Volume 5, Number 1
July 1999

Gender and Development Policy Seminar Series

On February 16, IFPRI launched a brown-bag seminar series on Gender and Development Policy. The seminars are held on the third Tuesday of each month at IFPRI. The series, supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Women in Development, seeks to bring together a Washington-biodiversity based network of policymakers, NGOs, and participants from the development research community to exchange information about critical issues that have emerged from new research on gender and intrahousehold allocation. Much of this new research has been conducted at IFPRI and its collaborator institutions, but the speakers come both from IFPRI and a wider network of development research institutions and universities.

Because all listserve members cannot physically participate in the seminar series, a discussion of seminar issues is taking place on GENDEV. The positive experience with virtual meetings like the On February 16, IFPRI launched a brown-bag seminar series on Gender and Development Policy. The seminars are held on the third Tuesday of each month at IFPRI. The series, supported by gender-prop e-mail conference suggests that an online discussion is feasible. At least a week before the seminar, IFPRI announces the title of the paper and posts an abstract on the listserve, with instructions for downloading the paper from its website. (For those who prefer to have papers mailed to them, this is also possible.) After the seminar, IFPRI posts a summary of the main points that emerged during the meeting and invite listserve members to discuss the issues raised for a month, after which we will turn to the discussion of the next paper. The following seminars have taken place so far: February 16— Agnes Quisumbing, IFPRI, "Gender, Land Rights, and the Management of Land and Trees in Customary areas of Western Ghana"; March 16—Marty Chen, Harvard Institute for Inter-national Development, "Who Supports Widows in Rural India?— Household Structure and Maintenance"; April 20—Howdy Bouis, IFPRI, "Intrahousehold Distribution of Food and Micronutrient Status in Bangladesh"; May 18—Ruth Meinzen-Dick, IFPRI, "Gender, Participation, and Rights to Common Property Re-sources: The Case of Water Users' Organizations in South Asia"; June 15—Maria Sagrario Florio, American University, "Whose Work and Whose Leisure? Time Use and Overlapping Activities of Men and Women." On July 20, Lisa Smith and Lawrence Haddad of IFPRI will present "Women's Status, Women's Education and Child Nutrition in Developing Countries."