Despite recent advances in important aspects of the lives of girls and women, pervasive challenges remain. These challenges reflect widespread deprivations and constraints and include epidemic levels of gender-based violence and discriminatory laws and norms that prevent women from owning property, being educated, and making meaningful decisions about their own lives--such as whether and when to marry or have children. These often violate their most basic rights and are magnified and multiplied by poverty and lack of education. This groundbreaking book distills vast data and hundreds of studies to shed new light on deprivations and constraints facing the voice and agency of women and girls worldwide, and on the associated costs for individuals, families, communities, and global development. The volume presents major new findings about the patterns of constraints and overlapping deprivations and focuses on several areas key to women s empowerment: freedom from violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, ownership of land and housing, and voice and collective action. It highlights promising reforms and interventions from around the world and lays out an urgent agenda for governments, civil society, development agencies, and other stakeholders, including a call for greater investment in data and knowledge to benchmark progress.

This book serves to shed a light on the position of women in media and how these institutions shape the women’s contributions to national development. The authors argue that women are unsung heroes, driving the growth of nations. Nevertheless, their stories are seldom told, they are often stereotyped and marginalized within society. This form of discrimination serves to take away the voices of women in all social stratas, especially in the developing nations of Africa. It is little wonder that there is gender inequality, gender bias, and gender injustice in society. This book highlights literature which may be used to actualize gender equality and social justice for women. By creating a discussion around gender, society will begin to understand the value and importance of women in engineering development. Women are vital to social change.

This book offers a multifaceted examination of Africa’s development into the post-2015 global agenda from a geographical perspective. As a diversified and highly applied discipline, geography has a lot to offer to global debates, nuanced analysis of problems on and the search for innovative solutions to advance the African development agenda beyond 2015. The end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era and the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015 mark an important turning point for Africa and an opportune time to examine new challenges and opportunities that it faces. The regional disparities in MDG progress affirm an important geographic tenet that the unique yet internally differentiated socio-cultural, economic, political, ecological, biophysical and historical context give Africa distinctive challenges and opportunities that demand particular approaches to development. This edited book presents innovative contributions examining Africa’s development performance in diverse sectors during the MDG era as a basis for understanding prospects for its development in the SDG era and beyond. It offers new and innovative study perspectives and methodological approaches on urban transformation, development financing, food security, climate change, gender equality, health, and regional integration, among other topics, and useful insights for scholars, students and development practitioners. This book was originally published as a special issue of African Geographical Review, the journal of the American Association of Geographers’ Africa Specialty Group, to mark the transition from MDGs to SDGs.

For pathways to be truly sustainable and advance gender equality and the rights and capabilities of women and girls, those whose lives and well-being are at stake must be involved in leading the way. Gender Equality and Sustainable Development calls for policies, investments and initiatives in sustainable development that recognize women’s knowledge, agency and decision-making as fundamental. Four key sets of issues - work and industrial production; population and reproduction; food and agriculture, and water, sanitation and energy provide focal lenses through which these challenges are considered. Perspectives from new feminist political ecology and economy are integrated, alongside issues of rights, relations and power. The book untangles the complex interactions between different dimensions of gender relations and of sustainability, and explores how policy and activism can build synergies between them. Finally, this book demonstrates how plural pathways are possible; underpinned by different narratives about gender and sustainability, and how the choices between these are ultimately political. This timely book will be of great interest to students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers working on gender, sustainable development, development studies and ecological economics.