Annex1.Review of the Women’s Empowerment Impact Statement: Key Concepts and Tasks
Throughout the meetings, the group reflected on the implications of the impact statement on their work:
- What is the work?
- How does the work need to get done?
- Who needs to do the work?
- What is your role as agents of change?
Figure 1: Women’s Empowerment Impact Statement Review
Component / Impact Group: Women, whose rights and entitlements are denied throughout their life cycle by institutionalization of gender inequity. / Long term impact Goal: The most socially, economically, and politically marginalized women are empowered / Situational Analysis: Takes specific forms from context to context:- What are positive/negative aspects of the context? What are some trends?
- How does CARE work with trends through program design? How does CARE deepen and draw on analysis to understand its TOC?
- Who are other key actors? What do they do?
Social Movements
Key Questions / Who are these women? / What is ‘empowered’? What is required for it? What is marginalized? / How clear are we on how this TOC works? What lies behind it? How strong is it? How can it be tested? What path reaches focus areas?
Concepts, Understanding / CARE Bangladeshidentified diverse groups of women, though this information has not yet been widely communicated. / An organizational position has not been pulled together. Different regions have unique contexts and dynamics of marginalization. / In several program areas,CARE has collaborated with other actors, and discussed enabling trends that link to three main pieces of the TOC, but these linkages have not connected to bigger trends, nationally. /
- Formulate Ideas/Hypotheses (for key reflection questions, see footnotes) [1]:
- Monitor for Learning: Test the idea/hypothesis over time and adjust the TOC.
- Identify key breakthroughs: In society, what changes represent fundamental shifts of culture, breakthroughs?
Action Area / For each new program initiative or project undertaken, CARE must differentiate who are these target groups, context of marginalization, forces against and opportunitiesfor empowerment / The group mentioned that they still need a standard definition of marginalization. /
- Build on existing studies, knowledge and tools to integrate past findings into the strategy paper.
- Conduct a context analysis in each region, and link them to national pathways.
- Elaborate on measurement system based on analyses, experience (layer learning)
- Solicit program design input from stakeholders (CARE’s role, blind spots, key actors)
- Ensure that program design involvesclear analysis and space for innovation/responsible risk.
Annex 2:
Tangled Pathways: Identifying Causal Pathways toward Women’s Empowerment
Objectives and Limitations:This exercise challenges participants to map a causal path toward a women’s empowerment. It is useful in highlighting the complexity of this work. The exercise demonstrates that there are multiple pathways toward any focus area, and that each change is inter-connected with others.
While this exercise clearly showed how pathways rest on a number of assumptions, this exercise did not draw outspecific hypotheses or assumptions underlying each causal pathway. It also did not consider stakeholders, trends, enabling factors for or barriers against social change. During the exercise, participants constructed pathways based on their own experience, so the exercise is not grounded in any systematic use of other analyses.
Instructions:Given the number of factors that reinforce women’s marginalization and exploitation and in light of the three focus areas of the TOC:
1)Identify four critical changes that represent a social shift toward one or more Focus Areas.
2)Map a pathway of critical changes to a Focus Area
3)Discuss and reflect on exercise and its outcomes.
Lessons Learned:
1)There are a rich number of potential pathways of change. Each participant has a different and valuable understanding of society and working with women, based on their unique experiences in different contexts.
2)To conceptualize pathways to change, it is important to bring in multiple ideas.
3)Be comfortable knowing that any pathway is uncertain: it intersects with many possible routes and cannot be predetermined far in advance. In this kind of impact work, we are all novices, and our expertise can actually be a handicap if it biases us to seeing only those solutions that are familiar and “proven” to us from our past experience. None of us has ever achieved these changes at a society-wide level.Whether there is “one true path” or many possible pathways, it is impossible to know how social change will come about until we have reached the destination, or at least a reliable signpost/breakthrough, and can look back to describe how we actually got there.
4)Any pathway must be open to shifts and evolution, as program capabilities and opportunities unfold.
5)Social shifts are interdependent across focus areas.
6)Formulating hypotheses/ideas for change requires making assumptions. This is not only ok, but essential – what is important is to be as explicit as we can be about those assumptions, and to invite challenge from our own learning and outside actors about the validity or completeness of our known assumptions.
7)In order to achieve social change, all parts of the organization must invest toward programmatic work. Staff must first, gain awareness and then critical ownership over the program approach.
Reflections on the Exercise:
1)Mappinga path to a focus area is uncomfortable and intimidating.Participants felt urgency to know the answer, but at the same time did not know which way to go.
2)While the goals and theory have been formed, it is difficult to envision how goals will be reached in practical terms.
3)Participants acknowledged that the confusion created by this exercise was a positive first step to transforming the conversations around how CARE works.
Annex 3:
Exercise 2: Future Breakthroughs: envisioning outcomes toward Women’s Empowerment
Objectives and Limitations:This exercise aimed to define and identify key breakthrough areas in the next 5 and 15 years. This would lead to the identification of a critical path toward the TOC focus areas. Unlike the first exercise, this activity allowed participants to remove themselves from the task of influencing change.
This exercise explicitly does not seek to explain how the changes are brought about, or CARE’s potential roles. It focuses more on the results themselves as possible sources for identifying key indicators of change than on hypotheses and assumptions about what would cause the change, or learning systems needed to test those hypotheses and assumptions.On a purely descriptive level, it could be deepened by pushing discussion of who the stakeholders/drivers of change might be, enabling factors and barriers facing each critical change, and the collateral changes that would precede and follow such breakthroughs.
Instructions: Envision that you fall asleep and awake in the future? What would society look like in terms of the 3 focus areas? Can you describe the changes in society in recognizable terms? Who is doing what differently?
- After 5 years
- After 15 years
1)With a partner, discuss key changes that would take place after 5 and 15 years in regard to the TOC Focus Areas.
2)Present findings and identify critical breakthrough changes, and reflect on exercise/outcomes.
Lessons Learned:
1)A breakthrough is a key shift that will NOT likely regress. Breakthroughs are durable (address agency, relations and structure) and significant (large scale, and diverse).
2)Social change fundamentally requires shifts in relationships, structures and individual agency.
3)To promote change, CARE needs leaders who take responsible risks toward sustainable social change, which is a departure from traditional manager roles.
4)Critical breakthroughs represent important changes with implications for all focus areas of TOC.
Reflections/Suggestions on the Exercise:
1)This process was much more positive and energizing as it focuses on the possibilities and what needs to be done.
2)Reflecting from this exercise made it much easier for participants to discuss and agree on key breakthrough areas.
3)Focusing on a detailed description of the desired changes without a discussion of the strategy may feel “soft” as a design process, but it is based on the reality that we do not know, today, HOW to get to where we want to go, but we can learn along the way if we are clear WHERE we are trying to reach. What the optimism/energy suggests is that staff are confident in their ability to learn along the wayhow to make change happen. They can only be clear enough up front about the importance and nature of change. In this sense, it is a visioning exercise like those used by successful athletes and business leaders facing complex, shifting challenges, who must always be open to shifting strategies and approaches as they track progress towards a goal.
4)Participants felt that the first exercise helped to establish confusion and reinforce the complexities around impact and learning-focused work. The second exercise allowed them to view the same challenge from a new perspective, which was more optimistic. They felt a combination of the two exercises may be helpful for future exercises.
5)One participant suggested that thework of deepening the TOC may begin by having people narrate a story from their own experience working in development. In this way, they can analyze how they experienced change and describe its non-linear pathway.
[1]Hypothesis formulation:What is the critical path that will spur change? How do focus areas interact? What are the assumptions underlying our hypotheses/ideas? In our work, are our projects actually affecting the pathway (social change)?
Learning:What are the indicators to test the ideas/hypotheses? How will CARE actually learn from hypotheses?How to share learning within organization?
Analysis:What are the changes in society that will lead to a focus area within the TOC? How can the program engage both the powerful and organized? What spaces exist that can support or prevent change? Who is doing it already? Who can do them? Map out relationships and how they link to one another.
CARE’s Role:What is the place for CARE within this system?What resources are there to take this forward? How is CARE working (process)? What is CARE’s value-added?