Conceptualising Empowerment
Where's the Power in Women's Empowerment?
Women's empowerment has risen to the top of the development agenda. Millions are spent every year on implementing programmes aimed at giving women and girls more choice and opportunity. And yet surprisingly little work has been done on how women themselves experience the process of empowerment - what their journeys have been, what they have gained and what might be learnt from their experiences.
Members of the Pathways Team Discussing Empowerment
Perween Hasan, Dhaka University |
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Simeen Mahmud, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies |
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Samia Huq, BRAC |
Samia Rahim, BRAC |
Maheen Sultan, BRAC |
Understanding what works to enable women to empower themselves is critical to success in fostering women's empowerment. To gain that understanding we need to go beyond one-size-fits all recipes or one-shot solutions. Empowerment is not a destination that can be reached once and for all. It is a process through which people gain consciousness of the constraints that affect their lives, and the inner strength and solidarity with others to overcome these constraints. Empowerment is fundamentally about power. It is not something that can be given, or something that can be done for someone else. In taking power, women can change societies in which women are not treated equally or fairly in any aspect of their lives.
For some development agencies, there are short cuts to women's empowerment. There is a set repertoire of interventions that are carried out in the name of 'women's empowerment'. All are aimed at giving women increased choices. But all too often, the choices that are available exist within - and sometimes even unwittingly reinforce - an changed and unfair social and gender order.
The commitment that most development agencies and governments have to gender equality makes women's empowerment about more than this. Linking women's empowerment with gender equality bridges enabling women to gain the power to act in transforming their own lives with strategies for changing the inequitable gender relations that affect everyone. And this calls for putting power back into approaches to women's empowerment in development.
Being Strategic about the Meanings of Women's Empowerment
Conceptualising Empowerment in Global Spaces and the Shaping of International Policies and Practice about Women
Giacomo Pirozzi/Panos
This project consists of a critical review of conceptual assumptions about women’s empowerment that are being globally developed and communicated and the relation between these assumptions and evolving international policy and practice in relation to alternative pathways of empowerment. The rationale for this project is to explore the meanings and debates within and among sets of actors with a global reach that are shaping values, ideas and policy actions (or absence of actions) on women’s empowerment.
The Global Hub held a conference for the project at Dunford House in Sussex from 11-12 February and Rosalind Eyben (Convenor of the Global Hub) provided a brief report from the meeting for the IDS webpage. Link here.
Changing Times, Changing Lives
The purpose of this study is to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over the last three generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment.
The project began in July 2007 and involves working with a panel of 400 women from different generations living in the Plataforma region of Bahia, Brazil. Young girls from the region and university students will be trained to use media equipment to interview their mothers and grandmothers on how life has changed in the region. Almost all (but 2) of the young interns come from working
class families, and they, themselves have lived
stories of empowerment just by making it to the
university.
Pathways of Women's Empowerment
To launch our partnership with Open Democracy in July 2007, Andrea wrote about women's empowerment and its meanings in development today.
See: Link to Open Democracy
Changing Images of Women in Bangladesh
Pathways South Asia hub recently ran a photography competition and exhibition on changing images of women. The project was an attempt to see what amateur photographers would see as emerging and new images of women and to document the audiences’ reactions to these images. The project process has been designed both as a communication and research project that is being carefully monitored at each stage of the process. The final exhibition of the work produced in the project is being toured around several venues in Bangladesh, and focus group discussions held on peoples’ reaction to the photographs.
Pathways employed the photographer Ismat Jahan to design and manage the project from conception, through training to the delivery of the final report. Ismat started working as a professional photographer from 2001. She graduated from New York Institute of Photography in Professional Photography. She has worked primarily in product photography but is also particularly interested in both Nature Photography and Portraiture. Ismat has had two solo exhibitions in Bangladesh. Her work can be seen at http://www.ijphoto.com
The photographs
We have chosen six of the photographs from the exhibition to give a sense of the kind of work produced by the project.
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