ABSTRACT
CARE’s journey toward a central focus on women’s empowerment and gender equality as pillars of poverty reduction has involved decades of systematic learning and ongoing refinement of its guiding frameworks and tools for conceptualizing empowerment and promoting gender equality both in its organizational practices and in its sectoral programming. This chapter turns a spotlight on CARE’s journey toward that organizational focus on women’s empowerment and details the learning and research processes that went into developing this approach with the consent and input from the “ground” as well as from the academic and policy worlds. We trace the development of CARE’s Women’s Empowerment Framework and gender analysis guidelines, showing how resources and time were dedicated to theoretical as well as practical research, with the participation of the communities.
We then illustrate the implications of CARE’s shift to a focus on women and girls by following the application of these key frameworks through to its work in the agriculture sector. We describe the collective learning processes that defined what it means to empower women in an agricultural context. Using the case study of CARE’s Pathways to Secure Livelihoods program, we go on to illustrate how CARE’s guiding frameworks and practices of learning and personal reflection are embedded in the Pathways model, which in itself has become a field-tested framework for flexible, gender-responsive agriculture programming across diverse contexts.
In sum, this chapter examines how an institutional learning culture that prioritizes gender equality, values collective learning, and invests in 132“ground-truthing” robust theories of change has led to programming models and theoretical frameworks that (a) are grounded in programmatic experience and that (b) provide a common language for diverse country programs to be accountable to gender outcomes in their respective sectors. This collective learning approach enables CARE to contribute effectively to the global discourse, ensure institutional accountability to gender equality, and continually enhance the quality and suitability of gender-responsive programming.
