Bridging Development Interventions and Women’s Empowerment in Ghana: Reflections from Radical Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

The popularity of development interventions as a tool for women’s empowerment, notwithstanding their ability to achieve targeted goals, has come under scrutiny. Some researchers point out that interventions targeting empowerment tend to address women’s  practical rather than their strategic needs, resulting in such interventions falling short in their attempts to transform unequal gender  relations. This paper seeks to uncover the nuances of such outcomes through an autoethnographic account of two gender-specific  interventions. The main findings reveal that, of the two interventions, one held the potential to transform gender relations, and the other  set out to integrate women into the existing system. The paper concludes that interventions can realise the goal of empowerment if  gender-sensitive tools and actors are integrated into their design and implementation, and if markers that target gender transformation   and redistribution are employed.