Abstract
The aim of this paper is to trace how village women changed their consciousness and action and to attempt to evaluate these changes, based on my field work from 1994 to 2001 on the process of how the micro-level “quality-of-life improvement projects” were conducted in the farming village S in the Republic of Paraguay.
Recently human-centered sustainable development is gaining importance as a means of promoting people's empowerment in the area of development cooperation. However, since sustainable development requires the changes of people's consciousness and action, and such qualitative changes are not easy to evaluate, new methods of evaluation are now being developed.
This paper makes a qualitative study of 11 women involved in quality-of-life improvement projects and analyzes the results of these projects. First, it illustrates how the specific results of these projects can be categorized into “three types, ” which are derived by contrasting these specific results in light of the goal of these projects set by the women in the early stage of the projects and by incorporating the viewpoints of Moser's practical and strategic gender needs. One of the most significant findings is that as type 1 results produce type 2 and 3 results and the three types interact with each other, the women begin to mention their changes. Second, the paper reveals the process of the empowerment of the community women themselves. Third, through an analysis of the discourse of the women's groups, I have extracted 12 items of the empowerment index. Furthermore, the original goals of these projects have undergone transition in the course of time from practical to strategic gender needs.
If we are to continue to pursue sustainable development and human-centered development projects, we should explore the methods of evaluation considering people's quality changes, which can be revealed by focusing on the three types of results as this paper has shown.
