Why are conventional interventions that seek to promote women’s empowerment insufficient? This article highlights the choices, negotiations, narratives, and context of women’s lived experience. It finds that empowerment is a complex process of negotiation rather than a linear sequence of inputs and outcomes. Governments and development agencies need to give more consideration to the structures perpetuating gender inequality. They should invest in creating an enabling environment for women’s empowerment, and should support those who are tackling deeply rooted issues of power impeding transformative change.
Development agencies tend to view women’s empowerment as women gaining the material means to help their families and communities. However, work by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium indicates that empowerment is in fact a much more complex process. It concerns changes happening outside the scope of conventional mechanisms such as electoral quotas, education and legislative change. It is a journey of constant negotiation and compromise, with uncertain outcomes.
Significant changes are taking place in women’s lives outside the range of conventional empowerment interventions. Key areas within the dynamics of women’s empowerment require consideration:
- Context: historical shifts in societal and cultural norms, in political institutions, the economy, current and previous political conjectures, and the density of donor engagement are all factors in restricting or facilitating women’s empowerment.
- Choice: acts may have entirely unintended outcomes, and what constitutes an empowering choice is very context-specific, possibly unanticipated or unrecognised by development organisations.
- Narratives: women’s organisations face difficult choices about how to portray women’s issues, navigating between eliciting sympathy and showing women as agents, not victims.
- Relationships: mainstream empowerment narratives focus on individual women’s trajectories of self-improvement or society-wide economic change, failing to consider the relational webs that constitute these women’s social and economic lives. For example, it is important to ask what money does for and to relationships. It is relationships rather than assets that bring about the kinds of changes associated with ’empowerment’ such as growth in self-confidence, capabilities and consciousness, and capacity to act collectively to demand rights and recognition.
- Voice: development goals and targets have focused more on formal politics than any other arena for decision-making and influence, but these domains are restrictive not just because of gender, but also class and family connection. Community-based organisations are not necessarily sufficiently participatory and responsive to enable women to have greater influence at community level.
- Negotiation: tactical accommodation and compromise may offer more scope for the exercise of agency than contestation; to acquire certain freedoms women may need to subscribe to some societal expectations.
While conventional mechanisms for promoting women’s empowerment are necessary, they are limited and insufficient. Policies that view women as instrumental to other objectives cannot promote women’s empowerment because they fail to address structural barriers to equality.
- Development agencies have neglected to consider areas such as relationships, leisure, pleasure, love and care as a means for empowerment.
- In the rush for results, women’s voices, analyses, experiences and solutions continue to be disregarded. If women are to have a voice, far more needs to be done to engage them, at all levels, in the decisions that affect their lives.
- Context matters: the same solutions cannot be rolled out to every region without examining the realities of women’s lives and what made them as they are.
- The finest policies and laws mean nothing if no one is held to account for their non-implementation.
For further information on this research, see: www.pathways-of-empowerment.org.
