and activist involvement was started, initially led by Kate Young, with the challenging title of The Subordination of Women. Gradually gender became an ever more important part of IDS work, covering research and teaching, and estab...

Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they...

This article takes gender inequalities in the distribution of power as its point of departure. Given the widespread evidence of the extent to which women, particularly poor women, have been marginalised in processes by which development policies are designed and implemented, it suggests that explicit attention needs to be given to strengthening wom...

The contributions to this IDS Bulletin report on some of the findings from research undertaken under the Social Protection in Asia programme. This is a three-year policy-oriented research and network building programme, funded by the Ford Foundation and IDRC, with project partners in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The re...

Recent research Bangladesh has come to embody an interesting paradox. On the one hand, it has experienced rising rates of growth, a slow but steady decline in poverty and impressive progress in terms of social development, outperforming some of its richer neighbours on a number of Millennium Development Goals. On the other hand, it has an abysmal r...

This article examines the significance of social relationships in women's lives and their relevance to processes of women's empowerment. In Bangladesh, traditional structures limit women's social interaction to their immediate family and maintain male responsibility over them. However, here we look at the example of Saptagram – a social mobilisatio...

In recent years a group of researchers at Cambridge (UK) have (re)introduced conceptions of open and closed systems into economics. In doing so they have employed these categories in ways that, in my assessment, both facilitate a significant critique of current disciplinary practices and also point to more fruitful ways of proceeding. In an issue o...

The complex nature of the challenge posed by state–society relations to the realisation of citizenship rights in the poorer countries of the world reflects the incapacity or unwillingness on the part of the state to guarantee basic security of life and livelihoods to its citizens and its proneness to capture by powerful elites that perpetuate this...

As part of a general trend toward a reduced role for the state, international donors have increasingly encouraged development NGOs to take up a service delivery function. In Bangladesh, this has induced NGOs to shift their core activities away from social mobilisation to a focus on providing microfinance services, although many organisations also p...

Summary Despite their apparent gender-neutrality, most discussions of poverty have been premised on the concept of a male actor and of male-centred notions of well-being and agency. The assumption underpinning income/consumption and well-being measures is that shortfalls in income/consumption translate into shortfalls in choice, and are manifested...

Early attempts to assess the social impacts associated with microfinance have focused on changes at the level of individual loanees and their households. This article considers the wider social impacts associated with microfinance. These relate to changes in norms, relationships and activities beyond the domain of the household. The article provide...

This article explores the simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion as they have occurred in different places and at different times in order to understand better the vision of society, the material interests and the notions of identity which have helped to delineate different understandings of the concept. This article aims to contribute t...

The contributions to this IDS Bulletin are clustered into three thematic concerns: the rise of precarious work, the challenge for social protection and the capacity of macroeconomic policy to generate more and better jobs. This introduction draws out some of these intersecting strands. It argues for the better models of the labour market which can...

Failure to invest in children's education is widely recognised as a key mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of poverty. At the same time, rising levels of education among different socioeconomic groups in countries like Bangladesh suggest that poverty on its own is not an adequate explanation for this failure. This article uses survey...

This article evaluates the usefulness of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in the field of gender and development planning. While the incorporation of distributional considerations into CBA would appear to have made it more sensitive to gender differentials, the article argues that it is limited by a number of factors. These include both its own methodol...

This article takes as its starting point the overwhelming concentration of Bangladeshi women in the homeworking sector of the clothing industry in London. This pattern forms a contrast to the large numbers of male Bangladeshi workers also concentrated in the garment industry but who are to be found mainly in the factories and sweatshops. The articl...

What does citizenship mean to poor and socially excluded people? How do their views help us understand and analyse what 'inclusive' citizenship means?

In Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy Naila Kabeer explores the gendered dimensions of risk, vulnerability and insecurity and hence the need for a gender perspective in the design of social protection measures. Her emphasis is on the informal economy because that is where the majority of women, and indeed the poor, a...

Incl. bibl., abstract. Economic growth and poverty reduction have occurred unevenly across, and within, Asian countries. This article focuses on the chronic nature of poverty, and explores why social exclusion makes it more difficult for some poor people to take advantage of the opportunities generated by economic growth. The article shows that a p...

Is microfinance a ‘magic bullet’ for women’s empowerment? This article published in the Economic and Political Weekly, India, examines the empirical evidence of the impact of microfinance on poverty reduction and the empowerment of poor women. Focusing on experiences in South Asia, it argues that while access to financial services can and does make...

Opinions on the impact of microfinance have been divided between those who see it as a "magic bullet" for women's empowerment and others who are dismissive of its abilities as a cure-all panacea for development. This paper seeks to examine the empirical evidence on the impact of microfinance with respect to poverty reduction and empowerment of poor...

The concept of 'social exclusion' is of relatively recent origin. It gained currency in the European context in response to rising unemployment and income inequalities which characterised the closing decades of the 20 th century, a period of considerable economic and social dislocation as countries sought to deal with the challenges of globalisatio...

This paper brings together some of the findings reported by assessments of the work of SHARE (Society for Helping Awaken Rural Poor through Education) in Andhra Pradesh, India, which were carried out under the Imp-Act programme. The studies comprised an initial assessment study conducted in 2001, which included social and economic impacts, as well...

Opinions on the impact of microfinance have been divided between those who see it as a "magic bullet" for women's empowerment and others who are dismissive of its abilities as a cure-all panacea for development. This paper seeks to examine the empirical evidence on the impact of microfinance with respect to poverty reduction and empowerment of poor...

Earlier chapters have reviewed the evidence of the direct economic and social impacts associated with MFI activities. This chapter focuses on their wider impacts, more specifically their wider social impacts. It examines changes in the sphere of community, civil society and the polity rather than in the sphere of market and economy. Such impacts ha...

Incl. bibl., index.