In her Sussex Development Lecture, Professor Andrea Cornwall presented findings from the Pathways of Women's Empowerment research programme (Pathways). The programme started in 2006 and was funded by the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) with some additional financing from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“Governments and international agencies have been largely travelling motorways to nowhere in changing power relations in favour of women living in poverty.” Andrea used this quote from Rosalind Eyben, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, to highlight how the Pathways programme was determined to examine the drivers of women's empowerment in new and innovative ways, and that challenged entrenched stereotypes and traditional ways of working.

Andrea highlighted how the Pathways consortium had sought to visualise empowerment in a much more creative way. In setting up the programme they were keen to break with traditional patterns of north-south collaboration, where northern partners and funders dictated the focus and direction of work. In order to do this they set up Pathways hubs in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia. Each with responsibility for defining regional priorities and building local networks. The programme also sought to bring together people from different disciplines including economists and anthropologists and to use a wide range of communications tools to both undertake and disseminate the research.

The approach was lauded in the Pathways final report by Latin America Hub Convenor, Professor Cecilia Sardenberg (Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Women's Studies, Federal University of Bahia in Brazil), “Being a part of Pathways has given us the opportunity to dare, to brave into unconventional forms of doing research and giving voice to women.”

Andrea highlighted 12 key findings from the project which included:

• What’s empowering to one women, is not empowering to another.
• Women's ability to exercise voice and strategic forms of control over their lives is linked to being able to generate regular and independent sources of income.
• Relationships lie at the heart of women's empowerment
• Sexuality is a vital but neglected dimension of women's empowerment.
• Understanding women's empowerment calls for rigorous and imaginative combinations of research methodologies and methods.
• Efforts to promote women's empowerment need to do more than give individual women economic or political opportunities. They need to tackle deeper-rooted structural constraints that perpetuate inequalities.
• Policies and laws that affirm women's rights and open up pathways for women's empowerment are critically important. But they are not in themselves sufficient to change women’s lives.
• Women's organizing is vital for sustainable change
• Global institutions would benefit from listening more to local women and doing more to support existing local agendas for women's empowerment.
• Fostering public engagement and debate is essential to making policies that work for women’s empowerment and gender equality.
• Recognising and supporting those within the state who are responsible for the implementation of women's empowerment interventions is crucial.
• Changing attitudes and values is as important to bringing about women's empowerment as changing women’s material circumstances and political opportunities.