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Project Record

The programme investigates what enables women, individually and collectively, to empower themselves, how they can sustain these changes, and how development agencies' policies support or hinder this process in order to make such changes visible and to build on them to inspire a radical shift in policy and practice. The key areas of focus are:

• Locating empowerment in women's everyday lives, applying a range of methodological and analytical strategies to gain a better understanding of how positive change happens in women's lives.
• Tracing policy processes that seek to promote women's empowerment in order to understand the enabling conditions, strategies and tactics for achieving policy change.
• Understanding strategies for change, seeking to reveal the factors for success and asking what works and what is specific to particular contexts, and what more generic lessons can be drawn.

Background:

Pathways of Women’s Empowerment is an international research and communications programme established in 2006 which links academics with activists and practitioners to find out what works to enhance women’s empowerment. The aim is to make these pathways of change visible and to build on them to inspire a radical shift in policy and practice. By involving policy actors and practitioners directly in the research and learning, they hope the work will be in itself a catalyst for change.

Intended Outputs:

Research strategy implemented for systematic identification of pathways of women's empowerment in four thematic areas.

Four centres of regional excellence in applied research strengthened – CEGENSA, NEIM, SRC/AUC and BRAC University – with capacity to implement and support policy research on women’s empowerment within their regions.

Associated global institutions – UNIFEM, DFID and other donors, IDS – strengthened in their capacity to make use of innovative and critical research.

Communications strategy achieved, having influenced key stakeholders to take RPC research findings into account in policy practice.

Consortium governance and management system achieved horizontal working practices and power sharing.

Progress and Impact:

The Mid Term Review of 2009 found that most of the outputs have either been achieved or are in the pipeline and nearing completion. Some of the real successes highlighted include:

• Knowledge outputs of extremely high academic quality, the consistency of the quality is remarkable for a consortium comprising such diverse locations, the outputs are diverse in form, content and style.
• A significant number of policy-advocacy and public education oriented communications materials have also been produced and used in the form of pod casts, photo exhibitions, films and videos.
• Capacity of the research partners enhanced. There is some variation, in relation to the increased capacity of individual and teams compared to improved institutional capacity.
• Communications is not an "end of pipe" activity but a central part of the programme.
• Some stunning examples of creative communications work across all hubs: Stories for Change (Bangladesh), a pilot TV drama on mythical stories of Nigerian women, the Changing Times, Changing Lives photography course and exhibition (Bangladesh), work with Ghanaian Foundation for Female Photojournalists.
• The programme created a transparent, democratic, egalitarian and effective system of managing the multiple partnerships and relationships within its structure.