Conceptions of Women's Empowerment

Conceptions of empowerment and change, encompassing substantive empirical as well as conceptual work on measuring empowerment and change in women’s lives and contextualising meanings and practices of empowerment in our different regions.

Projects which will be initiated under this theme include:

Cluster 1 : Tracing and Measuring Empowerment and Change in Women’s Lives

(cross-cutting theme that will feed into and learn from other projects)

Panels and Surveys (cross-RPC)

Informed by a literature review, analysing panel data, qualitative interviews and other participatory research, a quantitative survey will be designed to measure the scale and nature of women’s empowerment.

Life Histories (cross-RPC)

Women from all walks of life (which will help see the intersections of race, class, age etc.) will give initial life histories and further periodic interviews over the course of the RPC to provide in-depth understandings of pathways of empowerment.

Ethnographies of Change (cross-RPC)

This work will contribute to a richer anthropological literature on empowerment by re-studying earlier intensive, long-term ethnographic research through an empowerment lens, and asking new questions in familiar contexts.

Cluster 2 : Conceptions of Empowerment and Change

Interrogating Policy Discourses and Practice on Women's Empowerment in Ghana

Project Coordinators: Takyiwaa Manuh and Nana Akua Anyidoho

Project Description: This project involves looking at policy texts of organisations (civil society, donor agencies and government) dealing with women's issues to see what kind of empowerment is present in the texts. What ideas do they have? How are they conceptualised? What strategies do they use to bring about empowerment? This project is linked to the work on Women District Assembly members under the Building Constituencies theme.

Project Update:

The Ghana Hub held a conference from 19-21 February 2007 entitled 'The Camera Shows us to the World. We should not be afraid to look into it: Dialogues with Women District Assembly Members in Ghana'. There will be a follow up to this work in 2008 at the ASA in Washington where members from the hub will be involved in a panel based on the dialogues with women Assembly members.

Expanding the Space for Women's Empowerment in Contemporary Nigeria

Project Coordinator: Charmaine Pereira, Initiative for Women's Studies Nigeria

Project Description: This project will examine the discourses of empowerment used by specific actors, particularly in relation to understandings of women’s disempowerment, and will explore the effects of these discourses on efforts to bring about gender equality.

Interrogating Discourses of Empowerment in Pre- and Post-War Sierra Leone

Project Coordinators: Aisha Fofana Ibrahim, Jamesina King, Hussainatu Abdullah, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone

Project Description: Pre-war discourses of empowerment which were mainly around issues of development have now changed, in this post-war era, to include issues of gender equality, participation and voice, among others – this project will track these changes in relations to women’s conceptions of empowerment during this period.

Qalet el Rawiyah (So Said the Storyteller)

Project Coordinators: Convened by the Women and Memory Forum, Egypt

Project Description: This project seeks to rework traditional folk stories to carry empowering representations of women and serve as a means to promote, through popular culture, new understandings of empowerment.

Project Update: See details of the performance by the Women and Memory Forum under this project held in Cairo on 15 June 2008 on the IDS Website. Extracts from the performance can be heard on the Open Democracy 50:50 site.

Conceptualising Empowerment in Sudan

Project Coordinator: Nafisa Bedri, Ahfad University, Sudan

Project Description: In Sudan Islamist thought has limited women’s empowerment to a narrow framework of income generation. The study will address the dilemma of how to get out from this conception, drawing on studies of empowerment in practice to build new ways of talking about and conceptualizing empowerment in this context.

Construction and Deconstruction of the Concept of Empowerment in General and that of Women's Empowerment in Particular in the Palestinian Context

Project Coordinator: Randa Nasser, Birzeit University, Palestine

Project Description: This research will assess concepts of empowerment as constructed locally as well as by the international donor community. The research aims to establish more valid and reliable conceptual and operational definitions of empowerment in general and women’s empowerment in particular, and meaningful measures of empowerment that are better suited for the local Palestinian context.

Talking Empowerment in Plain Arabic

Project Coordinators: regional workshop convened by Hania Sholkamy, SRC, Egypt with colleagues in Sudan and Palestine

Project Description: This regional workshop will tackle the difficulties of talking about empowerment in a context where the politics of religion complicates feminist advocacy, and to generate a new regional vocabulary with which to engage champions of women’s empowerment.

Conceptualising Empowerment in Global Spaces and the Shaping of International Policies and Practice about Women

Project Coordinators: Rosalind Eyben, Global Hub and Andrea Cornwall, IDS, UK

Project Description: This project will explore the meanings and debates around women’s empowerment within and among sets of actors with a global reach, and how they are shaping values, ideas and policy actions (or absence of actions) on women’s empowerment.

Project Update:

A conference was held at Dunford House, Sussex from 11-12 February for this project. See Global Hub News.

Changing Times, Changing Lives: Women's Empowerment through Generations in Bahia, Brazil

Project Coordinator: Cecilia Sardenberg

Project Description: 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.

Project Update:

This project which began in July 2007 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.

On 2 November, the interns working on this project held a photography show to display the results of the photography course they had been on. The pictures were taken at the Universidade Federal da Bahia campus and in Feira de São Joaquim, a famous market in Salvador. See the link to YouTube where a slide show of the photographs has been uploaded - http://www.youtube.com/fcapibaribe. A report from the photography course is available to download in pdf (667 KB).

Conceptualising Empowerment in Brazil: Policy Discourse and the Discourse of Feminist NGOs

Project Coordinators: Cecilia Sardenberg and Silvia de Aquino, NEIM, Brazil

Project Description: This research will look at how the recent introduction of the term “empowerment” by international development agencies has been conceived by Brazilian social and political actors with more politicised visions of justice and rights.

Project Update:

This project entails documental analysis, surveys and interview analysis. A survey was undertaken among participants of the V Women's Camp of the Landless People Movement, and the results are being tabulated and analysed by a doctoral student in NEIM's Graduate Program. Interviews were also carried out by Terezinha Goncalves during the Articulation of Brazilian Women meetings with the following prominent feminists: Maria Ednalva Bezerra (Secretaria Nacional de Mulheres Trabalhadoras da Central Unica de Trabalhadores, Brazil) and Lilian Celiberti (Cotidiano Mujer, Uruguay)

National Discourses on Women's Empowerment: Enabling or Constraining Women's Choices

Project Coordinators: Firdous Azim and Maheen Sultan, BRAC University, Bangladesh

Project Description: The research project will seek to compare and contrast conceptualisations on women's empowerment in the development area, women's organisations and in cultural spheres such as the media and religion. It will be working closely with the research being conducted by Firdous Azim under the theme of changing narratives of sexuality. These differing concepts will be defined and analysed while trying to establish how one has influenced the other. The preliminary findings will be presented back to the three groups and the expected differences between them will be used as a means of challenging the prevalent thinking and understanding better why the different communities have differences in their thinking.

Dialogues on Empowerment and Change

Regional Workshops: Each hub will hold an annual ‘dialogues on empowerment’ workshop specific to regional context, aimed at engaging a wide range of stakeholders with the work of the RPC and stimulating new debate on what has often become a hollow concept. Outputs will contribute to context-specific as well as more general literature on women’s empowerment.

International Workshops: The RPC will convene an annual international workshop on issues of broader interest to those engaged with feminisms and development, and outputs will contribute to literature on women’s empowerment.

See Reclaiming Feminisms workshop - July 2007

Global Hub Workshops: The Global Hub’s dialogues on empowerment will serve as a forum for engaging with networks working on issues of women’s rights and empowerment, provoking debate and disseminating emerging findings from the RPC to a global policy audience.