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This document presents a report on feminist leadership for social transformation- clearing the conceptual cloud. This paper was developed as a resource for the meeting ‘Building Feminist Leadership: Looking Back, Looking Forward’, held in November 2008 in Cape Town, South Africa. The purpose of this paper is not simply to theorise feminist leadership, but also to create a useful framework, or lens, through which to scrutinise our leadership development programmes, strengthen them, and enhance the quality and impact of the transformative feminist leadership.

Women in Lebanon face discrimination at many levels, from social conservatism to inadequate public policies. The National Commission for Lebanese Women (NCLW) was formed in 1998 to promote women’s rights, enhance gender mainstreaming, and also to oversee the implementation of the goals of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. In July 2006, a newly formed Cabinet vowed in its Ministerial Statement to put in action all the commitments that Lebanon has made on women's issues in connection with the recommendations of the Beijing Conference in 1995 (Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action). The Gender Profile of Lebanon describes main gender topics, like the above, within the Lebanese context, as well as addressing such milestones in relation to legal, political, economical, educational, health, infrastructure terms and subjects.

The objective of this report, “Gendering Youth (girls and boys) Empowerment in Arab Mediterranean Countries (AMCs)” is first to identify the inequalities of empowerment among young people of different genders; secondly, the efforts already made by governments and civil society in the AMCs to empower young people; thirdly, it describes positive experiences that may be generalized and reproduced in other countries. Finally, the report points out the disparities and inequalities present in programmes for capacity building addressed to young women and men. Recommendations for fixing such unequal treatment will be made to stakeholders in order to encourage them to better mainstream a gender perspective in the implementation of their programmes and action plans in favour of youth empowerment. Accordingly, the report is based on the qualitative and quantitative data and information provided by the SAHWA project in the Arab Mediterranean Countries (AMCs) of Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia: The National Case Studies, the policy papers, and the Ethnographic Fieldwork dataset 2015 based on narrative interviews, focus groups and life stories collected. Thus, and in line with the SAHWA gender equity approach, the report attempts to tackle the socioeconomic factors leading to the exclusion of women, exploring a number of pathways that could foster equality between men and women.

Incorporating the most recent employment trends for young women and men, Global Employment Trends for Youth sets out the youth labour market situation around the world. It shows where progress has or has not been made, updates world and regional youth labour market indicators, and gives detailed analyses of medium-term trends in youth population, labour force, employment, unemployment, working poverty and informality. The 2017 edition discusses the implications of technological change for youth labour market prospects – both quantity and quality – focusing on trends in sectoral employment and on the forms of work available to young people.

This paper tries to examine if women’s education affects the economic growth. To illustrate this aim, four countries cases have been presented: Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, named MATE. The motive behind choosing them was because these countries have many common religious and cultural norms and values. The statistical analysis of data over the period 1960-2012 shows that the relationship between fertility rate and different measures of education is negative. Averages literacy rate and labour participation of the female are less than that of male. Two panel models are estimated over the period 2000-2012: a 'general' panel model and a 'gender' panel model. In the first model, the explanatory variables are introduced without gender’s characteristics in order to measure their impact on the economic growth. In the second model, the explanatory variables are introduced in the first model with gender’s distinguishing excluding variables that measure the quality of governance and institutional. The main findings are that women’s education, particularly, tertiary education, women’s labour force participation and institutional capital affect positively economic growth. On the contrary, the primary and secondary school enrolment are negatively linked to the economic growth. This paper concludes that women’s tertiary education is a master-key to economic growth and development accompanied by a healthy and good quality of institutional capital and by eliminating all forms of gender discrimination.