Towards a new conceptualisation and measurement of women empowerment

Deborah Sciocco e Alessandra Folcio

Women empowerment has always been at the hearth of ActionAid international strategy to fight global inequalities and poverty. ActionAid Italy has been working on empowerment at the national and European level for more than 10 years, and in 2020 it started a path dedicated to structured learning on this topic. Our interventions focus on women economic empowerment to support the way out of intimate partner violence, deconstructing gender stereotypes, and monitoring of public policies and funds against GBV. The learning action started from the need to comprehensively assess the effectiveness and impact of ActionAid Italy interventions promoting women empowerment. It built on the experience gained in the past decade, as well as on the analysis of literature on the topic.

The core output of this effort is a framework to conceptualise and measure women empowerment, defined as a progressive multidimensional process in which a woman or a group of women acquires power and is able to make significant choices for herself and for others in the personal, social, political and economic domains. On a transformative level, this translates into a change in power relations between genders both in interpersonal relationships and at the collective level.

The framework lies within ActionAid intersectional feminist approach, hence including the description of changes in power relations as a key element. It applies both to individual empowerment paths and collective ones, assuming that solutions to global inequalities can only be found through collective and connected efforts at community, national and global level.

The empowerment path is thus described in its 3 different steps:

1. Potential empowerment: the initial phase of the process, it corresponds to the strengthening of the preconditions that are necessary for action, and coincides with the individual woman or group of women’s recognition of their potential as agents
2. Primary empowerment: it takes place when the woman (or group of women) makes significant choices but within the existing structures and power relations. This type of empowerment refers to acting within roles and responsibilities already assigned and defined without questioning them.
3. Transformative empowerment which can be:
   1. Micro-transformative empowerment takes place when the woman (or group of women) makes significant choices by questioning the existing power relations in socializing agencies at micro level (e.g. peers, family, and work, educational).
   1. Macro-transformative empowerment takes place when the woman (or group of women) uses her power to achieve a collective change that questions the redistribution of power in socializing agencies at macro level (e.g. political, economic institutions). It initiates long-term processes of change in social structures.

The document provides a description of the dimensions related to the empowerment process and a list of quantitative and qualitative indicators for their measurement. It does not point to a specific methodology to perform project and programme evaluation but clarifies how participatory approaches should be applied when discussing empowerment processes.

You can find here the English version of the document, and follow #closed4women blog and www.morethanprojects.actionaid.it/en to remain updated of ActionAid Italy projects and evaluations.