Revisiting foundational feminist work on the concept of empowerment from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper draws on the findings of a multi-country research programme, ‘Pathways of Women’s Empowerment’, to explore pathways of positive change in women’s lives, in diverse contexts, and to draw together some lessons for policy and practice.
Key findings:
- If efforts to promote women’s empowerment are to be about more than accommodating women within highly unequal, inequitable and unfair societies and systems—and if it is to go beyond the self-limiting strictures of the earlier Women in Development approach that today’s ‘women and girls’ narratives mirror—then it needs to engage with the structural bases of inequality and discrimination.
- All the evidence points to the fact that donor-driven projects, policies and programmes are not the basis for meaningful, sustainable change. If donors want to make a difference to women’s lives, their best bets lie in directing their investments not to building more motorways themselves, but towards women’s funds, who can use it to support local women’s organizations in mobilising demands and holding their states to account for delivering on commitments to women’s rights.
- If a fraction of the funds currently funnelled to the accountancy giants were redirected to women’s funds such as Mama Cash, we would see real gains for women’s empowerment. What works, our surveys work found, is a regular, dependable source of income that is at the discretion of the organization to spend on activities they believe to be most effective in making a difference.
- Rather than impose upon women’s organizations a fixed set of goals and expectations, and instruments such as logical frameworks that drive a linear, results-focused, approach, what works to strengthen them is investment in their capacity to respond creatively to emerging opportunities, more trust in their knowledge, and sensitive, supportive accompaniment. To do this effectively, donor organizations need to invest in hiring more staff to work on the gender equality and women’s empowerment portfolio, and in building greater knowledge and skills amongst staff as the supporters of transformative development practice. Internal learning processes, geared at strengthening donors’ capacities for analysis and responsiveness, will be needed for such investment to produce returns. These would engage staff from across donor organisations in learning initiatives to connect their personal experiences of constraint and change with their practice as development professionals, creating safe spaces for agency personnel across the organization to develop capacities to listen, think and learn.
- This virtuous circle of investment, directed inwards as well as outwards, could deliver far more effective results for women’s rights than slimming down staff and cranking up disbursement pressure. Transformative development practice would, then, come to be about restoring empathy to a sector ever more distant from lived experience, reliant on ‘evidence’ that strips the humanity out of those whose lives’ development purports to transform. This vision for change would encompass a methodological plurality and willingness to experiment creatively with ways of communicating – of listening and learning, as well as of engaging in dialogue – that can be in itself a catalyst of change. And this is perhaps one of the most powerful lessons from the Pathways programme: that engaging a broader constituency with change calls for ways of going beyond words, figures and text to invite the power of moving images, songs and stories to transform perspectives and incite imaginations.