Women’s Empowerment and Development Interventions

The ideal approach in any intervention will be to ensure that concerns about gender equality are present in the ideas, information, vision and commitment of the different actors that conceptualize, design, implement, evaluate and learn from different stages of an intervention, in order to make an enormous difference to what the intervention is able to achieve.

Women’s Empowerment and Theories of Change

A ll development interventions operate, either explicitly or implicitly, with theories of change that make ‘cause-and-effect’ assumptions about the relationship between their activities and intended outcomes. However, because our understanding of social reality is never perfect and because this reality is constantly changing, in both anticipated and unanticipated ways, these assumptions need to be constantly subjected to reality checks.

There is a serious problem, however. Theories of change tend to reflect the worldview of those who formulate these interventions and their understanding of social reality. In a world that is characterized by an unequal distribution of power, this means that the world-views that underlie development interventions are not only partial and imperfect but are also likely to be biased. Most often, they are biased against those who do not exercise a great deal of voice or influence in either the formulation of these theories or their translation into interventions. In other words, development interventions do not always promote, or even seek to promote, greater justice in society.