The Women Empowerment Project is the result of a doctoral research project I began in July 2020, as part of a joint PhD project offered by the University of Queensland and Indian Institute of Technology’s Academy of Research (UQIDAR). In 2018, I graduated from the Australian Catholic University with a Bachelor of Global Studies/Bachelor of Arts with majors in sociology and philosophy, and in 2019 I graduated my Arts Honours degree in Philosophy.
At the start of 2020 I wasn’t entirely sure what my next move was career-wise, but I had a dream to launch a social enterprise and travel the world. Then the Covid-19 pandemic came along. Immediately the borders closed and my plan to travel to my 50th country came to a halt, I couldn’t work my job at a club I’d been dancing at for 6 years, and while I took the plunge to launch my social enterprise the Humanitarian Changemakers Network, from home, I craved financial/career stability. When I saw UQIDAR’s PhD project ‘Communication and Social Movements: Continuities and Discontinuities,’ I knew that it was the perfect PhD program for me:
This project will specifically explore the relationship between social movements and their uses of/relationships with media/information/technologies in India. Dealing with both independence and post-independence social movements in India, it will provide doctoral candidates the opportunities to explore the continuities, discontinuities, affordances, experiences arising from the technological mediation of social movements. The key objective of this project will be to explore the specific contributions made by technologically-mediated movements to the strengthening of movement identity and organizational structures, to examine movement investments in the infrastructures of communications and the historically contingent nature of the relationship between social movements and their uses of communications technology.Project Description
I knew this was the perfect project for me. After graduating high school, I first visited India at the age of 17 in 2014, to work on a community arts project with Sangam, one of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts’ world centres, in Pune India. I had recently completely my Queen’s Guide Award, which focused on developing my personal art practice, and the WAGGGS Global Action Theme- a program that educated and engaged youth in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. While at Sangam, I worked on a project with their community partner Maher, which used performing arts to teach families in slum communities about gendered violence, and how to support women who are impacted by violence.
India had since been my most-visited country, but I always knew I wanted to spend a longer period of time in India one day. A PhD program with an Indian University, where I would spend a year living and studying in India, was perfect for me.
The initial title I gave my project was “ICTs and the promotion of gender justice.” Perhaps anticipating that I would seek out something that would challenge me philosophically, I chose the term justice rather than gender equality or rights specifically because it is far more conceptually abstract. In my honours thesis I argued that philosophers ought to reconceptualise global justice, because the way it is currently conceptualised is not adequate for the truly globalised world we live in, and it is through this new conceptualisation that we should begin to assess issues pertaining to global justice and ethics. In hindsight, it’s not surprising then that as this project progressed and led me to focus on women’s empowerment within development, a large part of this study involved a reconceptualisation of empowerment for development contexts, from which I then explored how ICTs can be used to empower women.
Early on in the project, I came across an article titled Critical Realism and ICT4D Research. The authors expressed that due to a lack of attention to research philosophy, there is a knowledge gap in ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development) that could be addressed through the critical realism paradigm. However, the authors note this task could be challenging;
“Although true to some degree of all research paradigms, critical realism particularly—because of the relative complexity of combining a realist ontology with a relativist epistemology—has been criticised as hard to understand and “difficult, time-consuming and resource-intensive” to operationalise (Reed, 2009 p. 436). This may be less challenging for ICT4D doctoral researchers who have both the time and the requirement to delve into complex ideas and research paradigms” (Heeks & Wall, 2018).
With a research project that related to ICT4D, a clear need for a new approach to research in the ICT4D field, and an Honours degree in philosophy behind me, I felt compelled undertake this challenge for my doctoral project.
Critical realism proved to be a challenging philosophical paradigm to grasp at first, with its realist ontology and relativist epistemology. As Roy Bhaskar, the original Critical Realist philosopher’s aptly titled final work ‘Enlightened Common-sense’ suggests, critical realism is not only a philosophy to underlabour research, but a deeply philosophical account of the epistemological and ontological groundings of our common sense and the way in which we engage with the world. I began this project as a researcher using CR as a research paradigm, but I’m finishing the project identifying as a CR researcher.
But all of this begs the question- why did I focus on empowerment? Well,
Given the significance of the SDGs framework in the global development agenda, I explored the targets for SDG5. Each SDG has two types of targets: outcome targets (that use numbers) and means of implementation (MOI) targets (that use lowercase letters), each with at least one indicator.
I found the MOI targets for SDG 5 quite troubling: ensuring equal access and control over resources (5.a), using ICTs to promote empowerment (5.b), and ensuring gender equality through empowerment (5.c). Specifically, I found their indicators lacked any explanatory or communicative power to guide stakeholders action to address SDG5.
| Target | Indicator |
| 5.a Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws | 5.a.1: (a) Proportion of total agricultural population with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land, by sex; and (b) share of women among owners or rights-bearers of agricultural land, by type of tenure 5.a.2: Proportion of countries where the legal framework (including customary law) guarantees women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control |
| 5.b Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women | 5.b.1: Proportion of individuals who own a mobile telephone, by sex |
| 5.c Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels | 5.c.1: Proportion of countries with systems to track and make public allocations for gender equality and women’s empowerment |
Indicator 5.b.1 is the proportion of women to men who own mobile phones; however this metric does not put the target into context, nor does it effectively communicate to stakeholders what their interventions should address (other than ensuring women own mobile phones). Women owning mobile phones is an arbitrary, empirical indicator that might be useful amongst other indicators, but if mobile phone ownership is the only indicator to measure whether a country has ‘enhanced the use of ICTs to promote the empowerment of women.’ It is unclear why mobile phone ownership was selected as an indicator for this target, as it does not say anything about the role of technology in development processes, whether ICTs actually led to positive outcomes, or if women owning mobile phones have actually experienced increased empowerment. There are so many ways ICTs could potentially empower women, but the proportion of women owning mobile phones does not offer any adequate explanation for how stakeholders ought to approach this.
So my project set out to primarily propose appropriate indicators for target 5.b of SDG 5—how does ICT lead to the empowerment of women and girls in development interventions— although the investigation also uncovered important insights allowing indicators to be proposed for the other MOI targets, 5.a and 5.c. By uncovering the causal mechanisms of these targets through the critical realist philosophical paradigm, my research sought to propose indicators that offer more effective communicative and explanatory power to guide social action towards SDG5 across development contexts.
Once my research was finished, I wanted to disseminate it as wide as possible to help development actors working towards SDG 5, and thus the Women Empowerment Project was born.
