This position paper is a product of the first three years of the ‘Young Urban Women: Life Choices and Livelihoods Programme’ aimed at empowering young women by addressing their economic rights (in particular, decent work), their Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), and their unpaid care responsibilities.
The selected sites for the project were seven urban and peri-urban areas across Ghana, India and South Africa, all of which are rapidly urbanising countries. Activities included personal empowerment of young women living in selected urban communities, supporting young women’s organisation, leadership and action, and building solidarity with allies to push for policy and legal changes. The programme was based on the premise that transformative empowerment for young women requires improvements in their economic status (right to decent work, control over income, autonomy over financial decision-making) while also addressing their gendered realities, which are most acutely felt through the status of their sexual and reproductive health and rights, and their disproportionate burden of unpaid care and domestic work.
The Young Urban Woman’s Programme is directly related to realizing a number of United Nations human rights instruments and development frameworks which have recognised the multiple discriminations suffered by women with regards to their unpaid care work burden, their sexual and reproductive health and rights and their economic status. This approach is also grounded in the feminist concept of intersectionality which describes how gender, caste, class, race, ability, sexual orientation and other forms of discrimination interlock to trap women into rigid hierarchies of privilege and disadvantage.