Barriers to higher education: commonalities and contrasts in the experiences of Hindu and Muslim young women in urban Bengaluru.

Gender inequalities in educational attainment have attracted considerable attention and this article aims to contribute to our understanding of young women's access to higher education. The article is based on our in-depth interviews with 26 Hindu and Muslim young women attending colleges in urban Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), south India, and explores the barriers they confronted in fulfilling their aspirations. We highlight the similarities amongst the young women, as well as the distinctive experiences of the Hindu and Muslim interviewees. Financial constraints, lack of safety for women in public space, and gender bias, gossip and social control within the family and the local community affected Hindu and Muslim interviewees in substantially similar ways. For the Muslim interviewees, however, gender disadvantage was compounded by their minority status. This both underlines the importance of incorporating communal politics into our analysis and undermines popular discourses that stereotype Muslims in India as averse to girls' and young women's education.

Contextualizing Women's Agency in Marital Negotiations: Muslim and Hindu Women in Karnataka, India.

We use 36 in-depth interviews, with 18 Muslim and 18 Hindu women in Karnataka, India, to explore the relationships between women's educational attainments and women's exercise of agency in spousal selection and the timing of marriage. We have outlined three kinds of agency, namely, convinced, resistance, and complicit, and the contexts in which they were deployed by our participants during their marriage negotiations. Our examination of the role of education across this spectrum of agential capacities during marriage negotiations suggests that the linkages between education and agency are not straightforward. Rather, the normative context, and how parents and daughters interact with it when fixing marriages, makes the use of agency by the woman and by their parents much more complicated than standard narratives that claim that "modern" education for girls will inevitably enable women to play decisive roles in realizing their personal preferences. Our data lead us to challenge this framework and we argue that the link between education and agency is not always positive and linear, as it widely thought to be.

The impact of official development aid on maternal and reproductive health outcomes: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND: Progress toward meeting Millennium Development Goal 5, which aims to improve maternal and reproductive health outcomes, is behind schedule. This is despite ever increasing volumes of official development aid targeting the goal, calling into question the distribution and efficacy of aid. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness represented a global commitment to reform aid practices in order to improve development outcomes, encouraging a shift toward collaborative aid arrangements which support the national plans of aid recipient countries (and discouraging unaligned donor projects). METHODS AND FINDINGS: We conducted a systematic review to summarise the evidence of the impact on MDG 5 outcomes of official development aid delivered in line with Paris aid effectiveness principles and to compare this with the impact of aid in general on MDG 5 outcomes. Searches of electronic databases identified 30 studies reporting aid-funded interventions designed to improve maternal and reproductive health outcomes. Aid interventions appear to be associated with small improvements in the MDG indicators, although it is not clear whether changes are happening because of the manner in which aid is delivered. The data do not allow for a meaningful comparison between Paris style and general aid. The review identified discernible gaps in the evidence base on aid interventions targeting MDG 5, notably on indicators MDG 5.4 (adolescent birth rate) and 5.6 (unmet need for family planning). DISCUSSION: This review presents the first systematic review of the impact of official development aid delivered according to the Paris principles and aid delivered outside this framework on MDG 5 outcomes. Its findings point to major gaps in the evidence base and should be used to inform new approaches and methodologies aimed at measuring the impact of official development aid.

Only when the boat has started sinking: a maternal death in rural north India.

This paper uses a close reading of villagers' responses to the death in childbirth of a Muslim woman to raise questions about India's current policy emphasis on institutional delivery as a means of reducing maternal mortality. After introducing the context and methods of our research, we describe recent policy interventions related to maternal health, including the National Rural Health Mission established in 2005. We then outline villagers' commentaries on the specific maternal death, focusing on the costs to women's health (and sometimes life) of high fertility; the lack of care available from rural government facilities and staff and the preference for delivering at home with the aid of local practitioners; the financial constraints that make people hesitate to seek medical treatment; and the high costs of private treatment and the poor treatment experienced in government facilities. Our core argument is that government health care provision in rural Uttar Pradesh is embedded in a moral universe characterised by widespread and long-term mistrust of state services and that encouraging institutional deliveries without addressing the perceptions of potential service users is a seriously flawed approach to reducing maternal mortality. The paper draws primarily on ethnographic research funded by the Wellcome Trust during 2002-2005, in a Muslim village in rural Bijnor district (in north-western Uttar Pradesh).

Unmonitored intrapartum oxytocin use in home deliveries: evidence from Uttar Pradesh, India.

Intrapartum use of oxytocin should entail controlled dosages administered through infusion, continual monitoring of mother and fetus and surgical back-up, since several adverse outcomes have been reported. However, in Uttar Pradesh, north India, small-scale ethnographic studies as well as a large-scale retrospective survey have established that unmonitored intramuscular oxytocin injections are commonly given to birthing mothers to augment labour by unregistered local male practitioners and auxiliary nurse-midwives employed by government during home deliveries. India's reproductive and child health policy needs to address the inappropriate use of oxytocin. Under a new 2007 policy, female government health workers at peripheral institutions are to be supplied with oxytocin to inject during the third stage of labour to prevent post-partum haemorrhage. The practice of injecting oxytocin intrapartum could readily be reinforced by this policy shift. There is an urgent need to ensure that home births are safer for mothers and babies alike, since India's current policy goals of raising the numbers of institutional deliveries, ensuring skilled attendance at birth and improving referrals for emergency obstetric care cannot be met in the foreseeable future. In a context of enduringly high infant and maternal mortality, especially in Uttar Pradesh and other large northern states, the question of whether or not inappropriate use of oxytocin is contributing to maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality deserves further research.