Don’t Fight The Power. Transform It
By: Marne Platt
Tags: Feminism, Women, Equality, Society, Culture

Don’t Fight The Power. Transform It

Overcoming resistance to programs that improve women’s lives

Photo by Muhammad Taha Khan on Unsplash

Another woman, dead of complications in childbirth. Another girl, banned from school, married too young, pregnant. Another sex worker infected with HIV by a client, and in turn infecting her unborn child.

All around the world, programs with lofty goals and the best of intentions are failing to help raise the standard of living for women and girls.

See, there’s nothing wrong with the programs themselves. They have funding, goals, staffing. They have local, national, even international support. They include measures and project checks to ensure accountability.

Yet they still fail.

Many make no difference whatsoever. Some even make life worse for the women and girls they are designed to help.

Why?

A recent article in the International Journal for Equity In Health assesses why programs aimed at improving women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights fail often in execution. It then demonstrates how considering different implications of a program’s goals or measures can improve the chances of making a real and lasting difference.

The article attributes many failures to the profound power differentials that exist between participants. Planners do not consider this, or the resulting responses to accountability measures. As if following a GPS that doesn’t consider roadwork, their projects hit rough spots, detours, and dead ends.

The authors define 6 different actions by groups in power. Some are passive or hidden, others are active and overt. Only one leads to a truly successful outcome for women and girls.

Reinforcement

Some programs inadvertently reinforce the existing power structure. For example, population control programs that only measure birth rates can drive health authorities to pressure women to choose long term or permanent birth control measures. This deprives women of their reproductive rights and reinforces the power of (usually male) bureaucrats to make reproductive decisions on their behalf. The numbers look good, but the women still lose.

Accommodation

When those in power don’t want to see the situation change, they ‘come to terms’ with the people striving to make changes. Collaborators and supposed partners give lip service to the program’s goals, making all the right noises but actually doing very little. Think of this as the ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge, of course, we will help you’ response. Project members attend frequent meetings but the program makes no progress.

Subversion

When the people in power disagree with or feel threatened by the program’s goals, they can actively work to undermine its success.

Consider a program designed to shift village health care from traditional providers to professional community health workers. The program might be working to bring women current contraceptive choices, or perinatal care.

Unless the program provides a valued role for the traditional providers, they may quietly speak out against the new workers. They might use their social status and influence to undermine residents’ confidence in the new workers. The traditional providers are formally blocked from working by the new program, and the new providers are informally blocked by the traditional providers. Women in these villages lose again, ending up with worse health care than before the program started.

Contestation

Contestation is exactly what it sounds like: someone with leverage says ‘Oh no we won’t!’ They openly reject the program, its goals, and its implementation.

This is common when, for example, members of the government are prosecuted for human rights violations such as rape or violence against women. The alleged criminals and their cronies use their power to block prosecution, perhaps even to threaten or attack the prosecutors. Not only do their actions block the current project, they can (and want to) scare off other, similar projects. Criminals and rapists are not brought to justice. Potential criminals and rapists see that they will not be punished. Once again, the women lose.

Negotiation

Negotiators water down the program, chipping away at it bit by bit. They support new health care workers, but fewer than planned. Or they limit the statute of limitations or scope of prosecutions against alleged war criminals.

Negotiators are often pleasant, and they are patient and relentless, like water dripping on a stone. They wear down a program’s supporters to accept that ‘this is the best we can get.’ What they end up with is indeed better than nothing, but it is far from ideal. The program is scaled back, the team gives up on its real goals and accepts smaller changes. In the end, women’s lives may be improved, but not by much.

Transformation

Transformation is the path to successfully advancing women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. With transformation, the program’s leaders and the people whose power is affected come to a complete and common understanding of the program’s overall benefits. They consider how to make it work for everyone involved. Transformation can only happen when the power disparities are considered and addressed in advance, through appropriate accountability strategies.

Achieving transformation

The article also provides a roadmap for achieving transformation. Like most successful roadmaps, it is simple, albeit not easy. The path is straightforward. Ask the right questions when designing the program.

These questions all force the program designers to get into the minds of the other parties they will work with: the people who will benefit, those whose lives will change in a neutral way, and those whose power, self-image or livelihood will be threatened or lessened in some way. Only by understanding these viewpoints can planners truly develop a plan that works, that will make full sexual and reproductive health rights available to all women, everywhere.

Asking the right questions

Key questions include:

What types of power do different stakeholders have? Where does that power come from? What are the consequences of our actions? What are the unintended consequences? How is each player directly or indirectly affected? Where can the legal system help or hinder our efforts?

Their basic premise is that identifying and counteracting a program’s weaknesses makes that program more likely to succeed. And lest we forget, that means more women controlling their own reproductive decisions. Fewer girls married off too young. Fewer women raped, mutilated, or otherwise oppressed. More girls growing into strong, healthy, well-educated women who can and will improve their world, and ours.

Transformation requires honesty, empathy, and humility. Planners must not only ask questions, they must listen to the answers and adjust their program accordingly.

What if?

Imagine a world in which all social programs, from PEPFAR to UN Programs providing basic health care to women, were assessed with these questions before being rolled out. What would change? How would we improve the lives of women and girls, and of all people?

These are tough questions, with unpopular answers. By calling out problems with current well-intentioned programs the authors are, in effect, finding ways to call the baby ugly. But only by facing these challenges, considering their validity, and addressing them can an organization craft a program that will protect women’s sexual and reproductive rights, and change their lives for the better.