Transcript SII Women's Empowerment Global Presentation of

Programmatic Practices that Empower
Lessons and Implications from
CARE International’s SII on Women’s Empowerment
Elisa Martinez, CARE USA Impact Measurement and Learning Team
Dialogue on Embedding Practices for Women’s Empowerment – Atlanta – March 26 2007
Overview of Presentation
Getting from “here” to “there”
• “There”: How do we define our goals, and
why do we define them that way?
• “Here”: What are our impacts?
• “Getting there”: Transformational Practices
I. Where is “There”?
How do we decide what’s empowerment?
• Politics of conceptualizations
• Adjusting our own understanding
• A CRITICAL “NEW BASIC” SKILL:
Naming our own ideas and theory of
change, asking others for theirs, and
working with the different (and diverse)
answers
SOCIAL
POSITIONS
Promoting Social
Equity &
Inclusive Societies
HUMAN
CONDITIONS
Promoting Human
Development &
Quality of Life
Poverty
Eradication
& Social
Justice
ENABLING
ENVIRONMENT
Institutional
Environment for
Growth & Equity
Defining Women’s Empowerment
We understand empowerment as the sum total of changes
needed for a woman to realize her full human rights –
the interplay of changes in:
in her own aspirations and capabilities
(agency),
in the environment that surrounds and conditions her choices
(structure),
in the power relations through which she must negotiate her path
(relations).
Any individual indicator of progress
can only be properly assessed and valued
in the context of how it advances that whole.
Agency-based
1.Self-image; self-esteem
2.Legal / rights awareness
3.Information / skills
Routines, conventions, relationships and taken-forgranted behavior
4.Educational attainment
5.Employment / control of labour
Carrying out our own analyses,
6.Mobility in public space
Institutions that establish agreed-upon significations (meanings), accepted
making our own decisions,
and
7.Decision
making
and influence in household finance & child-rearing
forms of domination (who has power over what or
whom), and
agreed
taking our own actions.
criteria for legitimizing the social order
8.Group membership / activism
9.Material assets owned
Empowerment involves poor women becoming
10.Body health / integrity
the agents of their own development
Structure
Agency
Women’s
Empowerment
Framework
23
SubRelations
Structure Dimensions
Connecting with other social
Routines,
actors, building conventions,
relationships,
relationships and
joint efforts, coalitions,
and
taken-for-granted
behavior
mutual support, in order to
Institutions
thatalter
establish agreed-upon
claim and enact
agency,
significations
(meanings),
accepted
structure,
forms ofrights
domination (who has power
and so realize
over
what
or whom), and agreed
and livelihood security
criteria for legitimizing the social order
Structural
1.Marriage/Kinship rules and roles
2.Inclusive & equitable notions of citizenship
3.Transparent information and access to services
4.Enforceability of rights, access to justice
5.Market accessibility (labour/credit/goods)
6.Political representation
7.Share of state budgets
Carrying out our
own of civil society representation
8.Density
Agency
Relations
analyses,
making
our
Array
and quality
of social
Relational
owninteraction.
decisions, and
taking our own actions.1.Consciousness of self / others
Empowerment
as interdependent
What
are the preferences, habits,
involves
poor women
2.Negotiation
/ accommodation habits
expectations
that women
have of
becoming
the agents
their relations
with other women, 3.Alliance / coalition habits
of
their
men,
andown
institutional actors?
4.Pursuit / acceptance
development
of accountability
5.New social forms
Bangladesh
Ecuador
India
Access/control over
income and assets
Decision-making
processes
Mobility and
participation in public
sphere
Marriage and dowry
Access to justice,
and local practices of
justice
Political
participation
Gender-based
violence
Access to resources &
material achievement
Decision-making
Relations with the partner
and family
Relations with other
institutions / org’s
Self-confidence
Sense of personal worth /
deserving
Expression of feelings /
emotions
Relations within own
organizations
Awareness of efforts and
sacrifices made
Can work and earn
money for the family
Can take up any
activity of her liking
Has unrestricted
mobility
Can manage family
affairs effectively
Bold and able to
face any situation
Can lead a group of
women effectively
freedom to
make
decisions
and move
around
freely
woman who
makes efforts,
who overcomes,
is strong
Yemen
Material assets,
Employment
Decision-making in household
Mobility
Family labor
Marriage / kinship roles
Negotiation habits
Self-esteem/self image
Group membership/ activism
Rights awareness
Access to information
Educational attainment
Health awareness/ integrity
“woman in paid jobs, In village women’s eyes:
carrying purse, selfMobility
confident and selfEducation
reliant, who has the
Negotiation & decision-making
capacity to step out
in the family
of her house and
Networking with unrelated men
make her place in
the world.” (CARE
worker!)
has educated children, can
defend herself, speak freely,
talks with men and can
leave the village without
permission and by herself.”
ECARMU Indicators
A
S
A
S
•Inclusiveness citizenry
•Interdependence
Active involvement of participants in groups
R
A
S
•Self-Image/Self-esteem/Confidence
A
•Decision influence
•Material assets (control)
R
S
A
S
R
•Ability to advocate issues that impact the livelihood
•Ability to mobilize constituency
•Ability to identify, analyze
issues that impact livelihood
R
S
R
A
R
Ability to hold duty bearers accountable
•Negotiation
•New social forms
A
•Freedom
from
Violence of
all forms
S
R
•Self-Expression
•Source of income or control of income
Note that all indicators carry the dimension of agency, structure and relations. Depending on who is responsible for
the changes required to achieve them. (What about the other 14???)
Patsy Collins Trust Fund Initiative
Pilot Core Indicators of Empowerment
Key Empowerment
Sub-Dimensions
Agency-based
Indicators
Notions of selfworth; dignity
1.
Control and
influence over HH
and public
resources
2.
Bodily integrity
Collective
effort/solidarity
3.
4.
Knowledge of rights and
structures of gender
inequality
Equitable access to quality,
gender-sensitive education
Changes in self-images and
belief in ability to influence
the future
Equitable access to basic
human services
Structural
Indicators
5.
Relational
Indicators
Participation in political processes
6.
Legal changes and/or enforcement of
women’s control of strategic
resources
7.
Equal economic opportunity, including
ownership/control of strategic assets
(land, labor, livestock, credit, home)
8.
Pro-woman changes in family/kinship
norms and institutions
9.
Pro-woman state budgets and
development policies
10. Influence on formal and
informal decision-makers to
make pro-woman decisions.
11. Incidents of violence against
woman and active prosecution
of same
12. Male attitudes regarding
gender roles and norms
13. Vertical and horizontal civil
society connections (density of
organizational social networks)
– LAC: solidarity-based
organization around agendas
of strategic interest, and
networking in civil society.
What shapes “the politics of there?”
• Individual experiences, beliefs,
preferences
• Theory – definitions and explanations put
forth by influential / thoughtful people
• Ecology – our reading of the resources
and opportunities our environment affords
us to pursue a given change.
All of these interact, all the time, for each of us.
Q1: Where is “There”?
How do we decide what’s empowerment?
• Can we recognize “the politics of there” in our
own work? Why do we set certain goals/metrics?
• What, concretely, can we do to move forward
towards a shared goal, given “the politics of
there” that lead our stakeholders to seek
different endpoints at different moments?
• How do we build a working agreement of what
“there” looks like – but still respect that
diversity/dynamism?
II. Where is “Here?”
• Brief overview of the key findings
• Couple of short examples
• CRITICAL NEW BASIC SKILL: Moving
from a narrow- to a wide-screen approach
to addressing underlying causes of
poverty.
The Bottom Line of Phase 2 – the good news
•a portfolio on the rise, the payoff from five years of investment
•Important empowerment gains for more that 20 million men, women, and children
over the past decade or more.
•Largely in agency: basic training, knowledge transfer, and skills building of women
•In a wide range of key domains: sexual and reproductive health, savings, democracy,
civil society, organizational management, literacy, human rights, emergency
preparedness, and on…
•More significant changes in structural aspects of women’s marginalization and in
the social relations through which lasting changes in women’s empowerment will be
achieved.
•New spaces for dialogue between local elected officials, customary leaders, and
women about women’s issues – e.g, elimination of female genital cutting, women’s
and girls education and health, dowry, early marriage, work loads, and more – where
no such space existed in the past
•Women claim that the skills and confidence they had gained from contact with CARE
programs were allowing them to play a stronger and more active role in the
household, to talk with their husbands at a more equal level, to participate in public
meetings, and to enter the public sphere more broadly
The Bottom Line of Phase 2 – the challenge
•a portfolio on the rise, the payoff from five years of investment
Yet…
•a portfolio riddled with missed opportunities to achieve deeper, faster, and more long
lasting changes in poverty and social justice.
•To build women’s soliidarity and political strength.
•To ground concrete short-term changes in long-term social change
processes – that we help women and men build over time.
•To extend the impact of early and incipient changes in gendered power
relations, helping them to move from new awareness/dialogue to new
policies, norms, and practices – and concrete physical results that last.
How Broad and Deep is the Performance Gap?
13% of projects in one sample (of
evaluations) conducted gender
analysis
2% of CPIN projects did gender
analysis as part of project design;
12% had an explicit gender
strategy; 1% did gender training
for partner organizations; 1%
raised awareness about violence
against women; 9% raised
awareness on women’s rights.
Of 32 project proposals Only
about 10% articulated
empowerment goals with a clear,
context specific strategy and
measures backing them up.
How Many CPIN Projects state they deploy…
Empowerment approaches
57%
Empowerment
+ GED approaches
37%
Empowerment + GED
+ Policy Advocacy
17%
Emp. + GED + PA
+rights-based approaches
15%
Emp+GED+PA+RBA
+focus on marginalization
11%
Emp+GED+PA+RBA+Marg
+citizen participation
10%
Narrow-screen approaches:
wide-screen ambitions?
Phase 2 research reveals a women’s empowerment
portfolio producing important benefits for women, but
limited by “narrow-screen” horizons.
The resulting performance gap first appears in our ability to
secure short-term benefits – we actually see evidence that
the lack of wider-screen commitment reduces impact on
the concrete, measurable, and material conditions of
women’s empowerment.
But more importantly, seen against a wider-screen
commitment to transformational impact, these interventions
are revealed as missed opportunities to build towards the
kind of impact to which we commit in our vision.
Narrow-Screen Approaches
• tacitly commit to goals that are easily measurable,
fundable, and palatable
• Priority given to maintaining our image of effectiveness
and efficiency, and thereby earning political capital to
persist in our efforts.
• can seed unplanned impacts on wider structures and
relations of empowerment, but these benefits or harms
are not part of the intervention’s logic. They are often
unseen, unleveraged
If the women have managed to make advances and recognize these, this takes place outside of any
analysis or consciousness of gender; there is no vision affected by gender that permits them to establish
the linkage between their gendered positions, poverty, and the project’s interventions. In the same way,
there is a weak conception of rights, and a weak consciousness of the women as rights-bearers.
(CARE El Salvador, JIBEWS Final Evaluation report, p. 14)
CARE El Salvador staff notation:
Very important – a gender equity perspective would use the tools of inclusion and learning TO MOVE A
DEEPER CHANGE – something that many times we as professionals do not understand, and we wind
up selling the change short.
What Good Projects Do Well, Their Impacts,
Their Opportunity Costs and Harms
Good women’s empowerment projects…
…Deliver tangible,
technical, gender
disaggregated
outputs under
contractual
obligations
…Focus on women’s
capabilities, skills,
knowledge without
trying to influence
gender norms
…Begin and frequently
ends with a donor
contract (a “project”)
…that lead to impacts that are…
…strongly individual,
psychological,
asset/service
focused
…able to mitigate the
effects of poverty and
social injustice, not
eradicate/eliminate them
…”seedlings” for
such sustainable
impact on
underlying causes
of poverty
…and create harms such as…
…reversible
gains; longer
term irrelevance
of output and
effects
…increased
workloads and
violence against
women and girls
…Male
abdication and
feelings of
worthlessness
…Weak
sustained
learning
between
projects
When is Good Enough… not?
Two paradoxes of narrow-screen approaches to impact:
• that what we can count, may not count for women’s
empowerment. Income does not in itself equal
empowerment; nor do morbidity reductions, educational
attainment, voting, group membership or even rights
awareness. These things can be accomplished in ways
that empower or disempower, that are sustainable or
easily reversible. We must not mistake the forest for the
trees.
• that our drive to show attributable results in the short
term can blind us to the real progress and pathways
of long-term impact on women’s empowerment. As
one research initiative argues, as we build “motorways to
nowhere” we may miss hidden pathways by which social
change can advance.
Q2. Where is “Here?”
How does looking at your own work, the
programs you know best, through this
optic help you interrogate it differently?
• Do you see elements of narrow-screen
focus? Wide-screen? What balance?
• What would it take to widen the screen?
• How would you do it? Where would you
begin?
III. What’s it take to get from
Here to There?
• Practices we need to pursue
• Transformation at work today
• CRITICAL NEW BASIC SKILL: Making
innovation, impact, and learning our
hallmark.
Wide Screen Approaches: What world class programs
do to leverage social justice for women
Depth and Breadth of Lasting Impacts On
Poverty And Social Injustice
Local, Long-Term, Impact Goals: Each country office commits to achieving three to five local program impacts
that advance the organizational goal, building and evolving strategy over time through cumulative learning
from their own work and that of others addressing similar issues.
Perspectives on Power and a Theory of Change: All program action is built on a working (and constantly
tested) theory of power and change.
Reinventing the Project: Projects are valued equally as platforms for reflection on long-term impacts, for
critical engagement with participants and stakeholders, and for delivering high-quality benefits in the shortterm. The logframe is used more wisely to map how we believe a project might contribute to a cumulative shift
in human conditions, social positions and the enabling environment.
Building Women’s Solidarity: Programs move to solidarity models where women organize to build social and
political influence around shared agendas.
Extending Solidarity to Engage the Powerful: Programs encourage women and men – in the home,
community and external institutions – to surface, debate and challenge the norms and practices that sustain
women’s subordination.
Aligning Accountability: Accountability is for impact, and to the constituencies served by the project in the
countries in which we work. The poor play a more prominent role in defining strategy and judging success. We
shift our relationship with project donors as a result, marketing and encouraging their investment in long-term
programs or project-sized components of these.
Organizational Change: Internal focus to
close the performance gap
Unyielding Leadership: Leaders at all levels take responsibility for finding and sharing
creative ways to enact our stated policy commitments and advance a clear
organizational goal regarding gender equity. They would manage down, up and
sideways to support one another in this difficult journey.
Collective Recognition: Achievement is seen as the product of teamwork across
hierarchies and divides in CARE and also in the communities we serve.
Responsible Risk: Programs become sites of struggle, risk-taking and learning,
proactively responding to harms as they arise.
Stopping the Leak of Knowledge: We have financial and organizational models that
retain our best staff, partners and ideas across project cycles, leveraging knowledge and
relationships for change. We use technology in sensible and revolutionary ways to
ensure that our knowledge is constantly at the cutting edge of our field practice.
Knowledge and Learning Are our Hallmark. We foster open-ended learning processes
that acknowledge that complex changes – poverty reduction or empowerment, for
example – can be difficult and hard to measure. We develop metrics that meaningfully
capture social change underway. Staff are rewarded for making reflection and critical
thinking with all stakeholders a core aspect of CARE’s work. We disseminate our work
at all levels to be transparent about our ideas, contribute to development knowledge and
learn from others.
Q3. What’s it take to get from
Here to There?
If our job is to propose a strategy for
dramatically improving our impact on
women’s empowerment:
• What do you know in your own work to be
the most effective ways of promoting
reflection, learning, and change?
• What are the waves of change, of
promise, already at work in CARE, that we
can ride to accelerate change?
An SII Bottom Line Problem:
Projects are the basic building block of our operating model
Drawn from Drinkwater, M. Crafting Programs Organically (2006).
It is widely understood across CARE that we need to work with longer time
frames if we are serious about evolving our work so that we can address
underlying causes of poverty and social injustice. It is also understood that
this requires us shifting to a programmatic way of working, rather than a
project based mode.
Despite this knowledge, the project remains the basic building block of our
operating model.
Yet, as we are also aware, it is when we do have programs that transcend
the normal 2-5 year life spans of projects that we are able to achieve
greater levels of learning and begin to evolve program models and modes
of working where a greater scale and level of impact can be achieved.
Where we see impact on underlying causes, intervention
tends to be been long term (often for ten years or more)
and has had multiple donors and project activities as well
as multiple programming cycles.
What is a Program?
A high quality program is organic. It evolves over time as learning occurs. A
good program ensures that reflective learning constantly takes place. Learning
and evolution will continue throughout the life of the project, in three main ways:
•
•
•
Analytical learning – increased understanding of the UCP in context
Capability learning – increased staff skill to lead complex facilitative process
Strategic learning – continuous evolution of project activities, based on analytical
and capability learning
It has certain other characteristics:
• The activities are focused and mutually reinforcing, not scattered
• Many of our activities will be projects, but some might not be projects (e.g., advocacy
efforts, mediation and dialogue efforts)
• CARE only carries out some of the activities; others actors are also important and in
many cases they take the lead
• Strong social analysis informs the program goal and activities throughout
• The time frame is longer than any individual project
• The goal is sustained change in the form of progress toward a rights-based goal
What would define the program is the nexus of activities bound
to an analytical core. Thus all action would proceed on the basis
of a theory of change being elaborated, tested, and changed.
The New Basics:
3 Practices for Transformation
• Engaging reality in full: Naming our own ideas
and theory of change, asking others for theirs,
and working with the different (and diverse)
answers
• Working programmatically: Moving from a
narrow- to a wide-screen approach to
addressing underlying causes of poverty.
• Treasuring knowledge: Making innovation,
learning and sharing our hallmark.
Practice 1: Engaging reality in full
•
Continually questioning why we hold certain assumptions about
poverty and social injustice: what they are, how they are linked,
who experiences them, and why they exist
•
Being transparent about what we see as the problem, why it’s a
problem, and for whom
•
Being true to local context: actually listening to – and engaging –
people whose lives we seek to change (powerless and powerful)
•
Resisting pressure to oversimplify – daring to acknowledge
complex social realities and explore non-linear change pathways
•
Using projects and programs to surface new conversations about
society and collaborative options for social change
Examples seen in SII: Dialogue of Knowledges,
Dialogues Valorisants, Diversity dialogues, Critical Social
Challenge, Institutional Analysis, Elite mapping
Practice 2: Working Programmatically
•
Committing to impact, with clear and measurable goals and
meaningful indicators for social changes that underpin long-term
improvements in women’s lives, and a refutable hypothesis about
how such changes will arise.
•
Using concrete, socially-valued change initiatives as entry points:
building relationships and understanding, testing assumptions
and building solidarity for structural and relational change.
•
Building solidarity among women and across women and men
through a strategic set of roles and alliances, across project and
non-project interventions
•
Explicitly using projects to test the validity of our hypothesis,
learning through inquiry, risk-taking and innovation.
Examples: Program strategies, Leveraging projects,
Entry points, Shifting roles, Risktaking to build knowledge
Practice 3: Treasuring Knowledge
•
•
•
•
•
•
Regular reflective practice, capturing knowledge for
application.
Retaining key staff and alliances across funding cycles
Testing the transferability of lessons and practices
Limiting data collection to what’s needed for questions
of impact and strategy shifts
Diversity training/ISOFI – exploring our personal
fears/blind spots, seeking surprise
Publishing and presenting our work for critical review
Learning as our hallmark, Welcoming challenge,
Training for transformation, Stopping the leak of
knowledge, Promising practices inquiry,
Communities of Practice, Social learning fairs
Organic Programming Process?
Understanding context (and questioning our assumptions about it)
• Building community, knitting relationships with others –movements, NGOs, donors
• Challenging and strengthening the collective understanding of underlying causes
of poverty and social injustice
• Policy analysis – north and south
Program Design (Changing relations between “developers” and “developed”)
• Building a theory of social change (broadly)
• Building a hypothesis of what CARE and partners can do to shape a given change
• Building impact statement and learning/accountability system: method &
indicators
• Design projects and non-project activities that offer entry points and advance the
program vision across UF categories
• Regular testing and revision of the long-term hypothesis – through staff reflection
and external challenge
Knowledge Exchange (challenging the politics of knowledge)
• Regular uptake of knowledge produced by others (social actors, other projects,
partners, others)
• Staff contribute their knowledge regularly to a wider knowledge base
• Periodic summarizing and discussion of lessons for the rest of CARE and those
we serve
• Promote uptake of program lessons and practices by others