The M4P Hub is coordinating a multi-step process aimed at strengthening women’s economic empowerment (WEE) issues within the M4P framework. Dr. Linda Jones produced a discussion paper that was presented at the M4P Hub Conference in November 2011, where additional input from donors and practitioners was captured to gather collective perceptions from the M4P community.
The growing portfolio of M4P programmes and increased implementation expertise have progressively exposed the need to devote explicit attention to the gender-specific systemic constraints faced by poor women and men.
This momentum offers an excellent opportunity to revisit the M4P framework and to initiate and support a process for developing recommendations and guidance for better addressing women’s economic empowerment in M4P projects and programmes. This consultancy forms part of a multi-donor (DFID, SDC, Sida) effort to strengthen the M4P Guides, and to lead dialogue and consensus building on how to prioritise and operationalise women’s economic empowerment within the M4P approach.
A key challenge of this analysis has been to unpack common elements of the definition of women’s economic empowerment, the guiding principles of women’s economic empowerment and whether they relate to women’s situation or programming approaches, and how M4P stacks up both against the ultimate empowerment goal (and the elements or objectives that underlie this goal), as well as the principles for reaching that goal. A second challenge is that the basic principles of M4P should not be undermined by changes that support women’s economic empowerment. Therefore, the goal of the women’s economic empowerment framework is to find solutions that support sustainable and scalable systems development, while including women’s empowerment in the economic advancement agenda.
The discussion paper can be downloaded here.