Women’s Empowerment: The Heart of the Challenge
90 minutes
30 people??
Goals / key concepts:
1. Foster an approach to women’s empowerment that is “whole person” and complexity-oriented
a. whole woman
b. whole development worker
2. Galvanize support for the function SII can play in transforming CARE and the aid industry
a. a space for clarifying our theories of change
b. a platform for exercising transparency, participation and accountability
c. a source of lessons and strategies for improving our impacts
Key Message – What is the heart of the challenge?
The heart of the challenge, in working for women’s empowerment, is the struggle to be authentic: honest with ourselves and one another, genuine in relating to the poorest or the most powerful as equal human beings, and humble but determined in learning how to work with others for change that all can fight to sustain. The heart of our challenge is to be genuinely open to inconvenient truths and dirty little secrets about ourselves and those we serve – without losing sight of the principles and goals that define us as a rights-based organization, and bind us in solidarity to pursue a better future.
Everything we’ve learned in the SII points to the imperfect correspondence of development strategies and outcomes, with the diverse aspirations and achievements of women’s empowerment. An authentic engagement for women’s empowerment has to be one that makes closing those gaps its number one priority. It must seek to understand, and not obscure, that complexity, irregularity, and non-linearity of women’s individual and collective pathways of empowerment. It must allow us to understand and leverage the energy behind women’s and men’s own constrained choices, even as we present our own ideals and beliefs. And it must lead us to strengthen the strategies that women value, as we work to help them shift the rules and relationships that constrain their range of possibilities.
Yet so much about us – our professional skills and personal comfort zones, our organizational competencies and blind spots, our entire field’s dominant view of means and ends in people’s processes of change – mitigates against engaging with that diversity in authentic ways. Our failures are not merely failures of will or skill (though these play a part) – they are, like the obstacles to empowerment itself, deeply grounded in the structures and power relations of development, this instrument we’ve been using to try to achieve social justice. We are driven to squeeze Cinderella’s foot into the glass slippers we have on hand… even as we know that our shoe may prove an uncomfortable fit for her own journey, and she may cast off or be forced to remove it when we’re not looking.
Essential Features:
1. Participants confront and think about contradictions in our WE work and lives
2. SII team presents and participants test evolution in CARE’s thinking about WE
3. SII team presents an agenda for impact, built on empirically-grounded strategies, and participants “ground-proof” and enrich the proposed agenda for impact
4. Participants
Stage 1 – create uncertainty and honesty (Provocations and discussion)
Stage 2 – create safety, resources, but draw us back to the arena of uncertainty, as key. (presentation and discussion)
The session is split into two broad components – direct participant dialogue around key themes and challenges in the Women’s Empowerment SII, and presentation of insights that CARE can use to guide the next generation of programming for impact on gender inequality and women’s empowerment
Stage 2 – Deepening the Adaptive Challenge – 45 minutes
1. (10 minutes). Opening:
· Last Slide: Recap highlights of the SII messages to us all – headlines and big statistics
· Pose the session question for a warmup: Given that WE is something we ALL have some expertise on by now, if I ask you why it is such a challenge for us, what do you say? What do you think is the heart of the matter?
· Slide: A Provocative Premise: We struggle to promote WE in more enduring ways because doing so challenges the very foundations of our projects, our industry, our societies and ourselves (the project approach is really just the tip of the iceberg). Going to the heart of the matter means acknowledging the ways in which we know, because we live it every day, that our work is at a a disconnect with the full complexity of empowerment, and then finding the courage and staying power to engage the fullness, though we don’t know quite how, and it fills us with uncertainty and fear.
2. (20 minutes). Groupwork: Don’t take my word for it… Experiment with this idea:
· That we know more, already, than we are acting upon, and
· That if we think from a different frame about how to react, we know more about that too.
In pairs or triads, participants read and debate the relevance in their own lives of key quotes and passages from SII research reports and presentations. Discussions confront two key questions:
(a) how do these passages relate to our own lived realities and known (if secret) truths?
(b) how equipped is CARE to deal with the implications of these passages
3. (20 minutes). Plenary sharing of personal reflections/insights about how and why when we act as CARE, we limit the way we engage the “messy reality” of women’s lives and relationships in our programming, and what the consequences have been in cases we have seen ourselves. Pull out the big issues. A couple to start with:
· WE takes us off the “straight and narrow path” that all our professional instincts are honed to find – and therefore out of our niche, and our comfort zone
· We don’t all have confidence in our skills to surface, and engage, these messy realities of power… we’re even struggling to cope with them in our own personal lives!
· Part of the transformation, then, is recognizing the ways in which “poor women” are not exotic or other… even as we take care not to assume that they experience and understand their struggles in the same way we do. A profound respect and desire to engage with these fellow human beings, not as children we train or protect, but as equals.
3. (20 minutes). Powerpoint presentation of major implications of CARE’s ways of working for women’s empowerment, and the emerging lessons for future women’s empowerment strategy. Focus is on aligning our strategy to our lived, and empirically demonstrated, reading of reality, in order to deepen our connection with, and impact on, women’s real lives?
4. (30 minutes). Plenary discussion of options for construction of the next generation of strategy for a fuller and more effective engagement with gender, power, lived realities and social change.