Steps

1. What does women’s empowerment mean to you?
2. Are some of the following important in making you feel like an “empowered” woman (Why? Why not?)
   • Having knowledge about how to protect yourself from harm or disease
   • Knowing where to go or get essential services (education, legal services, food, treatment etc.)
   • Knowing how to talk about sex with your partner – whether or not to have sex, when to have sex
   • Having control over and access to money
   • Being able to go where you want without asking for permission
   • Being consulted or making decisions (specify what ) in your home or in the community
   • Being self-confident
   • Being treated with respected as a woman by your partner, family and the community
   • Knowing what your legal rights are and knowing where to go if they are denied to you
   • Decisions related to marriage (who to marry, paying dowry) and child-bearing (when to have children, how many to have)
   • Knowing how to protect yourself from violence
   • Being able to decide what groups to belong to or not
3. Has there been a situation when you disagreed, with CARE, on what women’s empowerment means in your context – either as a woman, or as a professional? Can you tell me about this instance(s)?
4. What has shaped your understanding of women’s empowerment?
   • Probe→ personal influences, professional influences, organizational influences, and influences from the larger environment – funding, donors, other NGOs and the way they implement women’s empowerment. For each of these influences, ask how they have shaped the person's undersatnding of women's empowerment.
5. How have existing frameworks, like the SII, or language used by CARE, influenced your view of women’s empowerment? How did it influence the way you conceived or designed or planned or implemented or evaluated this project?
6. Are there other ways of empowering women that you know of that might have been successfully implemented by other NGOs?
7. In what ways do you think that you, as a CARE employee, helped or hindered the project (especially the functioning of solidarity groups, or the activities where the women tried to influence power brokers) as a whole?
   • Probe→ What about helping or hindering individual women participants in the group? If yes, how?
8. When we asked the women that you work with, what they understand when they hear the word “empowerment” (use locally appropriate term here), these are the kind of responses we got. [Note to researcher: Provide some relevant examples from each required domain, if possible].
   • Are there any changes in the women’s lives that you have seen, but the women did not talk about OR changes that you have not seen, but the women have reported these)?
   • What are these?
   • Probe→ Ask for specific examples
9. Let me tell you again some of the things that women told us when we asked them how this project had changed them. [Here, it is often a good idea to present especially those responses where the women have reported some fantastic results, which you feel may not have been linked to the project, given its scope.]
   • What was happening, in this area, at the same time as the project?
   • Was anything new started or established or was something stopped or discontinued – like clinics, schools, testing centers, new projects, rallies by other organization, new public sector programs for ARVs or maternal health or primary health care, or health promotion campaigns etc that could explain why the women reported this kind of change?
10. Are some of these elements of women’s empowerment more (or less) important in your context? Which ones? Why? [If easier, carry a list of the above and/or other elements that emerged during the FGDs with women so you can have the staff look it over during the interview]