Listening to Women to Explore the Measurement of Power in the Context of Self-injectables

Abstract for Preformed Panel Presentation from the 2022 International SBCC Summit in Morocco:

"Delivering Innovations in Self Care (DISC) is a four-year project funded by the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, working in Nigeria and Uganda to support women to take more control of their SRH by self-managing their care, beginning with contraceptive self-injectables. As a new self-care technology, self-injectable contraceptives have implications for behavior change spanning providers' and women's roles in SRH care. To enable learning as to the role power plays in influencing women's self-care user journeys, the project sought to determine the validated metrics most relevant to DISC's local contexts. The project conducted participatory workshops with women. Findings were mapped to existing validated measures of reproductive empowerment. Key domains of empowerment were: self-efficacy, self-reliance, well-being, and power in the public sphere. The latter included collaborative decision-making, social solidarity, and group leadership - all notably absent from existing measures. Analysis also revealed violence, discrimination and stigma as active constraints on women's power. Findings affirm that the concept of power (and empowerment) is context-specific, and is experienced and understood differently considering women's context and life-stage. In the context of violence, individualistic notions of empowerment may not only be insufficient to understand how power operates in the lives of women, but may in fact be dangerous if they distort programs' understandings of what actually shapes and constrains women's power. Current metrics may lead projects to overfocus on increasing a woman's sense of self-efficacy without addressing outside forces that constrain her actions."