WUNRN
DONOR POLICIES CAN FAIL TO BRING
REAL & SUSTAINED CHANGE FOR WOMEN
For all their talk of empowerment, initiatives by development agencies and donors fail to tackle power imbalances, and do not allow women to realise their own hopes and dreams.
Women vote in
5 March 2012
- The empowerment of women and girls has risen up the development agenda in
recent years, championed by powerful financial institutions, the philanthropic
wings of major transnational corporations and influential development donors as
a sought-after panacea. There's an appealing simplicity to the argument for
investing in women and girls. Women and girls have been overlooked. They have
so much potential. Get them into work, and poverty will disappear. Get them
into school, and high birthrates will decrease. Get them into politics, and
peace will reign. Invest in their potential and in their families, and
communities and nations will yield the benefits.
It's a
formula that harnesses persuasive gender
myths with an action agenda blind to many of the principal underlying
causes of women's disempowerment. These myths – that women are more industrious
and responsible than men, that women politicians can't be corrupt and always
represent women's interests, that women care more for their children and the
environment and that they are closer to the earth – may be based on some
truths. But their power is based less on reality than on what they offer those
who tell and listen to them. All this makes for a promise to investors of a
safe bet, and a guaranteed return.
But a disquieting truth is
staring us in the face. All around the world changes are happening in women's
lives – in many countries, women are discovering new freedoms, exploring new
horizons and breaking away from old patterns, constraints and certainties. In
the process, they are facing opposition and exploitation, and encountering new
forms of oppression. Change is happening, but women's journeys of empowerment
rarely follow the simple linear formula that development agencies and their
corporate sponsors would have us believe.
The findings
of Pathways of Women's Empowerment, a five-year
multi-country collaborative research and communications initiative, suggest
that women seize opportunities for empowerment wherever they find them.
Sometimes, they find these opportunities in interventions targeting women –
like the micro-enterprise programme that offered one Afghan woman the chance to
set up a hairdressing business: a space that allowed her to make money, but
perhaps more importantly, to socialise with other women
(pdf). Sometimes, these opportunities come from women's own collective
action – like the Indian sex worker collective that routed out under-age sex
work in their community, and challenged the abusive treatment of sex workers at the hands of police and society. Where
projects, programmes and policies have made a difference, they have done so
because they recognised the power of relationships, the significance of
recognition and the importance of confronting limiting stereotypes and
institutionalising new norms. At the heart of these changes have been women's
organisations and movements, visionary and committed feminist bureaucrats and
collective action by women themselves.
Research by
Pathways suggests that powerful sources of empowerment may lie in places
overlooked by development. Research on women's sexuality highlights the
empowering dimensions of pleasure, and the transformative possibilities of
approaches that recognise
this power. Other pleasures emerge from surveys of women in
The research
suggests that piecemeal economic and political empowerment programmes might
give individual women opportunities to improve their lives through loans or
training, but they fall short of achieving real
and sustained change. "Empowerment lite" might deliver the kind
of results development agencies have been reduced to measuring – numbers of
women on courses, numbers of girls at school, numbers of women on councils. But
this rarely translates into the kinds of transformations that lie beyond such
limiting measures, such as changes in women's sense of their own possibilities
and horizons, and shifts of power that are the precondition for creating a more
just and equal world.
For all the warm and fuzzy images
of smiling women and laughing girls that appear in marketing materials, the
vision of change purveyed by "empowerment lite" is frighteningly
stark: one in which women and girls are recruited for their industriousness,
and put to work to maintain a status quo that is deeply unjust. Men appear as
shadowy figures, menacing or useless, never as allies or agents of positive
change – women and girls are left to bear the responsibility of improving
everyone's lives.
Empowerment lite offers women
entry into labour markets that continue to devalue their labour and does
nothing to support them to organise to claim their rights. It fails to address
the sexism they face in the labour market and political institutions, or the
violence that blights so many women's lives, or to support their efforts to
challenge the structural inequities that produce and sustain their
disempowerment. And rosy as it is, there is nothing in this vision about
enabling women and girls to enjoy life's pleasures and realise their own hopes
and dreams.
If women and girls are really to
be put at the heart of development efforts, a good place to begin is to ask not
what women and girls can do for development, but what development might do for
them. It's almost 20 years since the fourth world women's conference in