“Everyone uses the word ‘empowerment,’” said the UN Foundation’s Alaka Basu at the Wilson Center on October 10. “It’s now such an overused word. You are empowered if you have a choice of 10 different shampoos in the grocery store; you are empowered if you have 100 kinds of cereals to buy; you are empowered by virtually anyone wanting to sell you something.”

Basu argues in her research that effective gender equality initiatives need to go “beyond that way of looking at empowerment and ask, ‘what is meaningful empowerment?’”

She was joined by Wendy Baldwin, formerly of the Population Reference Bureau, for a discussion about the effectiveness of the international development community’s efforts to empower some of the world’s most marginalized women. Click here