Transcript Slide 1

CARE’s Women’s
Empowerment SII:
Process, Lessons and
Applications in the Program
Approach
Michael Drinkwater and Diana Wu
Program Approaches
March 04, 2010
PART I: The Women’s Empowerment
Strategic Impact Inquiry
Process and Lessons
Starting Points:
CARE’s Vision & Principles
We seek a world of hope, tolerance and social justice, where poverty has
been overcome and people live in dignity and security.
CARE will be a global force and a partner of choice within a worldwide
movement dedicated to ending poverty. We will be known everywhere for
our unshakable commitment to the dignity of people.
CARE International Programming
Principles
1: Promote Empowerment
2: Work in partnership with others
3: Ensure Accountability and
Promote Responsibility
4: Oppose Discrimination
5: Oppose Violence
6: Seek Sustainable Results
Driving our Discourse:
Strategic Impact Inquiry at CARE
Goal
Deepen a culture of learning and critical inquiry through:
Accountability
Offer stakeholders in
and out of CARE
evidence to assess
our work
PROGRAM
QUALITY
Empowering
Use Analysis
participatory,
rights-based methods
that are empowering in
themselves
RIGHTS
BASED
APPROACH
Continuous Improvement
Research for
organizational action.
Aggressively share
lessons with others
ADVOCACY
The SII on Women’s Empowerment:
In a Nutshell
What contributions are CARE
programs making, if any, to the
empowerment of women and the
advancement of gender equity?
Year 1 - Launching
What internal, organizational
variables are associated with higher –
and lower – levels of impact on
women’s empowerment and
improving gender equity?
•In depth site research (5 sites); Desk analyses of evaluations, proposals, C-Pin
Year 2 - Broadening
•In depth site research (24 sites); Desk analysis of C-pin,
Promising Practices Inquiry
Year 3 - Probing
24 countries
35 (+1000) projects
+350 staff;
5 CI members
•In-depth comparative research (6 sites) on empowerment and HIV/AIDS risk
Year 4- Knowledge Sharing
•Summarizing, producing program guidance, publishing and promoting externally
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.
What Good Projects Do:
impacts, opportunity costs and harms
Good women’s empowerment projects typically…
…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
So what’s it gonna take?
Understanding context (and questioning our
assumptions about it)
• Equipping staff to face internalized and entrenched gender
norms
• Building community with others –movements, NGOs,
donors
• Challenging and strengthening a collective understanding of
underlying causes of gender inequity in a given context,
analyzing policies north & south
• Working to truly understand the specific population
groups we seek to serve
So what’s it gonna take?
Program Design (planning a coherent system of
actions over time, for impact), and
• Articulate a transformational goal making empowerment
explicit
• Proposing a theory of social change (broadly), and
hypotheses of what CARE/partners can do to shape impact
across all TOC components
• Building dynamic learning system to track progress:
method & indicators
• Testing / revision of the TOC – through staff reflection and
external challenge
• Ground global indicators of key change domains in local
realities, including indicators for agency/structure/relationsrelated aspects.
So what’s it gonna take?
Project Design and Activities (as a reinforcing
system of entry points for change )
• Seek entry points to maximize chances of
engaging/learning about local communities, building relations
of trust and interdependence, and bringing opposing interests
together.
• Solidarity groups can provide women with empowering
space and support, but we must recognize that our work
with groups is often a woman’s first step into collective
identity/action.
• Use group strategies to link to wider movements for social
change.
• Engage men/elites to explore their interests, beliefs, and
fears – expanding the potential alliance for affirming, just
gender-power relations, and reducing backlash against
women.
So what’s it gonna take?
Organizational alignment
• Support advocacy led by women’s own movements, and
ground our own advocacy efforts in their broader vision and
theories of change.
• Promote knowledge exchange for the regular uptake of
knowledge produced by others and for staff to contribute their
knowledge regularly to a wider knowledge base
• Align contracts and build long-term alliances with
partners and donors to work across shared analysis,
hypothesis generation/testing, critical reflection, and strategy
shift.
• Support staff through training, accountability and
organizational structures that emphasize gender equity
and expand space to question who we are and what we are
doing – ensuring consistent action-learning on what
constitutes good empowerment work
PART II: The Women’s Empowerment
Strategic Impact Inquiry
Encapsulating Lessons
Encapsulating Lessons from the SII
• Key documents
– Global syntheses, regional briefs and SII reports
– Research frameworks and Methods
– Thematic Briefs highlighting lessons around key
strategies for women’s empowerment
•
•
•
•
•
•
Women’s empowerment overview
Group strategies and organizing
Engaging men
VSLA
Violence
Emergencies
• Key Platform – SII Library Site:
http://pqdl.care.org/sii
PART III: The New Generation of
Women’s Empowerment Programs
SII Lessons Applied
• Analysis and Learning
• Program Design and Impact Measurement
• Organizational structure and orientation
SII Lessons Applied:
Situational Analysis
Example: CARE Burundi
• Shift toward more reflective practice and rights based
approaches
• Women’s Empowerment SIIs: local definitions of
empowerment, HIV and empowerment
• Further studies to deepen understanding of local context:
marriage, engaging men, coffee harvest
• Broader historical perspective in situational analysis:
Patrilineal systems research
SII Lessons Applied:
Program Design
Example CARE Nepal
• Design discusses:
– Links to movements and enhancing women’s capacity to negotiate
their rights;
– Challenging patriarchal systems; and
– Promoting women’s inclusion in policy-making for gender equity
• Looks across projects and other key stakeholders in context to
enable greater collaboration for a coherent program
• Learning and reflection as a key strategy
SII Lessons Applied:
Aligning Structures and Partnership
Example: CARE Mali
• Developed a program and strategic support structure to
align with the program approach
• Aligning our work more with partners and contributing to
broader social movements
SII Lessons Applied:
Linking to Broader Rights Movements
Example CARE’s Latin America Region
• Approach from the lens that gender equity is political, and
necessarily involves transformation of power relations and
oppression
• From the outset, linking to social movements to inform
situational analysis and CARE’s role in promoting women’s
rights
PART IV: Supporting the New
Generation of CARE’s Women’s
Empowerment Programs
Key Areas for Further Guidance on
Women’s Empowerment
• Gender analysis and Learning
• Organizational forms to support women’s empowerment
programming
• Ensuring women’s empowerment effectively and explicitly in
program design and impact measurement
• Women and governance
• Engaging men and the powerful
• Gender based violence and sexuality