Self Efficacy: The Role of Relative Power in Women’s Political Participation

Name

Kalkidan Hailegiorgis

Major

Ethics and Leadership, Public Policy

Class

2022

About

Kali Hailegiorgis is a senior majoring in Ethics and Leadership with a track in Public Policy. Throughout her academic career at DKU she has been interested in learning about power dynamics in social structures and how to build inclusive and representative systems. As such, her signature work project explores how to create a more gender-equal society and democracy through women’s empowerment. Outside of school, Kali has built a career in supporting impact-led start-up businesses. She currently works at a venture capital firm working to make capital accessible to underrepresented founders. Upon graduating from DKU, she plans to pursue her MBA and a Masters degree in Social Psychology.

Signature Work Project Overview

This project explores how we can design and implement social intervention programs that can solve women’s low levels of political participation, with a focus on developing countries. Women in developing countries tend to have much lower levels of political participation, both within formal and informal institutions. The lower levels of self-efficacy women report can explain this disparity. Self-efficacy is aided by relative power, which women in developing countries lack due to social, cultural, economic, and political barriers. This project explores what sort of social interventions can successfully equip women with relative power, thus increasing their self-efficacy, and in turn their political participation. To do so, I have conducted in-depth analyses of three social intervention programs in Ghana that have successfully increased women’s political participation. I organize these analyses in three parts: household and community level, non-partisan district politics level, and partisan national politics level. Through these analyses, this project presents one model of designing and implementing social intervention programs at each of the above levels. Key successes of these models are increasing women’s relative power through economic empowerment, political skills and knowledge building, and network development towards increased political influence.

Signature Work Presentation Video