Salima, Malawi

May 27-28, 2024

Retreat 1

The POWER Consortium, consisting of the GDP Center and four women’s empowerment research and policy partners—AidData, EconInsight, AFIDEP, and IDinsight—held its first retreat in Salima, Malawi. During the retreat, Consortium members discussed the POWER vision and mission, the Consortium’s value and potential areas of impact, and how members would engage and collaborate.

Where it all began: the Africa POWER Consortium’s inaugural retreat

In May 2024, the five founding partners of the Africa POWER Consortium - the Boston University Global Development Policy Center (serving as the Consortium’s Secretariat at the time), AidData,
EconInsight, AFIDEP, and IDinsight - gathered in Salima, Malawi for the Consortium’s first-ever retreat.

Over two days, roughly thirty participants worked to define what the Consortium could be: its shared vision and mission, the value each partner brings to the table, and the terms on which we’d work together. Much of the conversation returned to a deceptively simple question - what does “women’s empowerment” actually mean, and would we recognize an empowered woman if we saw one? That debate, captured in a lively sticky-note exercise with the full group, made it clear as to how differently empowerment can be understood depending on whether you start from agency, autonomy, informed choice, or free will - and it shaped how we think about measuring our own impact.

On the retreat’s second day, we were joined by eleven Malawian policymakers from Parliament, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Gender, the National Planning Commission, and other institutions for an open discussion. Their feedback was clear and consistent: data management and sharing across institutions remains a major barrier to effective policy on women’s empowerment, and progress requires a genuinely multi-sectoral approach - health, education, agriculture, and youth priorities are all intertwined. Stakeholders also pushed us to think about how research findings can actually reach parliamentarians and ministries in a usable form, not just as academic output.

The retreat closed with a shared sense that our five organizations - each bringing a different piece of the research-to-policy puzzle - were more aligned than we’d expected, and with a concrete list of
next steps: finalize our mission statement and strategic plan and begin identifying the collaborative projects that would become our first seed investments.

The Specifics

Our Takeaways

Takeaways

Consortium partners identified complementary skillsets and resources to begin developing proposals for collaborative research and policy projects.
There was much discussion about the Consortium’s collective vision and mission statement, which included proposals for creating pathways to connect research efforts to policy. From a communications perspective, participants felt it particularly important that the POWER mission statement encompass the collaborative and policy-focused nature of the Consortium.
There was significant discussion and debate over exactly what “women’s empowerment” encompasses (e.g. Would we recognize an empowered woman if we saw her? How does empowerment relate to other notions of well-being, including agency, autonomy, self-efficacy, etc.?). Relatedly, there was discussion over how to identify the extent to which interventions and programs that seek to be empowering are, in fact, successful in promoting women’s welfare.
Guest stakeholders highlighted ongoing issues with data management and sharing and noted that a multi-sectoral approach would be needed to address many gender-based issues. Their feedback was helpful for the Consortium to understand policymakers’ most pressing needs.
The next steps for the Consortium involve narrowing down the areas of focus to identify projects, and determining the best ways to incorporate and interact with policymakers throughout the research process. It is important that our research can be demand-driven to some degree, understanding critical needs in the women’s empowerment policy space.

What We Learned

Learnings

All members and stakeholders identified the potential of the POWER Consortium to affect
change – there are many avenues for growth, and the collective capacity of the five
organizations brings significant promise on the range and scope of work that can be undertaken.
As a next step, the Consortium will finalize the mission statement and strategic plan and will develop an action plan, along with an updated timeline, to complete key projects that were identified as part of the retreat.
Having many international partners has led to some complexities related to coordination and operations (e.g. payments, logistics, and contracts), many of which were identified prior to the retreat as well as in-country. We are working to have a better system for payments and will seek
more detailed guidance from partners before the second retreat, which is scheduled to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in January 2025.
BU staff (Mahesh, Naomi, and Sarah) coordinated the majority of sessions at the retreat. However, partners from each of the member organizations were in charge of leading the discussions and activities during the retreat, which provided balance to the presence of BU as the Secretariat. As a result, we received strong and positive feedback on the level of planning and quality of the sessions from partners, who were very grateful for the opportunity to actively participate in and contribute to such an event.
Over the course of the retreat, it became very apparent that our five organizations are, in fact, very well-aligned both in terms of our research interests in the women’s empowerment space as well as in terms of our commitment to actively engaging with practitioners and policy audiences. All partners left the retreat with greater enthusiasm for the Consortium and expressed their commitment to actively contribute to upcoming projects, which would include partners leveraging pre-existing organizational resources outside of the staff who are directly involved with POWER.
In addition to the core POWER team, we were grateful to have Jacob Bor join us for the retreat and indicate his interest and commitment to POWER and the Consortium in future activities. Jacob will be a great addition to the POWER team and will provide support to POWER and the GDP Center’s role as Secretariat to the Consortium.

2024 Salima, Malawi Retreat