Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)

In recent decades, women's political empowerment has become an important foreign policy and assistance objective.Every year, donor governments and multilateral organizations partner with hundreds of civil society groups around the world to train women to run for office, support women legislators, campaign for gender quotas, and bolster women's networks in political parties and parliaments. What ideas about gender, power, and political change guide these aid programs?What have practitioners and advocates learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and how might they improve their work going forward? Drawing on extensive interviews with aid officials, women's rights advocates, and women politicians in Western donor countries and across Kenya, Morocco, Myanmar, and Nepal, Aiding Empowerment investigates how democracy aid actors promote gender equality in politics.Saskia Brechenmacher and Katherine Mann argue that international assistance for women's political empowerment has evolved sig