What do we really know about empowering women? Putting Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy in context

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a systematic review of the impact of international development interventions on the empowerment of women. It seeks to draw lessons from these past projects as a way of putting Canada's new Feminist International Assistance Policy into context. The review identified seventeen studies, 11 of which were country-specific evaluations and 6 were cross-national. These studies explored five different types of interventions: microfinance, community-driven development, asset acquisition, cash transfers, and education. The evidence is mixed, with varying levels of success and vastly different methods for measuring empowerment outcomes often obscuring the effectiveness of these methods. This paper also explores the history and evolution of feminist international development theory as a way of understanding the challenges of defining empowerment of women as an outcome and its implications on international development activities.