Training for Empowerment for Women Experiencing Poverty in Britain

Offered as part of the publication "Learning for Action on Women's Leadership and Participation", this paper details Oxfam Great Britain (GB)'s work with partner organisations to enable economically poor women to meet with and lobby the civil servants and politicians who make decisions that impact on their lives. Women in the United Kingdom (UK) experience higher levels of poverty than men, just as they do in other parts of the world. Recognising this, Oxfam GB's UK Poverty Programme is premised on the importance of building women's confidence to help them recognise how the structures of society and the economy keep them in poverty, and to tackle the situation to their own advantage through lobbying for changes to the policies that uphold this structural inequality. In this paper, Oxfam GB reflects on what approaches have been successful, what has not worked so well, and what has been learned about how to support women's participation and engagement with providers of public services.

Oxfam GB asserts that there are two sides to empowerment: building the confidence and skills of people in powerless positions, and ensuring that they are able to occupy a position where they can talk on relatively equal terms to those people with power to make decisions that affect their lives. This paper focuses on two attempts to do the former - one focusing on economic literacy and empowerment in Scotland, the other a participatory research project on women's experiences of poverty - which are designed to help participants challenge structures that sustain gender inequality by voicing their own experiences, and their demands, to civil servants and politicians at the local and national level.

Working at the local level: Women's Economic Empowerment project

In 2006-2007 Oxfam in Scotland ran a series of training courses on women's economic empowerment, in collaboration with local agencies in three deprived areas in Scotland: South Lanarkshire, Dundee, and Inverclyde. The courses were intended to build women's confidence to think about their futures, to bring out their experiences of paid work and their views on local services such as transport and housing, and to provide an opportunity for them to voice their experiences to a local job-support agency and to local service providers. The courses ran for two days a week for four weeks, and participants were recruited by Oxfam GB staff working in those areas. The courses were facilitated by someone with extensive experience working on empowerment projects. The sessions began with the women discussing a short film which dealt with direct discrimination. From this, they went on to look at power, how it operates, and what impact it has on experiences and opportunities. Participants in the South Lanarkshire training spoke of the sessions as "lighting up so many lightbulbs for me" and helping them "[learn] to stand up and be counted and not just blend into the background".

Working at the national level: Women's Voices of Experience project

In England in 2006, Oxfam GB worked with the UK Women's Budget Group (WBG) on a participatory research project with women living in poverty. The WBG contacted 12 local women's organisations who brought a total of 47 women together for training, and supported their attendance at a seminar in London to meet civil servants from the UK Government and members of Parliament. The first phase was an opportunity for women to map their regional experiences of living in poverty. The second phase brought women from the regions together to understand better how decisions are made at the level of national government. This covered basic government structure, and some of the factors which influence decision-making."The women involved felt a real sense of solidarity having worked in this way."

Lessons learned:

• Economically poor women need extra practical and financial support to get their voices heard in any kind of public arena. Example: Recognising that these women are often not part of established networks, the Women's Economic Empowerment project recruited participants by word of mouth, as well as via regular community notices. To ensure that their participation was as convenient and as low-cost as possible, the women were provided with transportation, lunch, childcare, and attendance bonus vouchers. The course was scheduled to fit in with school hours and was intensive, yet did not interfere with the qualifying hours for their state benefits.
• "Our experience of working with established or nascent women's groups across the UK has taught us that we cannot assume that women have any sense of shared solidarity. This is partly because discrimination against women is less visible than in other countries, and also because feminism is now labelled in the public mind as old fashioned and extreme."
• Challenging gender stereotyping is crucial. Example: Oxfam in Scotland has worked with council officers in South Lanarkshire who provide careers advice to girls and boys at school. These officers were unaware that the advice they offered channelled girls into poorly paid and stereotypically "female" jobs such as hairdressing, and boys into better paid ones such as plumbing, until it was brought to their attention by the Oxfam GB staff member who sat in on career sessions. "Once this was pointed out to them, many welcomed the realisation..."
• "The capacity-building work with women has been very effective in helping women gain confidence, helping them to understand that their problems are often created by structures and are not their personal fault, and that they are not alone, and helping them to understand how policy is made." Example: In the Women's Voices of Experience project, participants recorded their experiences and thoughts by writing them down on pieces of coloured paper. These messages were then fitted together like a patchwork quilt, in a way that built the women's sense of being connected, and reinforced their sense that they had issues in common. The women highlighted not only their entitlement to a decent income, but also their rights to respect and dignity through the unpaid contributions they made to society.
• "We need to spend as long preparing the ground with decision-makers so that they are able to listen, as we do building the skills and confidence of women so that they feel they can speak up." Example: Oxfam GB's work with Routes to Work South, a local job-advice service in South Lanarkshire, as part of a larger project went some way towards preparing the ground for Routes to Work South to "hear" what the women were saying about their needs and experiences during sessions organised as part of the Women's Economic Empowerment project.
  

The concluding section of the document addresses issues of the sustainability of Oxfam GB's involvement in this type of work. "We will be monitoring the results of the projects described to establish more clearly whether we are contributing to real long-term change in encouraging women's participation and getting them into positions of leadership. However, we expect to continue working with women for their advancement in economic and political leadership, as we believe this to be at the core of tackling women's poverty in Britain."