Women’s Economic and Psychological Empowerment

Women’s Economic Empowerment has become a mainstream gender and development policy and practice.

UN Women states that “investing in women’s economic empowerment sets a direct path towards gender equality, poverty eradication and inclusive economic growth”. But as leading gender and development academics ask, is it really that simple?

In the light of gender inequalities worldwide, feminist economists and gender and development experts, demand a more nuanced understanding of transformation processes.

The Women’s Economic and Psychological Empowerment- EMPOWER project brings together feminist economics, gender and development, and social psychology to understand how to ensure personal empowerment processes through the promotion of women’s access to productive resources in specific contexts.

EMPOWER will answer the research question for which women, with which economic activities and in which contexts can access to productive resources allow for economic and social transformations that lead to women’s psychological empowerment.

EMPOWER aims to look at the psychological empowerment process in relation to programmes that target to give women access to different economic resources with a critical analysis of how development programmes work, engaging insight from academia as well as insights from gender and development policy.

I will be hosted by CARE Netherlands, one of the major non-academic international organisations in the development sector that has an extensive database of women’s empowerment programmes with the aim of creating gender transformative change across different geographic and socio-political settings.

Furthermore, I will carry out a secondment at the International Institute for Social Sciences, a major European academic institution of policy-oriented social science.

The proposed research and training programme is carefully designed to advance my professional goal of becoming a researcher and policy advisor in women’s empowerment and gender equality.