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SII Lessons and Materials on Strategies Supporting Women's Empowerment

This view of the SII library features a select handful of the research studies that illustrate the SII’s lessons about key strategies that can dramatically increase our impact on women’s empowerment:

· Engaging men in more authentic ways in gender work: Why are men so important to women’s empowerment? What are key challenges and considerations in working with men? How does fuller engagement of men work?

· Combating and strategizing around violence in women’s lives: What factors perpetuate violence against women? How does CARE’s work help women to confront violence in their lives? What can we do to support women against violence?

· Supporting women’s solidarity and collective mobilization beyond mere project implementation groups: What are CARE’s most common approaches to women’s groups and what do they tend to achieve in terms of women’s empowerment? What challenges do we face in supporting the work of women’s autonomous movements? What key lessons can we draw about organizing women for women’s empowerment?

It is important to note that very few of these projects began with clearly thought out theories of change, or specific strategies designed to advance women’s empowerment. But because of their careful analysis of impacts achieved by everyday CARE projects, these studies point out important strategic levers we can increasingly incorporate in our program design to contribute to positive and lasting change.

Focus on Findings

Drawing from these resources, CARE has also developed a series of briefs to highlight the key trends, successes, challenges and lessons learned on these program strategies for women’s empowerment:

Women's Empowerment & Engaging Men

The Strategic Impact Inquiry put a clear and intentional focus on women – their beliefs, their dreams, their capabilities, and their experiences of the relationships and institutions that shape their lives. And yet one of the SII’s most important messages is that lasting empowerment for women requires a more serious and honest effort to understand and support change among the men who are so integral to their lives. This paper discusses the SII’s findings on the role of men in women’s empowerment programming.

Women's Empowerment & Violence

Across the nearly 30 countries involved in the SII, violence has been a pervasive characteristic of the female experience – affecting them as victims, perpetrators and enablers. The violence that women experience can be seen as a crime, a punishment, a norm or a rite of passage. But it is more than simply random harm; it is the expression of systems, structures and relationships under strain – an instrument of social control, and an extreme reaction to the prospect of change. In CARE’s work that aims explicitly to shift gendered power relations, it is incumbent on us to be prepared to address violence, as a common feature of women’s lives, or a consequence of our efforts to support their empowerment.

This paper explores the multiple dynamics of power and violence in women’s lives.

Women's Empowerment & Women's Organizing

Social change agents have long emphasized the need for women to organize, and take collective action to challenge the social ideas and institutions that underpin their subordination. But does it matter what kinds of collectives women are in, and how those groups are supported? Evidence from the SII suggests that it does, and that the range of organizing strategies we see in the development sector reflects a diversity of objectives and underlying theories about women, poverty, and social change. Our most common approaches to clustering women in project-based groups can deliver practical benefits for women, but have little chance on their own of building towards impact on the structural drivers of gender inequity. They also limit the effectiveness of our engagement with more autonomous and enduring women’s rights movements.

This paper aims to help readers become more aware of the many possible levels of women’s organizing, and the need to be mindful about how we foster women’s groups. Drawing from analysis