The fifth Sustainable Development Goal aims to achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls. The United Nations state that they aim to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through providing women with equal access to education, healthcare, decent work and representation in the political sphere. The United Nations believes that by achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment this will benefit humanity at large. My own research for my Masters thesis focused on women’s empowerment, particularly women’s economic empowerment. My research also examined how the term ‘empowerment’ emerged in relation to women’s empowerment and how the term became an important aim in development discourse. My Masters research focused specifically on Hmong women’s empowerment. The Hmong are an ethnic group which mainly reside in the mountainous areas of south-east Asia.

The term empowerment was first formally used in international development discourse in relation to the feminist movement in the Global South. The empowerment concept was then formally recognised in the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, where it was stated that women’s empowerment and gender and sexual rights were central to population issues. Then, in 2000, at the United Nations Declaration, the third Millennium Development Goal referred to directly to empowerment: ‘promote gender equality and empower women’. Since then, the term has become increasingly common in theories of development and gender and also among policy makers. Cornwall (2016: 356) describes women’s empowerment as “a process that engages women in thinking differently about themselves, about situations they are in, about their social worlds and relationships”. It is relevant to speak of ‘empowering women’ because as a group they are often disempowered relative to men. In terms of women’s empowerment, Kabeer (2000: 22) claims that women are “constrained by the norms, beliefs, customs, and values through which societies differentiate between women and men”. She states that this can manifest itself in a wide variety of different ways such as through gender pay gaps or gender-based physical or psychological violence. In patriarchal societies, this can lead to men holding power over women by making major decisions within a household, not allowing women to work, curtailing women’s access to resources, and so on.

One way in which the Sustainable Development Goals aim to promote women’s empowerment is through increasing women’s access to decent paid work. Women’s economic empowerment can be defined as “when a woman has the ability to succeed and advance economically and has the power to make and act on economic decisions” (Golla et al, 2011: 3). Women’s economic empowerment has become an important global policy priority and is seen as a vital contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. There is evidence to suggest that economic strength is the basis of social, political and physiological power in society, and so with a higher economic status, women often benefit socially and physiologically. Economic empowerment can have positive effects on women. With economic power, women have the ability to make more household decisions as economic empowerment can increase self-confidence and women’s voice within the household. Women’s economic empowerment can also have positive effects on the development of their country. Evidence suggests that women are more likely than men to spend their income on nutrition, health, and education of both daughters and sons. As a result, this can lead to economic growth, poverty reduction, increased health and welfare. Increased income can encourage as well as facilitate mothers to send their daughters to school as well as their sons.

The positive impacts of women’s economic empowerment were evident among the Hmong women I interviewed in Northern Vietnam. From my research, I discovered that by Hmong women being employed, Hmong gender roles in the household underwent a change. Prior to Hmong women working full-time jobs, they mainly stayed at home to care for their children and carry out other household tasks. In the past, Hmong men used to carry out work on the farm and were generally not involved in household tasks. Since Hmong women have begun to work full time outside of the home, their husbands have begun to look after the children and cook for the family and carry out other domestic chores. This has almost led to a reversal in Hmong gender roles. I gained a sense of Hmong women’s empowerment through my interviews with these women. The women stated that they no longer felt restricted to their household chores and were able to earn a large income which meant that they no longer depended on their husbands for money.
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It is evident from my research that the fifth sustainable development goal is an important one.  Achieving women’s empowerment has the potential to reduce gender inequality and have a positive impact on wider society. My own research has proven that decent paid work for women can certainly increase women’s sense of empowerment and in turn reduce gender inequality.

​References can be requested from info@geographysocietyireland.ie

Blood and blood transfusion therapies are indispensable to sustainable healthcare systems worldwide, and people have a right to give and receive blood in a way that best supports the health and well-being needs of society  [1]. In Ireland, we ensure the availability of a sustainable and safe supply of blood through a combination of voluntary donors, and public agencies such as the statutory non-profit Irish Blood Transfusion Service’ (hereafter; IBTS) which routinely collects, fractionates, and screens the blood for pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, as well as responding to the more unexpected and undesirable outcomes of blood transfusion [2]. Because Ireland is one of the least materially rewarding countries in which to give blood, [3] eager and altruistic donors often couch their willingness to give in terms of citizenship, responsibility, and compassion towards those in medical need; sentiments which help to solidify one’s sense of belonging and inclusion within the wider body-politic [4]

The World Health Organisation has affirmed ‘voluntary self-sufficient’ blood donation as the safest and most sustainable means for meeting the state’s statistical blood requirements [5] and together with the European Union Directive  2002/ 98/EC [6] has mandated that a preemptive screening of potential donors through rigorous onsite questioning and potential donor deferrals be established as a routine and permanent fixture of this process. What this has amounted to in practice is excessive and often discriminatory exclusion guidelines that centre around controversial and intimate aspects of one’s race or sexual orientation, and which work to sustain nothing more than a naturalized association between blood, risk, and security.

​The aim of my Research Masters was therefore to investigate the moral and political economies of blood donor regulation in Ireland, examining in what ways the geography of global disease outbreaks from hepatitis, and later HIV/AIDS, cultivated an exclusionary and often inaccessible blood donation regimen that is still visible in the Irish Blood Transfusion service today. Using blood donor practices in the Republic of Ireland as a case study, and as a frame of reference, my research focused on the spatial tactics and surveillance techniques adopted by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service as a way in which to regulate and exclude potential donors between the years of 2015-2016 as well as the narratives, voices and opinions of non-normative donors who themselves embodied and experienced exclusion at this marginalized site of citizenship.
 
Since the height of the hepatitis and AIDS crisis, both gay men as well as immigrants have been central to the exclusionary logic that has at times prohibited them from contributing to the national blood supply [7]. Racial exclusions often masquerade as travel based restrictions which target particular bodies that are believed to be located closer to the epicentre of infection. Blood transfusion services, on the other hand, typically paint a monochromatic picture of power, claiming that their donor selection criteria is standardized, fair, and in the interests of “safeguarding” a national blood supply. Exclusions on the behavioural collective ‘men who have sex with men’ MSM from donating blood have historically taken the form of either temporary or indefinite deferrals in over twenty countries including Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the US, without any scientific evidence to support it, and rather, a mounting international evidence to suggest it’s indefensibility. The most recent litigation case taken by a French citizen to the European Court of Justice as of April 2015 [8] ruled that EU countries should seek a “less onerous” means in which to protect the national blood supply, and together with a High Court challenge by Irish blood donor activist, and student Tomas Heneghan, [9] it compelled the state to introduce a one year deferral on MSM, bringing it’s policy into line with international developments. While the recent decision taken by the Irish government to move away from an indefinite MSM deferral has been welcomed by many as a step in the right direction, the continued exclusion of  monogamous same-sex couples which the new policy entails, has likewise been criticised for perpetuating an “inequitable risk tolerance” [10] between ineligible same sex partners and sexually promiscuous heterosexual men. During a time when blood donation is at its lowest rate in almost a decade [11], and only 3% of the eligible Irish population donate blood, [12] valid questions need to be asked as to whether it is indeed sustainable for us to continue meeting our national blood requirements through the presence of scientifically unsupported donor exclusions. 
 
My research was to largely reveal that what is accepted as the most sustainable model of blood donation internationally, is still premised on the fear and mistrust of the spaces within which so-called ‘panic figures’ move [13]. Lengthy and esoteric ‘health and lifestyle’ questionnaires are designed to confuse and unsettle potential donors from the outset, while questions addressing one’s size and weight often render implicit that the appearance of the body acts as the ultimate marker of one’s health, productivity, and thereby safety. The corporeality of the flesh remains an important visual modality in which to construct a spatial, as well as temporal geography of the body that assesses and surveills all aspects one’s moral behaviour; arms are scanned for signs of intravenous track marks, while the corporeal proximity of bodies is also often conflated with moral deterioration and given equal cause for expulsion. The ‘queer body’ [14] had, in particular, been mapped as a space in which to project future fears of a diseased and death-ridden polity. MSM who had presented as heterosexual prior to the lifting of the Irish ‘gay blood ban’ in January 2017 feared that their identities would be outed providing they did not regulate or suppress their bodily movements within the space so as not to give away any indiscriminate cues about their sexuality. This was also true of blood drives held in community spaces where MSM who had not yet been open about their sexual practices felt compelled to donate blood as a way in which to conceal their sexual identity among unwitting family, friends or colleagues, even in the absence of STI testing. Especially striking was an Irish trans woman and avid blood donor Ms Aoife Martin, now well documented in the Irish media, [15] who had received an expulsion letter simply for undergoing a male- to- female gender identity transition that exemplified not only the continued inaccessibility and inequality of health care services towards people who identify as Trans [6] but also the way in which biological parts continued to be viewed by medical services as what Seidman (1995) [17] has referred to as an “authentic and unchanging space,” while gender identities are rendered a mere fictitious aberration of the former Self.

mmediate and reactionary decisions that have been taken to date by the IBTS which had excluded non-normative donors from the Irish blood donor registry throughout the research, is illustrative of the ways in which political decisions continue to be taken among objectively positioned medical services; decisions which cannot simply be reducible to scientific evidence regarding blood safety alone. What remains apparent from the research is that the act of  blood donation provides geographers with a useful opportunity in which to more closely interrogate the boundary-making practices of citizenship, the regulation of the national, as well as the biological body, and ultimately, the ways in which sustainable models of blood transfusion, and of our health and development goals more broadly, must rely in equal measure on the equitable and inclusive accommodation of our increasingly socially diverse blood donor pool. 

​​References can be requested from info@geographysocietyireland.ie

​Bio: Rory Horner is a Senior Lecturer and ESRC Future Research Leader at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research focuses on globalization, trade and development, with a particular interest in South–South trade and the pharmaceutical industry in India and sub-Saharan Africa.
@rory_horner and @globaldevinst

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight the need to rethink the dominant imaginary of the global map of development.
 
Through much of the 20th century, a classic macro-geographic division of the world into two, and according to standard of living, has prevailed. While the nomenclature has changed from First and Third World, to developed and developing, to global North and South lines, the territorial categorisation of the world into two has continued.
 
Under such an understanding, from the perspective of many in the global North, development was largely a challenge for far away countries in the global South. Aid was provided by rich countries to poor countries under a moral geography of charity, often justified by the aim of helping developing countries become more like developed countries.
 
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which preceded the SDGs, reflected just such a geography. The MDGs were largely designed by rich countries. Their focus was almost exclusively on targets for poor countries. The SDGs, which apply to all countries in the world and present universal development goals, challenge this dominant map.
 
Of course, the SDGs highlight continuing major development challenges in lower-income countries. These include poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2), health care (SDG 3), education (SDG 4), water and sanitation (SDG 6), energy services (SDG 7), decent jobs (SDG 8) and infrastructure (SDG 9).
 
Yet, rather than just relating to lower-income countries, the SDGs highlight major development challenges that are present in high-income countries too. Initial indicators of progress towards the SDGs point to sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12), climate change (SDG 13) and ecosystem conservation (SDG 14 and 15) as high priorities for countries such as Ireland in the global North. Other major challenges in such countries include agricultural systems and malnutrition (related to obesity) (SDG 2), malnutrition (related to obesity), jobs and unemployment (SDG 8), and gender equality (SDG 5).
 
Although major development challenges, including those highlighted by the SDGs are present in all countries in the world, considerable geographic variation is present in the nature and severity of those challenges. It is not a flat world, but one characterised by vast inequalities.
 
As well as applying to all countries, the SDGs also had a very different process of formation from the MDGs. Brazil, in particular, as well as the G77 (a collective of the UN’s 130 ‘developing countries’), played prominent roles in converting the ‘post-2015 Development Agenda’ into the United Nations General Assembly-agreed Sustainable Development Goals.
 
The SDGs have been made within a very different context from the MDGs. New geographies of wealth, middle classes, poverty, health and environment have been observed this century. Patterns of global inequality have changed, with some fall in between-country inequality across a number of different indicators, while inequalities within many countries have risen. The Paris Agreement of 2015 requires climate commitments by all countries, not just ‘developed’ or ‘Annex 1’ countries. We are also living in a world of multi-directional development cooperation, justified by a morality of solidarity, rather than just aid from North to South justified by a morality of charity.
 
The SDGs also provide a challenge to dominant understandings of development trajectories. Rather than seeking to become like developed countries under a developmentalist logic, the SDGs seek to put forward a goal for all countries of transformation towards sustainable development.
 
Considerable debate revolves around the SDGs as to what effect, if any, they have in practice. Fascinating research has suggested that rather than setting development agendas, national and local governments in Ecuador engage with global goals which reinforce or serve their own interests.
 
While much more evidence is needed as to implementation, the SDGs do help point to a very different geography of contemporary development challenges facing our planet and global society. Instead of an earlier era of international development, we are now operating in an era of global development.
 
This blogpost draws on research on the changing geographies of global development, published in Development and Change:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12379

The geographical community has lost a titan. David Lowenthal brought literary flourish and profound humanity to scholarship on the history of environmental ideas (George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter(1958); George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation(2000)) and on modern society’s complex and sometimes delusional relationship with its own past (The Past Is a Foreign Country(1985); The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History(1997); The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited(2015)). He studied under Carl Sauer at Berkeley before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his doctoral work and was on the staff at University College London from 1972, translating to Emeritus in 1985. Hugh Clout has affectionately evoked David’s life and work in a piece for the Guardian,
​ https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/sep/27/david-lowenthal-obituary.

By Gerry Kearns, Professor of Human Geography, Member Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth University

By - Ainhoa Gonzalez del Campo, Christine Bonnin, Eoin O’Mahony from the School of Geography, UCD. 

The SDGs span a continuum of interdependent social (e.g. no poverty, zero hunger, quality education, and well-being), economic (e.g. economic growth, innovation in industry) and environmental considerations (e.g. life on land and water, and climate). Aptly, Goal 4 which focuses on ‘quality education’, refers to the importance of inclusivity and equitability in access to quality education in order to improve people’s lives and sustainable development. While the targets and indicators for Goal 4 concentrate importantly on gender-equality in education and basic literacy (i.e. primary and post-primary completion), it also includes the provision of appropriate skills to promote sustainable development which are of particular relevance in higher education.
 
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – digital systems that enable us to work with, analyse and visually represent geographic information – are important tools that can help societies make evidence-based decisions to address pressing global sustainable development challenges. While GIS have become an important support tool in the global development and humanitarian sector, at present, very few higher education programmes in development studies integrate it as a key component. This is a problem for the implementation of the SDGs locally. Yet, highly promising opportunities arise for the use and proliferation of free and open source geospatial software in development education and practice. Of particular importance is the easy accessibility of this technology to institutions in the Global South at little to no cost, which can contribute to reducing global spatial inequalities in access to educational resources through its adaptation into online education. However, in spite of the ongoing technological advancements in both the practice of online education and free software, research on the contribution of open source GIS and open data to the educational sphere, and ultimately to student preparedness and employability, is very limited.
 
In this blog post we would like to showcase how a project we are working on in Vietnam enables university students there to avail of free and open source software to aid in the implementation of the SDGs, particularly around the goal of quality education. All human interventions on human and natural landscapes have a spatial component and GIS software analyses these components in relation to each other. Moreover, they represent key analytical software for seeking solutions to critical current and future global sustainable development challenges like climate change, migration, poverty alleviation and food security.

As a country, Vietnam is relatively well developed, with significant improvements in human health and infrastructure in recent years. The Vietnam 2035 report has however identified numerous lingering challenges, linked to the spatial inequality of socio-economic development, environmental sustainability and climate change. On the basis that these development challenges can benefit from a geographical perspective, as socio-economic and environmental issues are intrinsically spatial, a proposal was put forward to incorporate GIS teaching and learning into development studies in Vietnam. As a result, in 2017, geographers at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland were awarded funding by the official development and aid agency Irish Aid under their Vietnam Ireland Bilateral Education programme (VIBE) to develop an online open source GIS module for deployment by project partners at the Faculty of International Studies, Hanoi University (HANU) in their development studies programme.

Free and open source geospatial software (such as Quantum GIS or QGIS[1]) is now at a sufficiently mature stage to be used across a variety of contexts, and it is used by many municipal authorities, planning agencies and private sector companies. Their use is also growing in research and higher education contexts.

​In the light of this, QGIS was purposefully adopted in the project to ensure continued accessibility to the technology by HANU’s staff and students both during and after module completion. Complemented by online instructional videos and task-based assignments, the UCD team developed a fully-fledged GIS module for use at HANU.

​The module was provided as a set of practical handouts on GIS tools and functionality with accompanying video tutorials. Vietnam-specific data and examples were used to illustrate applications so that the module context would be directly relevant to the national and local development contexts. The students can access the lesson handouts locally on a USB drive and follow the accompanying demonstration videos on a dedicated private YouTube channel.


[1]               https://qgis.org

There are 17 Goals which are all interconnected. This means that success in one affects success in other areas. For example dealing with the threat of climate change impacts how we manage our fragile natural resources, achieving gender equality or better health helps eradicate poverty, and fostering peace and inclusive societies will reduce inequalities and help economies prosper. In short, this is the greatest chance we have to improve life for future generations. (UNDP, 2018)

Looking at the 17 goals it is clear that geography and the work of geographers has an important role to play in the achievement of these goals and this is why the GSI has chosen to focus on this relationship for GEOWEEK 2018. 

For the next few weeks we will feature blog posts from geographers that focus on how their work intersects with the themes and goals of sustainable development. If you would like to submit a post please check here for more details. 

Ireland has developed 'The Sustainable Development Goals National Implementation Plan 2018 - 2020' in direct response to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As part of our GeoWeek activities we are running a conference 'Geography and the SDG's' to create a stakeholder forum for geographers across the state to explore ways to achieve the SDG's. ​

If you have anything you would like to share or contribute, please feel free to contact us via the email button above! 
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The writer of this piece, Arnold Horner, formerly lectured in Geography at University College Dublin.
​His engagement with second-level has included acting as NUI consultant in Geography for the State Examinations Commission for 25 years. Between 1995 and c. 2011, he also represented NUI on National Council for Curriculum Assessment syllabus committees for senior and junior cycle Geography. He was for more than twenty years a Teaching Council subject advisor in Geography.
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As part of GeoWeek this year we are hosting a public conference on Geography and the SDGs this November in association with the Dept of Communications Climate Action and Environment, the CSO and the OSI who are all working on the National Implementation Plan.
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In advance, blog posts will be posted weekly on the Society website from Sept 3rd up until Geoweek, with a different SDG highlighted each week (see schedule here: http://www.geographicalsocietyireland.ie/share-your-story.html)
In order to ensure that this is a success, we are asking you to share your story if your work touches on any or many of the SDG's. Why not send in a short informal piece to share online and get more visibility for your work? The idea of the programme is to highlight the relevance and diversity of the work of geographers and to build greater public visibility for, and interest in, what we do.
Please email us with any suggestions or to contribute your work.


Booking for the conference is available at 
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/geography-and-the-sdgs-tickets-48520758896