In her words
I first spoke to Shazia Khanum for a report on informal jobs. The 16-year-old’s fingers moved swiftly as she talked, rolling bidis – tendu leaves tied around tobacco. She rolls about 300-500 of the cigarettes daily, earning about £1. In the cramped workshop in Karnataka’s Yarab Nagar, India, where she works, there are no toilets or sanitary facilities. Asked how she manages her period, Khanum pointed to a makeshift curtained space where she changes and reuses cloth rags.
Last week, about 6,000 miles away, world leaders and advocates came together in Australia to launch the Melbourne declaration for gender equality, a framework for gender-responsive funding, policy reform, and a fundamental shift in how power and resources flow. In the conference, the mood was one of urgency but also solidarity. Women and queer leaders spoke about power and rights with an openness that felt both overdue and fragile. The document itself is, by any measure, ambitious. But for girls like Khanum working in India’s informal sector, its promise is a distant one.
That is not a criticism but rather a diagnosis of the problem we face. The Melbourne Declaration points to governments’ obligation to “ensure local civil society is adequately resourced, politically protected, globally connected, and locally rooted”.
It calls for the “those most affected by injustice” to be central to the work across the gender-equality ecosystem.
Khanum is not an outlier but a statistic that the system has chosen not to count. One of the 61% of female workers in India’s non-agriculture sector employed informally, she is among the 80% of south Asian women who work outside formal protections. She has no contract, payslips or access to welfare schemes. As far as the state is concerned, she does not work at all.
India’s government has made moves in the right direction. The e-Shram portal has registered more than 300 million informal workers, and pension schemes now exist. But there is no outreach, and Khanum remains invisible to the system. Even though India acknowledges that about 45% of its GDP comes from this informal sector, that has yet to translate into ground-level engagement.
This is the distance between commitment and reach. Maliha Khan, president of Women Deliver, architects of the declaration, says holding leaders accountable must also mean ensuring that public systems recognise and respond to everyone’s reality.
The only way Khanum will benefit from the declaration is through direct access to cash and healthcare. The best way to do that is either through funding from on-the-ground NGOs or by funding community health workers and bringing informal workers into policy consultations.
To paraphrase Khan, at the end of the day the declaration will be measured by whether it translates into policy, financing and practice, and whether it delivers change for women whose work has too often been invisible, undervalued and unprotected.
As applause filled the conference halls in Melbourne, I knew Khanum would be at her workbench, rolling her bidi, without knowing that people are debating whether systems like the one that has failed her can be fixed. Her ambitions lie in getting better pay and a proper toilet.
Cheena Kapoor is a journalist and documentary photographer based in Delhi. Read the full article here
On another note
Women behind the lens: ‘After state massacres, I began burning the prints as an act of mourning’
In September 2022, as revolution spread across Iran, I witnessed it from Dubai through the unstable glow of phone screens. Raw videos surfaced daily before disappearing into internet blackouts: women burning their hijabs, young men wounded by metal pellets, teenagers dragged into unmarked vans.
Unable to return safely to Iran, where I had spent six years documenting life under repression, I felt helpless. This work emerged from that pain and is both testimony and absence: the public violence of the state and my private, long-distance bearing witness.
Using open-source protest footage, I began isolating frames from videos circulating on social media and photographing them directly from my computer with a Fujifilm instax camera, which can produce prints immediately. I wanted to interrupt the relentless flow of digital images – to arrest their movement.
This image comes from a protest video in Tehran: crowds circle a fire burning in the street, holding hands and chanting, “You’re the pervert. You’re the whore. I’m a free woman” – transforming misogynistic insults into defiance against the state.
I photographed the silhouette of a young woman with a high ponytail moving against smoke and fluorescent light. Its grainy, pixelated surface carries the urgency of testimony over perfection.
The photograph is part of a wider body of work drawn from protest fragments. In January 2026, after state massacres and executions, I began burning the instax prints as an act of mourning. Fire scarred their surfaces, echoing the violence they depict. This was not erasure, but a way to push against the stillness of the image, allowing it to convey and to carry rage, grief and refusal.
For me, this photograph holds revolt and transformation. It speaks to rebellions public and private and belongs to an unfinished, unfolding story of resistance.
Parisa Azadi is an Iranian-Canadian visual journalist and artist. parisaphotography.com. Read the full article here
Things to look out for
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An exhibition of 100 Palestinian tatreez embroideries created to document the genocide in Gaza will be on display at the Venice Biennale from 9 May to 22 November. Each work, made by women in refugee camps and villages in Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank, shows a scene of destruction from Israel’s assault on Gaza. Gaza – No Words – See The Exhibit is presented by the Palestine Museum US at the Palazzo Mora.
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Musicians, activists, film-makers and scientists will join novelists and editors at Nairobi Litfest 2026 (8-10 May) in the Kenyan capital, while its sister, Hay festival, takes place in Powys, Wales, from 21 to 31 May.
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Dominican artist Hulda Guzmán’s most extensive solo exhibition to date opens on 23 May at Turner Contemporary in the UK coastal town of Margate. Shaped by the mountains of Samaná in the Dominican Republic, where she lives, Guzmán’s vibrant and dreamlike style challenges western landscape traditions.
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Three writers, Natasha Walter (Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism, Feminism for a World on Fire), Shahed Ezaydi (The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women) and NS Nuseibeh (Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman) will be discussing Feminism for a World on Fire at the Brighton festival on England’s south coast on 21 May.
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