Empowerment: A journey not a destination - Capacity.org

possibility. As women come tosee themselves differently, theycan begin to confront andovercome obstacles in theireveryday lives. Working withwomen’s empowerment callsfor working with women’simaginations as well as withmaterial aspects of their lives,and for changing the waywomen see themselves and areseen by others.10Relationships matterOur work points to a missingpiece in approaches to women’sempowerment: relationships.Women’s relationships withkin, colleagues, intimatepartners, children, and friendsmeans their choices aremediated by theserelationships. Relationshipsmatter for social change. Bondsof common concern forged instruggles for rights andcitizenship, and alliancesbetween women working instate institutions and civilsociety organisations, are a vitalpart of empowerment.Interventions aimed at creatingand sustaining supportiverelationships among women,and supporting women’scapacities to act together aremore likely to havetransformative effects thanthose targeted at individualwomen.Shifting the horizons ofpossibilityOur work emphasises how vitalit is to listen to what womenthemselves say about their lives,their options and their choices.For example, one of the moststriking and unexpectedfindings from Pathwaysresearch in Afghanistan andBangladesh, is the role thatwatching television plays tobroaden women’s sense of theworld around them, andprovide them with strategiesfor negotiating power relations.This and the findings fromother Pathways studiesdemonstrate thatempowerment is not onlyabout changing the boundariesof action, but also aboutshifting the horizons ofReport structureThis report is organised around12 key messages emerging fromacross the diversity of studiesand interventions supported bythe Pathways programme.These messages have emergedfrom an iterative and innovativesynthesis process. The synthesisprocess has involved theanalysis of around 825 outputs,derived from 55 projects in 15countries. This process soughtboth to systematise keyfindings, triangulating acrossdifferent sources of evidenceand different modes of analysis,and to ground these findings ina scan of the current policycontext, so as to optimise theaccessibility of findings to thosewho can make the most use ofemerging insights in theirefforts to bring about positivechange in women’s lives.