Aid groups say they’re ‘empowering’ women with cows and chickens. They’re not.
ANALYSIS | A lot of these programs were actually disempowering
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Amanda Erickson.
When it comes to international development, the whole idea of “women’s empowerment” is broken, a new report says.
Take, for example, what “empowering women” looked like in the days and months after the Sri Lankan civil war ended in 2009.
Many women had been on the front lines, fighting among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. After the war, aid groups offered the women opportunities to take sewing classes or attend beauty school. Why? Learning to sew or how to apply make up could help them make money. In development circles, “empowerment” has become synonymous with an income stream.
“These are women who had joined an armed movement because of their political ideals,” said Kate Cronin-Furman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School who studies human rights and mass atrocities. “And they were being sent to learn cake-making.”
One government official told Cronin-Furman that despite years of training programs, she had never seen any of the women earn a living from these skills. Plus, these programs kept women at home, leaving them disconnected from their networks and from opportunities to organize.
A lot of these programs were actually disempowering, Cronin-Furman found.
“It’s not just that they failed to help,” Cronin-Furman said. “It’s that it actually made them worse off, cutting them off from political power.”
As she looked around, Cronin-Furman and her colleagues noticed this dynamic around the world. They documented their findings in a new report.
Where did ‘women’s empowerment’ come from?
The concept of women’s empowerment emerged in 1987 from a meeting of women in Bangalore, India. The group, known as DAWN, or Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, had watched for decades as “experts” flocked to developing countries, promising to improve the lives of women and children. But too often, these top-down approaches did little to actually improve lives.
Instead, the members of DAWN called for a new mode of development, one that “empowered” women to “transform gender subordination” and break down “other oppressive structures” through collective “political mobilization.”
So far, this hasn’t happened.
How aid groups define ‘empowerment’
Many aid groups see empowerment as something pretty narrow: providing women with economic livelihoods. To aid organizations, that means a woman is empowered once she’s given a chicken or cow or sewing machine, even though there’s no evidence that this leads to long-term economic gains.
But this narrow definition ignores something important. Women don’t just suffer because they lack income. They are part of a system that fundamentally doesn’t favor them, making it hard for them to obtain and stay in power. To change that, the report says, these women need political power.
As one of the report’s co-authors, Rafia Zakaria, wrote in the New York Times:
“Without political change, the structures that discriminate against women can’t be dismantled and any advances they do make will be unsustainable.”
Why aid doesn’t mix with politics
A lot of aid organizations pride themselves on their neutrality, and they explicitly stay out of politics. Aid organizations are also focused on statistics to show results, but it’s hard to quantify political change. However, it’s easy to show the number of chickens distributed or sewing classes attended.
As Zakaria wrote in the Times:
“U.S.A.I.D. statistics on Afghanistan, for instance, usually focus on the number of girls “enrolled” in schools, even if they rarely attend class or graduate. The groups promoting chicken farming measure the short-term impact of the chickens and the momentary increase in household income, not the long-term, substantive changes to women’s lives.”
