This brief informs the debate on what empowerment means and how best to support it, with empirical evidence from a five-year international research programme.
Researchers from West Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the UK used quantitative surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research, life-histories, storytelling and film-making to discover how empowerment happens.
Key findings:
- Empowerment has multiple meanings relating to power, participation, capability, autonomy, choice and freedom. Researchers found that the presence and significance of these meanings varied greatly among different actors and contexts. Dignity, self-esteem and respect are however, highly valued by women everywhere.
- For planning and design purposes it is useful to distinguish between ‘social’, ‘political’ and ‘economic’ empowerment. The different dimensions of empowerment are however, mutually reinforcing. Social empowerment is about changing society so that women’s place within it is respected and recognised on the terms by which they want to live, not on terms dictated by others. Economic empowerment is about women’s capacity to contribute to and benefit from economic activities on terms which recognise the value of their contribution, respect their dignity and make it possible for them to negotiate a fairer distribution of returns and Political empowerment concerns equity of representation in political institutions and enhanced voice of the least vocal so that women engage in making the decisions that affect their lives and the lives of others like them.
- Empowerment can be a consequence of multiple factors, one of these being exposure to different realities. Thus, deliberate policy interventions may be just one element or entirely absent in an empowerment process. Even when policies do support empowerment, their effectiveness in one context does not necessarily transfer to another time or place. However, even if effective policies are context specific, it may still be useful to learn from what has worked elsewhere, provided good ideas from abroad are grounded in their own local reality.
- Empowerment is complex and multidimensional and it takes time to change a deeply-embedded gendered political economy that constrains women’s agency. To be able to properly balance the importance of short- and long-term results, development agencies need to value empowerment outcomes, their contribution to the sustainability of programme impact and their multiplier effects beyond the programme.
- Supporting women’s empowerment is a long-term agenda that requires identifying and helping to strengthen locally generated transformative processes. Effectively supporting women’s empowerment requires good grounded analysis, flexibility, imagination, investing in relationships, responsiveness and modesty in ambition.
Recommendations:
- Donor support to government policies and direct financing of programmes and projects do not by themselves empower women but they can enable and support people’s own efforts. Agencies can improve their practice by: facilitating locally generated changes to the political economy; supporting the power of women organising; getting to grips with policy implementation; designing for multiplier empowerment effects; going beyond comfort zones-responding to what women want; securing value for money in support of women’s empowerment.
