About this Wiki

Through this page, we invite you into a participatory process, in which we will explore whether we can assess the impact microfinance on a woman's interior experience of empowerment.

For more information 

To learn more about how we are approaching "women's empowerment through microfinance," you can see:

The first meeting of the Women's Empowerment through Microfinance Clarity Forum took place on November 26, 2007, hosted by the Institute for Strategic Clarity at the Harvard Faculty Club.

The participants were (see their bios):

• Peri Chickering
• Susanne R. Cook-Greuter
• Helen-Ann Ireland
• Rebecca Koeniger-Donohue
• Luz Maria Puente
• Mary Day Mordecai
• Kate W. Parrot
• Anne Starr
• Jim Ritchie-Dunham

Overview of the clarity forum

Below is a brief description of what happened at the first meeting of this Clarity Forum.  For transcriptions and audios of the clarity forum, click here.

Jim described how the vision for this forum emerged while visiting very poor communities in Guatemala, while working with CARE Guatemala.  Among their many projects in Guatemala, CARE had developed successful microfinancing projects to help women get out of poverty. 

• In the broader world, microfinancing has reached over 100 million women and there are plans to reach the next 200 million of the poorest women in the world in the next 10 years (see Microcredit Summit Campaign).  Much of this massive effort has been done in the name of "women's empowerment," yet none assess whether their programs directly impact the interior sense of empowerment in these women. 
• In Guatemala there are 5 million indigenous people, 40% of the population, representing 23 ethno-linguistic communities.

Jim then told us stories about two indigenous women from Guatemala in order to paint a picture of what is actually happening to these women today. These stories touched our hearts.

Three questions were posited for discussion:

1. Should we assess the level of empowerment of a woman, especially as it relates to microfinance?
2. Can we assess the interior state of the level of empowerment of a woman, especially across so many ethno-linguistic communities?
3. How do we assess her level of empowerment?

We spent some time in silence to reflect on the stories and Jim asked us if we should try to measure the impact that microfinancing has had in these women. Most likely, there are many good stories regarding these projects. However, do we know if we have actually helped or caused some damage to a woman's empowerment as a result of microfinancing?

One of the reflections from a participant deeply impacted the whole group about the implications of microfinancing, when she said "If I had 200 million of the poorest women in front of me who had received microfinancing, what would they say had been the impact on their internal side?" What does "better" really mean to an empoverished woman? It was a pivotal, powerful moment. We realized that even though we are women, we do not know these women.

After talking for a while, it became very clear that we did not know what "empowerment" really was for these women, so we called empowerment "IT." An idea emerged from this conversation that instead of imposing what we think about their empowerment, why not hear what they have to say about what IT means to them?  We believe that no one has asked them before. 

Next steps

The group agreed that the next step was to write a proposal to interview some women from Guatemala to see if we could identify common patterns of what IT is in order to understand better what we are trying to measure. After further discussion, we believed that storytelling would be the tool that made sense to capture this information instead of using a traditional set of questions to drive the interviews.

Once IT is clear, we could use this definition to write the second, more comprehensive, proposal where we will take on how to measure IT. We believe that by taking these two steps in this order, we are more likely yo gain deeper insight into how microfinancing had impacted these women, their lives, their families, and their communities.

We hope to develop a formal process that may be used elsewhere in the world to measure the qualitative impact of other microfinancing projects and to help reach the 200 million poorest women in the world more effectively and efficiently.

We would like for you to bring your knowledge, your experience, your profound sense of being a women, and your passion to help other women and humanity in general. We believe this has to be a participatory process and ask for your support. We will welcome men to also be a part of this important research project, since they bring a different and unique understanding to this topic.

Please add any ideas or suggestions of what needs to be included in the first proposal.  I have created a comments page to hold everybody's ideas in order to help Kate and Rebecca who offered to write the first proposal. 

Looking forward to your comments,

Luz Maria Puente

Institute for Strategic Clarity

Updates

Kimberly King has joined this effort as a project steward.  In her role as project steward, Kimberly has already connected this project with the broader, global conversation on women's empowerment to end poverty.  As a member of the leadership council for the Women, Faith and Development Alliance, Kimberly brought the commitment of our work to the world.  For more on the Breakthrough Summit where this commitment was made, click here.