How can development interventions manage information and ideas so as to empower women more effectively? This paper suggests that particular attention must be given to strengthening women’s capacity for voice and action at five ‘critical moments’ of an intervention’s planning cycle: conception, design, implementation, evaluation, and learning. At these moments, the ideas, values and knowledge of key actors profoundly affect how an intervention plays out in practice, and thus what it is able to achieve. Gender equality concerns are especially important at the conceptualisation stage, so as to plan follow-through.
Empowerment is the process by which a person previously denied the ability to make strategic life choices and to exercise influence gains the capacity to do so. Empowerment involves three elements: (1) the power within – that is, changes in how women view themselves; (2) the power to exert change more broadly within society; and (3) the power to join with other women and men to reinforce the momentum for change. Changes in individuals are unlikely to change structures, but women acting together can be a powerful force for change. Men’s attitudes and behaviour towards women will be critical to the kinds of change women are able to achieve.
Any intervention that seeks to bring about structural change needs a theory of change that is grounded in an understanding of local realities, including structural constraints – and opportunities. The institutionalised constraints that disempower women include:
- Gender-specific constraints: Values and customs afforded to women and men because of their gender, such as views about masculinity or traditional roles
- Gender-intensified constraints: Norms and values that are more intense for women, such as inheritance arrangements
- Imposed gender constraints: Gender-specific norms rooted in the informal institutions of society, such as customary forms of discrimination against women in the legal system.
How gender is conceptualised within a programme will also affect its outcomes: is it seen purely as a matter of efficiency and instrumentality or in terms of social justice? The ideas, values, assumptions and information that an intervention draws on will be particularly influential at five critical moments in project design:
- At conception, interventions need to acknowledge gender inequalities in their vision for change and recognise women’s potential contribution to achieving project aims. For instance, agricultural extension services are frequently built on the assumption that ‘women don’t farm’.
- As goals and objectives are translated into concrete design, and then forward to implementation, it is vital that gender awareness is retained.
- In monitoring and evaluation the significance given to gender in both the methods and the questions asked will influence the quality of data from a gender perspective. It is striking to note that, despite the widespread claims about empowerment potential of microfinance, very few microfinance organisations actually include indicators of women’s empowerment in their monitoring efforts.
- Feedback mechanisms need to allow learning from different stages of an intervention to modify practice – especially to bring in hitherto excluded groups.
