Understanding how Afghan women utilise a gender transformative and economic empowerment intervention: A qualitative study

The processes through which women's economic empowerment interventions are envisaged to improve women's health are strongly embedded in notions of building women's agency and autonomy. Yet despite the ubiquity of such interventions, there remains incredibly little qualitative work exploring how women actually utilise interventions to reshape their lives and wellbeing. Drawing on 9 focus groups discussions among 52 women who participated in the Women for Women International intervention in Afghanistan, an economic strengthening and social empowerment intervention, we explore processes of change. Data showed women learnt new skills around numeracy and animal husbandry; they perceived themselves to have become more respected within the household setting; they invested cash they received for intervention attendance in businesses, primarily their husband's or family's, and saved cash. Women did not, however, report their relationships to have been radically restructured. Rather women described incremental changes in their relationships within their household and used what they gained from the intervention to secure and sustain this. This conceptualisation of agency and empowerment reflects approaches to understanding agency, which move away from ‘action-oriented’ understandings, to ones that recognise ‘distributed agency’ as pathways to change through interventions.