Women Collaborating Together Measure Their Own Empowerment
Among the best examples of successful partnerships I’ve collaborated with was the Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction (UPPR) program in Bangladesh. UPPR’s main objective was to improve the livelihoods and living conditions of 3 million urban poor and extremely poor people, especially women and children.
Because experience suggested that if gender issues and the social empowerment of women and girls are ignored, the impact of economic empowerment and other poverty reduction strategies would fall short, UPPR made great effort to addresses discrimination against women and girls specifically, by focusing on issues that affect them within the home and in society at large. In addition to improving living and livelihoods conditions, UPPR worked to change the social position of the extreme poor women and girls.
I was hired as an international participatory monitoring consultant to assist with methodology design, data gathering, and initial field testing of UPPR’s Women’s Empowerment Scorecard. The objective of this consultancy was to develop a tool that was strong enough to provide meaningful data on empowerment yet simple enough for women in the community to manage themselves.
FG participants and Violeta
The design phase tested several approaches to participatory evaluation data gathering using day-long Focus Groups Discussions (FGDs) with Primary Group Members and CDC members, and Cluster Leaders (CLs). The main objectives of the FGDs were to obtain an understanding of what women themselves consider as 'empowerment' and the most important indicators of their choice. The underlying understanding guiding our participatory research was that empowerment was an individual’s or group’s capacity to make effective choices and then to transform these choices into desired actions and outcomes.
During the methodology design phase I and other members of our team field tested and refined four times the FGD tool until a data gathering matrix was agreed upon together with a pair-wise ranking matrix. I then conducted hands-on field training of research assistants and we launched the data gathering fieldwork phase consisting initially of 9 towns. During this phase I was in charge of coding and entering the data gathered using HyperResearch a qualitative data analysis program.
The initial field data revealed that UPPR's holistic approach to empowering women had resulted in personal as well as collective benefits. These benefits were fairly homogeneous throughout all sites visited, allowing for some variation in type and scope depending on the number of years participants had been members of the program as well as the specific conditions at each site consulted.
One of the tools used to understand how women in UPPR understood empowerment
The FGDs collected approximately 2,600 statements; FGD participants themselves narrowed these down using pair-wise ranking to approximately 21 sets of priorities. In order to simplify data handling these priorities were categorized into five conceptual domains: Group Capability, Agency, Personal Development, Economic, and Status.
For the purpose of analysis and scorecard design these five domains covered the topics shown below:
In real life these five conceptual domains are inter-related and complement each other. UPPR's holistic paradigm of offering multifaceted support to poor urban women both directly and through partnerships with local governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) created synergies among its different components yielding desired results as per the data gathered for this participatory research. The community driven development model adopted by UPPR ensured that women were leaders in charge of preparing needs assessments, managing and disbursing funds, subcontracting and establishing partnerships, allocating grants, and conducting quality control.
Participants during a pair-wise exercise
There is ample evidence that multiple facets of this approach synergistically interacted and reinforced each other. For example, women told us that by having the ability to earn money and have savings a woman's status both within her family and in the community have greatly improved. They were no longer considered as a burden but instead were respected and had gained self-confidence. Income generation enabled them not only to have better economic security but also prompted women to seek further individual improvements through skills training and grants. It also allowed them to devote their energies towards social and economic development of the group and the entire community.
In fact, the data revealed that UPPR groups interviewed were actively involved in mitigating many social problems in their community, such as domestic violence. Women were now interested in expanding further by starting larger economic ventures such as joint businesses. They also wanted to have women elected to ward level shalish or informal justice adjudicator panels and to local government councils. In fact, 9 UPPR women were elected as Councilors in City Corporation elections, a significant example of their empowerment.
Many years before this assignment I had written about the importance of holistic approaches and the participation of women in poverty reduction efforts in my thesis Paradigm Shift: Participatory Development in Theory and Practice. So it was very gratifying to see that the final findings of the Women’s Empowerment Scorecard conducted in 22 UPPR towns revealed that more than 90% of 2,700 CDC members reported moderate to high levels of empowerment. The effectiveness of engaging women in defining empowerment validated UPPR’s basic theory of change assumption – as well as the underlying assumption of my thesis – that the poor and extreme poor are best placed to define and lead poverty reduction efforts.
Violeta Manoukian
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