This report investigates what works to support women’s empowerment. It is organised around 12 key messages emerging from the diversity of studies and interventions supported by the Pathways programme. These messages emerged from an iterative and innovative synthesis process. The synthesis process involved the analysis of around 460 outputs, derived from 55 projects in 15 countries.
Key findings:
- What is empowering to one woman is not necessarily empowering to another: understanding empowerment needs to begin from women’s own experiences, rather than focus on a predictable set of outcomes.
- Across very different contexts, women’s ability to exercise voice and strategic forms of control over their lives is linked to being able to generate regular and independent sources of income.
- Relationships lie at the heart of women’s empowerment – women’s families, partners, friends and colleagues, and women’s organisations, networks and coalitions can be crucial in supporting and enabling women’s pathways of empowerment.
- Sexuality is a vital but neglected dimension of women’s empowerment. Positive approaches to sexuality can be an important driver of change in women’s lives.
- Understanding women’s empowerment calls for rigorous and imaginative combinations of research methodologies and methods. Participatory research can make a powerful contribution to both understanding and action.
- Efforts to promote women’s empowerment need to do more than give individual women economic or political opportunities. They need to tackle deeper-rooted structural constraints that perpetuate inequalities.
- Policies and laws that affirm women’s rights and open up pathways for women’s empowerment are critically important. But they are not in themselves sufficient to change women’s lives.
- Women’s organising is vital for sustainable change. Organising plays an important role in enabling women to formulate and voice their demands for gender justice to their communities, societies and states. By combining efforts in support of a particular issue women can gain greater visibility and legitimacy in holding governments to account on enacting their promises in a meaningful way.
- There is no one-size-fits-all approach to women’s empowerment. Global institutions would benefit from listening more to local women and doing more to support existing local agendas for women’s empowerment.
- Fostering public engagement and debate is essential to making policies that work for women’s empowerment and gender equality. The media and popular culture have a vital role to play in this.
- Recognising and supporting those within the state who are responsible for the implementation of women’s empowerment interventions is crucial; front-line workers can be vital agents of change.
- Changing attitudes and values is as important to bringing about women’s empowerment as changing women’s material circumstances and political opportunities.
