Strategic Impact Inquiry on Women's Empowerment: Report of Year 1 (July 2004 - June 2005)

This report presents the findings from the first year of CARE's Strategic Impact Inquiry (SII) into women's empowerment. The SII is a multi-year evolutionary process, which seeks answers to three basic questions:

• What are CARE's impacts on women's empowerment?
• How do CARE's internal dynamics affect its impacts on women's empowerment?
• What has CARE learned about doing global impact research?

The research found several positive impacts of CARE on women empowerment:

• Self-confidence, self-esteem, self-respect;
• Decision-making and family relations;
• Mobility;
• Collective identity and action;
• Attribution.

It identified some unintended negative impacts:

• CARE does not put nearly enough effort into supporting women's groups after they are set up;
• There is too much emphasis on quantitative targets (numbers of groups formed) and a lack of monitoring systems which reveal:
  • The quality of activities,
  • The distribution of benefits.
• CARE fails to address staff training needs around gender; this has a bad effect on its work for women's empowerment.

The document concludes with some of recommendations for future impact assessment:

• Serious impact assessment can be expected to create difficulties;
• Team composition, in terms of size, gender balance, needs to be worked out carefully;
• CARE programs and projects need frequent reflections on their impacts on the underlying causes of poverty;
• It is important to appreciate that the research process itself necessarily impacts on respondents and this has to be made as positive as possible.