Programmatic Practices that EmpowerLessons and Implications from

CARE International’s SII on Women’s Empowerment

Elisa Martinez, CARE USA Impact Measurement and Learning TeamDialogue on Embedding Practices for Women’s Empowerment – Atlanta – March 26 2007

Overview of PresentationGetting 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

ENABLINGENVIRONMENT

Institutional Environment forGrowth & Equity

HUMAN CONDITIONS

Promoting HumanDevelopment &Quality of Life

SOCIAL POSITIONS

Promoting SocialEquity &

Inclusive Societies

PovertyEradication

& SocialJustice

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.

Women’s Empowerme

nt Framework

StructureRoutines, conventions, relationships and taken-for-

granted behavior

Institutions that establish agreed-upon significations (meanings), accepted forms of domination (who has power over what or whom), and agreed criteria

for legitimizing the social order

RelationsConnecting with other social actors, building relationships, joint efforts, coalitions, and mutual support, in order to

claim and enact agency, alter structure,

and so realize rights and livelihood security

AgencyCarrying out our own analyses, making our own decisions, and

taking our own actions.Empowerment

involves poor women becoming the agents

of their own development

23Sub-

Dimensions

Agency

RelationsStructure

Carrying out our own analyses, making our own decisions, and

taking our own actions.

Empowerment involves poor women becoming the agents of their own development

Routines, conventions, relationships and

taken-for-granted behavior

Institutions that establish agreed-upon significations (meanings),

accepted forms of domination (who has power over what or whom), and

agreed criteria for legitimizing the social order

Array and quality of social interaction.

What are the preferences, habits, expectations that women have of their relations with other women,

men, and institutional actors?

Agency-based1.Self-image; self-esteem

2.Legal / rights awareness3.Information / skills

4.Educational attainment5.Employment / control of labour

6.Mobility in public space7.Decision making and influence in household finance & child-rearing

8.Group membership / activism9.Material assets owned

10.Body health / integrity

Structural1.Marriage/Kinship rules and roles

2.Inclusive & equitable notions of citizenship 3.Transparent information and access to services

4.Enforceability of rights, access to justice5.Market accessibility (labour/credit/goods)

6.Political representation7.Share of state budgets

8.Density of civil society representation

Relational1.Consciousness of self / others

as interdependent2.Negotiation / accommodation habits

3.Alliance / coalition habits4.Pursuit / acceptance

of accountability5.New social forms

Bangladesh Ecuador India Yemen

Access/control over income and assetsDecision-making processesMobility and participation in public sphere Marriage and dowryAccess to justice, and local practices of justicePolitical participation Gender-based violence

Access to resources & material achievementDecision-makingRelations with the partner and familyRelations with other institutions / org’sSelf-confidenceSense of personal worth / deservingExpression of feelings / emotionsRelations within own organizations Awareness of efforts and sacrifices made

Can work and earn money for the familyCan take up any activity of her likingHas unrestricted mobilityCan manage family affairs effectivelyBold and able to face any situationCan lead a group of women effectively

Material assets,EmploymentDecision-making in householdMobilityFamily laborMarriage / kinship rolesNegotiation habitsSelf-esteem/self imageGroup membership/ activismRights awarenessAccess to informationEducational attainmentHealth awareness/ integrityIn village women’s eyes:MobilityEducationNegotiation & decision-making in the familyNetworking with unrelated men

freedom to make

decisions and move

around freely

woman who makes efforts,

who overcomes, is strong

“woman in paid jobs, carrying purse, self-confident and self-reliant, who has the capacity to step out

of her house and 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

•Self-Image/Self-esteem/Confidence •Decision influence •Material assets (control)

Ability to hold duty bearers accountable

Active involvement of participants in groups

•Inclusiveness citizenry •Interdependence

•Ability to identify, analyze issues that impact livelihood

•Self-Expression •Source of income or control of income

•Negotiation •New social forms

•Ability to advocate issues that impact the livelihood •Ability to mobilize constituency

•Freedom from Violence of all forms

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???)

A

RS

A

RSA

RS

A

RS

A

RSA

RS

A

RS

Patsy Collins Trust Fund Initiative

Pilot Core Indicators of EmpowermentKey

Empowerment Sub-

Dimensions

Agency-based Indicators

Structural Indicators

RelationalIndicators

Notions of self-worth; dignity

1. Knowledge of rights and structures of gender inequality

2. Equitable access to quality, gender-sensitive education

3. Changes in self-images and belief in ability to influence the future

4. Equitable access to basic human services

5. 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.

Control and influence over HH and public resources

Bodily integrity

Collective effort/solidarity

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.

•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 good news

•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.

The Bottom Line of Phase 2 – the challenge

“ This SII’s survey of our impacts

on women’s empowerment points

to a clear line – and a qualitative

difference – between the many

interventions that we successfully

deploy to help women to get along

in a man’s world, versus the very

few successes we can show in

making that world more

fundamentally equal. ”

- SII Synthesis Report, Phase 2

13% of projects in one sample (of evaluations) conducted gender analysis

How Broad and Deep is the Performance Gap?

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 fromHere 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 short-term. 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 toclose 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 fromHere 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

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.

Drawn from Drinkwater, M. Crafting Programs Organically (2006).

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 is a Program?

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.

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

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

Learning as our hallmark, Welcoming challenge,Training for transformation, Stopping the leak of

knowledge, Promising practices inquiry, Communities of Practice, Social learning fairs

• 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

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