A Conceptual Model of Women and Girls' Empowerment

"The development field needs to be more serious about gender inequities and women’s empowerment. By ignoring gender inequities, many development projects fail to achieve their objective. And when development organizations do not focus on women’s empowerment, they neglect the fact that empowered women have the potential to transform their societies." (Gates, 2014, Commentary in Science p. 1273)

This White Paper from KIT (Royal Tropical Institute) Gender in partnership with and for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation analyses 15 years of work towards gender equality to find strategies to move initiatives further by developing a conceptual model for empowerment of women and girls with the aims:

• "To provide conceptual clarity on what empowerment of women and girls means for the foundation;
• To provide a common language for the foundation, its staff and its grantees for use in their work on empowerment of women and girls; and
• To stimulate ownership and buy-in of foundation staff at different levels"

The paper takes the position of Melinda Gates on the value of differentiating between a) development and health outcomes and b) gender equality and women's empowerment "to help better unpack the outcomes and processes of women and girls’ empowerment, and their feedback loops with other development outcomes." The model developed is based on a review of "frameworks, thinking and practice on the topic," done in three steps: identifying existing women's and girls' empowerment efforts; selecting 55 operational frameworks from key actors in the field; and searching publications and reviews of empowerment frameworks and concepts. The narrowing to this resulting framework came from a sampling, with feedback from Gates foundation staff, external partners, and experts.

Chapter 2 describes the model; chapter 3 considers the model, including definitions and qualifications in terms of choice, voice and power. "The subsequent chapters present the core elements of the conceptual model in more detail: expressions of agency (Chapter 4), institutional structures (Chapter 5) and different types of resources (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 highlights the importance of intersectionality and of engaging men and boys. The final chapter addresses interactions between agency, resources and institutional structures, and qualifies the empowerment of women and girls as a process of transformative change."

The model, both process- and outcome-oriented, aims for "the expansion of choice and strengthening of voice through the transformation of power relations, so women and girls have more control over their lives and futures." This means expanding opportunities and choices into action and outcomes; establishing participation in decision-making in households, communities, markets, and states; enabling the voicing of demands through leadership and organising; and transforming control over their own lives through the empowerment of women and girls. Challenging gender ideologies, including patriarchy, as organising principles in societies,  via identities, norms, values, and beliefs, "entails a transformation of power relations..." tackling "systemic constraints on women and girls’ choice and voice."

Key elements of the model include: exercising agency, shifting institutional structures, and redistributing resources. "[G]ender relations intersect with class, ethnicity, caste, religion, sexual orientation, race and other social markers." Strengthening "voice and choice" means recognising these differences in women and girls, as well as differences in age as a factor in agency. Engagement with boys and men is also critical for their possible contributions to the empowerment of women and girls as well as reinforcing their possibly positive positions as "peers, partners, role models, and mentors, and also in positions of authority."

Agency, decision making, leadership, and collective action are illustrated by some examples.

• The Sanitation Hygiene Infant Nutrition Efficacy (SHINE) study "hypothesises that the caregiver capabilities of women who are mothers affect the health outcomes of their children..." in that their skills to care for a young child can produce positive nutrition, health and development outcomes through a woman’s "capacity to manipulate one’s environment through control over resources and information, so that she can make decisions that reflect her own concerns or those of her children or relatives."
• The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) "covers five domains of empowerment: production, resources, income, leadership and time. Decision-making is considered in relation to agricultural production, credit and income."
• The AWARD framework empowers "individual fellows in multiple ways, cultivating a growing pool of top women scientists across sub-Saharan Africa..." who are "technically competent to generate innovations needed by rural smallholders, most of whom are women...."
• Self Help Groups (SHGs) in India have been formed by both civil society and the government as vehicles of empowerment, starting with "women’s immediate needs, supporting women to consider long-term goals, mobilising at a pace that matches women’s realities and linking women with networks and associations with shared goals" For example, the Avahan initiative, a community mobilisation programme that aimed to address HIV/AIDS prevention for high-risk populations in six Indian states, involved female sex workers, high-risk men who have sex with men, transgender people, and injecting drug users. "Characteristic of the Avahan initiative was the flexible management of the programme, allowing for micro-planning, structural interventions and community organisational development." 

The institutional structures section addresses formal laws and policies, for example, the WORLD Policy Analysis Centre of UCLA is "working with foundation partners to map laws and policies that support more equitable outcomes for women and girls." At the household level, the example is CARE Uganda's gender-transformative approach to "strengthen the positive and empowering impacts of the financial innovations and mitigate the potential negative consequences of financially oriented interventions." When women earn money, husbands may pressure them, so conflict resolution and alignment of needs and visions of all members in household financial planning are used.

Imperative resources in this model are:

1. Critical consciousness;
2. Bodily integrity, including both health and safety and security;
3. Assets, including social capital; knowledge and skills; time; and financial and productive assets.

For example, the Global Early Adolescent Study (GEAS) framework examines healthy sexuality as part of critical consciousness regarding behavioural control, relation self-efficacy, and voice. Psychosocial influences on bodily integrity "feature in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Benefits study", looking at "how a woman's exposure to intimate partner violence affects child growth and development, in particular nutrition and health outcomes." In terms of assets, the WEAI identifies productive assets using indicators that differentiate between ownership and decision-making on purchase, sale and transfer, where women can participate despite possible male ownership. Time poverty is recognised as unpaid time spent in household care and caregiving. Social capital that provides tangible and intangible value and support is discussed, including solidarity networks among women. Another asset, freedom of movement is a measure within the GEAS Health and Sexuality instrument.

Intersectionality is addressed, for example, by the Girls Achieve Power (GAP) Year project, using activities to build social, health, education, and economic assets among South African girls. "The Girl Effect has published a framework on age-appropriate assets for the economic empowerment of girls." The 1,000 days (between a woman’s pregnancy and her child’s second birthday) approach works with adolescent mothers to improve their health, including "attention to their nutritional status, reduced violence, their sexual and reproductive health status and the delaying of marriage and childbearing."

Engaging men and boys projects include:

• "CARE’s Umodzi project in Malawi engages with boys and men as part of a strategy to enhance both peer and intergenerational dialogue about sexual and reproductive health and rights...." including same-sex dialogue groups and linking male change agents to boys’ groups and female change agents to girls’ groups.
• The "Couple Power project of the Child in Need Institute and ICRW in Jharkhand...seeks to promote equitable decision-making among women (aged 15-24) and their partners on use of appropriate family planning and better maternal health outcomes."

Empowerment as transformative change is discussed as rooted in local contexts, with seven qualifications for interventions including, for example: "Strengthen women and girls’ expression of agency in decision-making, leadership and collective action...; [i]ntentionally and explicitly address institutional barriers over the longer term...; [w]ork across different institutional arenas (state, market, community and family)...; [and l]ink with other (development) actors, when needed in other sectors...." The unpredictability of moving forward suggests another set of four qualifications including, for example: "Use a set of indicators and methods that can capture dynamics between elements of the mode... and [e]nsure flexibility in design, implementation and measurement and allow for adaption along the process....." The document concludes by stating that facilitating bottom up change needs to be non-prescriptive with a focus on informed and voluntary choice of women and girls themselves who are invited and listened to and motivated to be agents of their own empowerment.