Summary
This document presents a framework for measuring contribution to women’s economic empowerment within the context of Investing in Women’s (IW) interventions and partnerships.
This framework attempts to answer three questions:
- What do we mean by women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in the context of IW?
- What are the pathways and spheres of influence through which IW contributes to WEE?
- Within the boundaries of what is feasible and realistic, how will IW contribution to WEE be measured?
The framework discusses some of the theoretical frameworks that have contributed to the design of IW interventions and the development of the pathways that underlie the program.
It also considers how best to measure the success of IW interventions on drivers of and pathways to women’s economic empowerment, highlighting the difference between the direct impacts of the interventions of partners that IW works with, compared with the interventions of IW itself.
Highlights
- The report considers the meaning of women’s economic empowerment, proposing the following definition that: ‘a woman is economically empowered when she has both the ability to succeed and advance economically and the power to make and act on economic decisions.
- The framework provides a comparison of the Rao Kelleher Gender at Work framework, upon which the IW program was originally conceived, with the more recent UN High Level Committee on Women’s Economic Empowerment’s ‘7 drivers of women’s economic empowerment.
- IW creates a chain of influence that is experienced at an individual, and at the group level, and the framework maps these spheres of influences to show how changes in norms, rules, policies and consciousness may take place across a wide range of stakeholder groups and individuals.
- The framework also considers how best to measure the success of IW interventions on drivers of and pathways to WEE, highlighting the difference between the direct impacts of the interventions of partners that IW works with, compared with the interventions of IW itself.
Published by: Investing in Women
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