Overview 

Women’s empowerment is a key way to tackle gender inequality. Empowerment is an end in itself and also contributes to wider outcomes. By empowering women, individuals become agents of change and can catalyze climate action as well as contribute to meeting strategic SDGs. This evidence review will depict what evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of interventions which seek to promote women’s empowerment.

The specific goals of the evidence review are to:

• Develop a typology of interventions for women’s empowerment, and anticipated outcomes from these interventions.
• Create an evidence gap map showing evaluations of interventions to increase women’s empowerment. The map will include filters for population, intervention, and study characteristics.

Interventions included in the evidence map will be screened against a clearly defined set of eligible women’s empowerment outcomes. Interventions targeted at women but intended to improve welfare rather than empowerment will not be included.

A further goal of this evidence review is to complete a systematic review which measures the effects of key interventions on the empowerment of women of any age in developing countries.

The systematic review will explain any variation of effects across intervention setting, location, and level of intervention in terms of improving intermediate and final empowerment outcomes.