Understanding how Afghan women utilise a gender transformative and economic empowerment intervention: A qualitative study

ABSTRACT

The processes through which women's economic empowerment interventions are envisaged to improve women's health are strongly embedded in notions of building women's agency and autonomy. Yet despite the ubiquity of such interventions, there remains incredibly little qualitative work exploring how women actually utilise interventions to reshape their lives and wellbeing. Drawing on 9 focus groups discussions among 52 women who participated in the Women for Women International intervention in Afghanistan, an economic strengthening and social empowerment intervention, we explore processes of change. Data showed women learnt new skills around numeracy and animal husbandry; they perceived themselves to have become more respected within the household setting; they invested cash they received for intervention attendance in businesses, primarily their husband's or family's, and saved cash. Women did not, however, report their relationships to have been radically restructured. Rather women described incremental changes in their relationships within their household and used what they gained from the intervention to secure and sustain this. This conceptualisation of agency and empowerment reflects approaches to understanding agency, which move away from ‘action-oriented’ understandings, to ones that recognise ‘distributed agency’ as pathways to change through interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s empowerment
• social change
• agency

Acknowledgements

We would also like to thank other WfWI staff who provided support for the study, the research company Eureka who undertook the focus groups, and the women who gave their time and shared their views.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Andrew Gibbs http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2812-5377

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded through the What Works to Prevent Violence? A Global Programme on Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) funded by the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID). However, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the department's official policies and the funders had no role in study design; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; and the decision to submit the paper for publication. Funding was managed by the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), who also supported the project team.