Publications

Co-creating accompanying systems to improve adolescent girls' and women's access to services

This article summarizes Empowered Aid's work in Jordan, implemented through a partnership between the Global Women's Institute and World Vision Syria Response. It captures how participatory approaches were used to center women and girls in identifying context-specific risks of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and actions to address them, while engaging other community members and holding aid actors accountable for taking action. It describes how the creation of accompaniment systems can enhance refugee women and girls' safety and access to services as they navigate gender-unequal environments. 

Blog Post: Engaging refugee women and girls as safeguarding experts, using creative and participatory methods

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Engaging refugee women and girls as experts: co-creating evidence on sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian crises using creative, participatory methods’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.

Engaging refugee women and girls as experts: co-creating evidence on sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian crises using creative, participatory methods

Humanitarian evidence is produced in settings of heightened power imbalances between research stakeholders. Yet evidence production processes often lack explicit reflection of who is shaping the questions asked and making meaning of the answers. This paper highlights our Empowered Aid program, which is participatory action research that seeks to mitigate sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) perpetrated by aid actors. Refugee women and girls in Uganda and Lebanon, as experts on SEA risk, are engaged co-researchers in generating evidence on how to make aid distributions safer.

Localizing knowledge generation during a pandemic to make distributions safer

Co-authored with our Empowered Aid Lebanon partners URDA and CARE, our latest article is published in the Humanitarian Practice Network's Humanitarian Exchange's May issue on Localisation and local humanitarian action. It shares reflections from Jihan Kaisi and Rosy Haddad, Executive Director and Public Relations Officer (respectively) with the Union of Relief and Development Associations (URDA), a Lebanese NGO; Loujine Fattal, Empowered Aid Lebanon Research Manager with CARE in Lebanon; and Alina Potts, Empowered Aid Primary Investigator, of GWI. They reflect on localization in humanitarian research and knowledge generation processes during the COVID-19 pandemic, using our Empowered Aid work in Lebanon as a case study. This article was also an opportunity to support local partners in publishing for the first time, as lead authors--an important aspect of centering local knowledge and decolonising research processes.

“Whose voices matter? Using participatory, feminist and anthropological approaches to centre power and positionality in research on gender-based violence in emergencies”

This research paper, co-authored by the GWI Research Scientist Alina Potts, Empowered Aid Lebanon lead Loujine Fattal, and Empowered Aid Uganda lead Harriet Kolli examines ways in which utilizing participatory, feminist, and anthropological methods in gender-based violence (GBV) research can be held accountable to both acknowledging and addressing power disparities. This research uses real examples from the Empowered Aid project.