Can Social Protection Empower Women? Patriarchy, Economic Agency and Redistribution Policies in Egypt

Can poverty alleviation undo gendered injustices? Egypt’s recently introduced cash transfers programme, Takaful and Karama (Solidarity and Dignity), which currently avails almost 3 million families through regular monthly cash transfers, has fulfilled its mandate in terms of providing protection to vulnerable families. The transfers enabled beneficiaries to increase food consumption and decrease their vulnerability to extreme shocks and hardship, by accumulating small savings or improving their credit worthiness. The programme has however failed to reach its aims of gender equality and women’s empowerment, despite having been explicitly designed to support women’s agency and mitigate gender inequality.

This research collaboration project explores the impacts of poverty alleviation programmes and cash transfers in particular, on gendered identities, as well as on the relationships that shape citizenship for women and families. The project investigates why the anticipated aims of improving women’s agency and fighting gender inequality were unrealised by this ‘model’ programme. Its main hypothesis is that impact evaluation methodologies are pre-designed rather than created in response to identified needs within local contexts. While such evaluations allow for comparability of the impacts of transfer programmes across different contexts, they do little to illuminate their specificities.

The project revisits the gender theory that undergirds social protection programmes to interrogate the links between theory and practice, as well as to inform future programme design and implementation. Based on ethnographic and statistical empirical research, this research project attempts to identify the potentials and limitations of redistribution policies such as cash transfers.

This project forms part of the Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme, funded by the Emirates Foundation.

---

Project Outputs

• N. Kabeer and H. Sholkamy, Does Social Protection Have an Effect on Gender Dynamics? Maybe!, LSE Middle East Centre Blog, January 2020 [February 2021].
• A. Mahmoud Othman, On Wellbeing in the COVID-19 Era: Are Cash Transfers Enough?, LSE Middle East Centre Blog, August 2020.
• M. Makhlouf, Can Social Protection Offer an Opportunity for Sustainable Graduation out of Poverty in Egypt?, LSE Middle East Centre Blog, June 2020.
• N. Kabeer, A. Deshpande and R. Assaad, Women's Access to Market Opportunities in South Asia and the Middle East & North Africa: Barriers, Opportunities and Policy Challenges, LSE Department of International Development, December 2019.