Research points to key areas where other actors, eg, donors, or other external actors or interventions may best be able to support and strengthen women’s voice and leadership in decision-making.
By Maggie Mzumara
Ensuring that the design of interventions and external support is context-specific is a priority. While there are similarities within and across countries, the political and institutional foundations of both gender relations and the broader political settlement vary across time and place. Technical approaches that are not grounded in an understanding of how these play out in particular localities and for particular groups of women (and men) will be ineffective. Investing in external actors’ understanding of the context must be an integral and sustained feature of engagement across the political, social and economic spheres.
Achieving change requires activists and donors to “think and work politically”. Increasing women’s voice and leadership involves redistribution of power and resources, and thus is often met with resistance. Advances in gender equality are therefore mostly the outcome of political work, and donor approaches need to help and not hinder this.
This includes facilitating strategic dialogue, trust and alliance building, including among unlikely partners, alongside support for women’s collective action and oppositional (social and political) mobilisation. The challenge lies in achieving a balance between taking the strategic and pragmatic decisions likely to advance women’s political interests, while maintaining the transformative goal in sight and not accepting trade-offs that unwittingly jeopardise or delay progress towards gender justice. For donors, working politically means investing in locally-driven change processes and using international resources to leverage change and facilitate strategic coalitions within the country. Research indicates, for instance, that successful women’s coalitions are those that employ “soft advocacy” by harnessing existing networks, both informal relationships with male power-holders and established ties between elite women, and who strategically frame issues so as to circumvent conservative opposition.
Supporting women’s collective action is strategic. Women’s socio-political and economic mobilisation have been consistently found to be important to change the formal and informal rules important for their voice, access to decision-making and influence. Assisting collective action means recognising women’s diversity and supporting them to define and organise around their priorities and interests. Women often focus on practical concerns initially, but their attention can shift over time to more strategic objectives that seek to change the underlying causes of women’s marginalisation. External funders and implementers may also need to alter their own thinking and allow for multiple women’s movements rather than just ‘a’ women’s movement. Funders should also adopt a twin-track approach of supporting women’s autonomous organisations, known to be important for more transformative agenda setting, while also helping women to exert greater influence in mainstream (thus male-dominated) organisations and policy forums where key decisions are made.
Work with multiple stakeholders and invest in long-term relationships with partners. Doing so will help donors to select credible intermediaries, support substantive change processes, and build on organic rather than induced participation. Fostering both professional and grassroots women’s organisations, and long-term relationships between them, is needed to ensure poor women’s everyday needs and concerns inform national advocacy by elite women and to connect community action to broader socio-political movements. Women (and their funders) need also to build coalitions and networks with decision-makers and other stakeholders in a strong position to advance women’s empowerment, such as core government ministries, universities, and the private sector.
Better understand and support women’s political capacitation. Women need leadership and negotiation skills to navigate the particular formal and informal modes and forums of political engagement and decision-making in political and social space. Women can develop political capabilities and networks through a range of experiences, including civic associations and oppositional voice, having family members who are politicians or activists, student politics, and voluntary and professional work, as well as formal political careers in party or legislative politics, and through increased presence in cabinet and executive posts. Those intervening to assist must recognise the different ways that women may enter politics, and that what women need to be better political leaders will also vary as a result. There is a need to invest in a better understanding and learning about what it takes to support women’s political and leadership roles more effectively, given context-specific political economy conditions.
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Develop and support multidimensional approaches that address both the practical and structural constraints to women’s voice, decision-making and leadership. Siloed and overly technical approaches, such as to microfinance, social accountability or women’s leadership development, can achieve short-term, localised and more instrumental gains (e.g. increase women’s access to assets, services, formal political positions). However, supporting women’s empowerment and sustained change requires multiple programming and complementary activities that explicitly seek to raise women’s (and men’s) consciousness, develop social capital and capabilities and change de facto norms. For example, access to assets, such as microfinance, is more likely to empower women when provision encourages group interaction between women and is combined with technical, vocational and/or legal training. Similarly, social accountability processes or political engagement by women can only be vehicles to advance six women’s interests if they are designed to address barriers to their meaningful participation, and will only lead to sustained change if processes are either linked to broader social movements or become institutionalised.
Source: ODI odi.org Report – April 2015
l Maggie Mzumara is a media, communication and leadership strategist. She is founder of Success in Stilettos, a platform dedicated to the development of women leadership. She is also founder and publisher of the Harare South Western News — a community newspaper founded to empower and lend a voice to under-represented communities in high and medium-density suburbs in Harare. She can be reached on email: [email protected] Twitter:@magsmzumara
