Oxfam asserts that effective economic empowerment for women occurs when women enjoy their rights to control and benefit from resources, assets, income and their own time, and when they have the ability to manage risk and improve their economic status and wellbeing. However, for Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) to translate into meaningful empowerment, women must also have the autonomy and self-belief to make changes in their own lives, including having the agency and power to organize and influence decision making, while enjoying equal rights to men. This framework is intended to assist the development of more consistent, effective and integrated programming on WEE through humanitarian response, long-term development, influencing or campaign approaches. and freedom from violence.
This framework proposes a series of basic principles to apply in program design, and which constitute good practice in program implementation. They should be considered as the minimum requirements for WEE programming:
Principle 1: Increase the voice of women in the household, in communities, in economic institutions and in political spaces
Principle 2: Take a systems approach to overturn the barriers to realizing women’s economic rights
Principle 3: Harness multiple entry points to ensure meaningful WEE and support women’s empowerment more broadly
Principle 4: Build partnerships that embed ownership in local systems Principle 5: Strengthen internal capacity to ensure programme quality
Source: Oxfam
