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Equitable futures depend upon better employment outcomes for young women. We use a skills ecosystems approach to explore how youth skills development programs can maximise their impact in highly gendered societies and labour markets. While improving employment outcomes and incomes for young women, BRAC's STAR program cannot withstand Bangladesh's deep-rooted and socially restrictive norms and practices. Short-term successes are diluted as family pressures and commitments take precedent over young women's economic lives. Adding a temporal dimension to the concept of skills ecosystems, these findings highlight that maintaining these impacts requires constant renegotiation and advocacy to challenge the structural obstacles within households and labour markets and within national policies and investments that constrain their longer-term economic empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One criticism of how women's empowerment is operationalised in development interventions is the lack of consideration of its context specificity. This quantitative study investigates how women participants in development projects in Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam perceive the meaning of empowerment and the associated positive effects of participating in empowerment activities. The findings indicate that women's ideas of empowerment differ according to their cultural, economic and social contexts as well as from donor-driven definitions. Both similar and distinct positive effects of participating in empowerment activities are felt, highlighting the importance of incorporating what women prioritise when planning empowerment projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many NGOs in India strive to empower women to lead through various programmes, but their effectiveness in the participants' lives is not known. This article reports on a descriptive cross-sectional study that used authentic leadership theory to explore an NGO's self-help group programme's ability to empower women by building their leadership capacity and self-efficacy to lead. Participants reported an increased capacity and self-efficacy to lead in their daily lives. Women who were in the programme for a longer period reported greater self-efficacy to lead, as compared to those who recently joined, showing the significance of women's empowerment programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development programmes centred on microfinance have experienced varied levels of success, especially in Bangladesh. Although impact assessments of these development interventions conclude that poor participants' access to credit is enhanced, the same empirical analysis reveals less encouraging results on women's empowerment and community transformation. Food for the Hungry's Family and Community Transformation (FCT) programme represents an alternative model to the traditional microcredit approach to development by emphasising internal savings, holistic training, and the build-up of community-wide social capital. Group graduation to sustainable independence takes a joint commitment of up to ten years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parivartan Plus is a structured sports mentoring programme for girls, implemented in a Mumbai slum where social expectations around gender-appropriate behaviour and good parenting restricts girls’ mobility and visibility in public spaces. This article presents practice-based learning from developing and implementing programme theory to empower girls in achieving changes in their everyday social interactions at home and beyond. Gender and social norms theory were combined with local practical wisdom to turn main implementation challenges into opportunities. The article reflects on the strategies that gave visibility to, and achieved community endorsement for, the erosion of restrictive gender norms while ensuring community safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]