Caroline Sweetman
Editor, Gender & Development Journal
Caroline is Editor of Oxfam's international journal Gender & Development. The journal is published by Routledge and aims to support development workers to integrate gender justice and women's rights into their work. It publishes the experience of policymakers, practitioners, and women's rights activists, many of whom have never previously published their work.
Caroline has a PhD, examining the impact of a microfinance project on Ethiopian craftsworker women's poverty, livelihoods and empowerment. She has over fifteen years experience in Oxfam GB, with spells as a gender policy and programme adviser, and as a policy researcher. She started her career off in Lesotho, working as a journalist, for a mineworkers' trade union association, and a children's village, before setting up and project managing a UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund)-sponsored popular women's education/media project, Shoeshoe.
This week, I didn't go to a fabulous, energising international event held only once every four years: the AWID International Forum, 19-22 April in Istanbul, Turkey, which this year focused on transforming economic power to support women's rights.
No. Instead, I was grounded here in Oxford, UK, with a bad back. Hasty plans had to be made to ensure Gender & Development's planned activities at AWID could go ahead... Read more
This month, the well-known TV show The Apprentice returned to British television, and a motley crew of young men and women swaggered across our screens at the start of their competition to obtain start-up business financing from 'Suralan' Sugar.
The solipsistic self-promotion, and clear belief that the cut-throat pursuit of short-term profits is both desirable and also a guarantor of success in business, sets these... Read more
Gender mainstreaming. The phrase may remind me sometimes of Jane Austen's comment on Basingstoke - 'there is something direful in the very sound'… yet I, and other gender and development specialists, spend my life doing it. Gender Mainstreaming is the process of integrating the aims of gender equality and women's rights into the agendas, policies, and practices of governments and NGOs throughout the world. It was first... Read more
The latest edition of the Gender & Development journal (G&D), is a special issue focusing on citizenship. It includes articles from all regions of the world, providing development and humanitarian workers with an array of case studies and points of view on gender and citizenship.
One of the lovely things about my job as editor of G&D is the opportunity to learn about a hot topic from encounters with feminist activists... Read more