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Empowering Women

3 April 2017

Do interventions that aim to promote material well-being by making women the main household recipient of benefits empower women or not?

It’s a question that new IKD Director Cristina Santos sets out to answer in her reflections on conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes in Are We Empowering Women?, a chapter in Social Protection: Towards Gender Equality, a special edition of the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth’s flagship publication, Policy in Focus.

Although the SDGs recognise gender equality and women’s empowerment as key to reducing inequalities, gender-based violence and poverty, many policies and development programmes continue to be designed within a neoliberal ethos which gives the woman – rather than the social systems to which she belongs – the main responsibility for change.

Indeed, it might be argued that relying on women’s resources and employment to promote societal well-being  and neglecting dimensions such as intrahousehold relations when designing and evaluating the impact of such programmes could even compromise women’s social relations or security.

A further problem arises through the failure to analyse in sufficient detail the political participation and empowerment of women in the communities where CCTs have been implemented. As a result, there is a danger that women are either excluded altogether, or not given a chance to benefit fully. (Evidence from Tanzania, for example, suggests that households that benefited contained fewer women and were less likely to have a woman as head.)

In short, focusing on the empowerment of women in isolation may not be the best way to succeed. Real change will hinge on policies that recognise and act upon the social complexity of women’s relations within their families and communities.

Policy in Focus was co-edited by IKD Visiting Research Fellow Flora Myamba, who also contributed an assessment of the impacts of cash transfer programmes on women’s empowerment in Tanzania to the special issue.

Read Social Protection: Towards Gender Equality in full.

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