We cannot give a woman a cow and expect her to change the world
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Version 0 of 1. The UK government and Unicef, the UN children's agency, hosted the world's first Girl Summit in London this week to drum up support for a campaign to end child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), practices affecting millions of girls around the globe. Working with communities to eradicate these practices is an important step towards gender parity. However, the focus on investing in girls to bring worldwide benefits – which has become increasingly popular among donors, NGOs and private-sector supporters – is a concern. Quick fixes are rarely the answer to complex and intertwined problems such as access to decent work, education and securing legal rights. The analogy used within the Pathways of Women's Empowerment programme, an international research initiative that aims to bring about positive change to women's lives, is that agencies are building motorways to nowhere. By speeding down a highway and focusing only on the destination, rather than journeying carefully along more meandering pathways, development agencies may be missing the fact that women's paths to empowerment are neither straight nor straightforward: there are many obstacles, women do not travel alone, routes are circuitous and there may be many stops along the way. To achieve sustainable gender equality, donors should look beyond targets and tick-boxes, and explore the complexity of women's lives and relationships. That education is no longer such a secure route to empowerment has been recognised by many university graduates in the UK. It is also one of the important findings from a survey of three generations of women undertaken by Akosua Darkwah, a researcher at the University of Ghana. For the older generation of Ghanaian women Darkwah interviewed, education had guaranteed a pathway to valuable formal-sector jobs, but not so for a younger generation faced with a more unpredictable labour market. In a recent article, Mariz Tadros, a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, points out that women's empowerment can often come at the expense of other women, who support such households by undertaking domestic work for long hours at low pay. These examples highlight the importance of context and the role geography, history, class and race play in improving women's lives. Such evidence also points to the need to be aware of our own context and how our empowerment affects others. For development interventions to be successful, they need to be fully appreciative of the lives of poor women and not see them as a homogenous group. Surveys conducted in Bangladesh and Egypt highlight the cultural differences between women. For women in Bangladesh and Egypt, work outside the home was seen as a more recent positive step towards empowerment, but not so for women in Ghana, where this was something they had always experienced. Focusing only on economic, political and legal routes of empowerment through interventions such as microcredit, quotas and law reform risks missing some of the less obvious but still important aspects of women's lives. For instance, although representations of women in the media have sometimes proved disempowering, a study in Bangladesh and Pakistan by Aanmona Priyadarshini and Samia Rahim, from Brac University, and Neelam Hussain, from Simorgh, shows how television can affect women. Women experienced pleasure and hope for their own lives from shared viewing, but also chose, judged or disregarded narratives dependent on how they connected with them, the study showed. One research participant in Pakistan said a TV programme that featured a woman in a job interview informed her how to behave in such situations. In the words of Brazilian philosopher of education Paulo Freire, the process of empowerment requires creating critical consciousness, or helping women to see themselves as equal citizens. This idea is not new but is worth repeating in an age of what Lisa VeneKlasen, an activist from Just Associates, describes as "clickivism" – the notion that we can simply press a button to lift a woman from poverty. We need to listen to women's experiences to understand what works and what does not; we need to support women in realising their rights and support organisations that help secure them; and we need to tackle the power structures that sustain inequality, and the issues that block women's equal representation in politics and business. What we cannot do is give a woman a cow and expect her to change the world. • Jenny Edwards is programme officer for Pathways of Women's Empowerment at the Institute of Development Studies |