Female empowerment and community-based productive associations: A systematic literature review

Abstract Albeit its long trajectory on social sciences and gender studies, female empowerment promotion has gained a renewed protagonism because of its inclusion on the Millenium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals. Among prioritized strategies to achieve this empowerment, international agencies and national governments have focused on gene-rating associative processes around productive activities. This study presents a systematic literature review to analyze the impact of community-based productive rural association's membership over different dimensions of female empowerment: resources, agency, and results. Then, a systematic literature review of five quantitative studies and eight qualitative studies is carried on. The analysis is organized according to each dimension of the empowerment process. In quantitative papers, the standardized size effects are estimated; a content analysis is made for qualitative papers. Results show that impacts of belonging to productive associations have been studied mostly from the empowerment approach as agency -decision-making process-, and for this specific dimension, size effects are statistically significant but small (8=0,05; 0,22).