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• Aspirations are often missing from women's empowerment models and measures. • Aspirations are related to agency, but they are more than how women make decisions, a common domain of women's empowerment. • The A-WEAI does not capture key domains of empowerment for ethnic minority women in Vietnam. • Without understanding women's aspirations, programs may not empower women. Empowerment programs for women have been key development initiatives toward achieving gender equality. Projects, models, and measurement tend to focus on resources and agency as core to empowerment. Missing from most models and research is women's own aspirations, or what they value for their futures, that affect how women use their resources and agency to achieve wellbeing. Aspirations are central to a sense of a good life and are necessary to strengthen among poor communities, but they are often overlooked among women, particularly those who are not pursuing formal schooling and who work in informal labor. This paper examines how aspirations matter for women in poverty who are working in informal sectors (agriculture and tourism) in Vietnam. It argues that without examining women's aspirations for themselves, their family, and community, development projects may miss achieving their outcomes because they are not valued by women. Using data from the abbreviated version of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI), and qualitative interview data from women and men from minority ethnic groups in Vietnam, we show that women and men achieve similar rates of adequacy in their access to resources and decision-making as measured by the A-WEAI, and that women's aspirations for themselves and their community emphasized other valued outcomes from projects aimed at economic empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Can membership of self-help groups (SHGs), designed for enhancing livelihoods, create social capital for women? • We find that it can, even when the livelihoods are negligible. • Membership of SHGs increases personal efficacy and propensity for collective action. • Social capital generated by SHG membership is a significant positive impact as it strengthens the process of women's empowerment. The "strength of weak ties" has been established in the context of labour market outcomes, with theoretical and empirical investigation showing how weak ties lead to an increase in mobility and job opportunities. The impact of weak ties on community organisation is less well understood. We contribute to this literature by investigating if weak ties, generated via membership of livelihood programmes, can lead to the creation or enhancement of social capital. Based on data from one of the largest independent primary surveys for India, we find that participation in self-help groups had little impact on livelihoods, but led to the creation of significant social capital, as measured by indicators related to personal efficacy and collective action. We use Entropy Balancing to estimate mean effects to tackle the problem of non-random selection into the programme. In contrast to the bulk of existing evidence on livelihood programmes that is based on small samples, our large sample size and innovative survey design allow us to detect a larger number of effects with greater certainty. We argue that the social capital generated by the programme is a significant positive impact (even though the main target of the programme is to strengthen livelihoods), as it strengthens the process of women's empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]