In Ethiopia, ensuring that both women and girls participate in and provide leadership through the urbanization process
is key and can only be accomplished by removing economic and socio- cultural barriers. Evidence from a series of
independent studies funded by USAID, the World Bank and the UNDP in 2017-2018 clearly show that urbanization and
industrialization processes in Ethiopia must be gender responsive in order to deliver sustainable outcomes.
CARE Ethiopia would challenge this and state that it must be gender transformative. For CARE Ethiopia this means
ensuring that: urban girls and women are empowered to equally access economic and social opportunities and
services; institutions become more responsive to the specific and contextual needs and priorities of urban girls and
women and with a focus to understand the heterogeneity of women and girls and their specific vulnerabilities, and that
socio-cultural norms and practices should promote gender equality. CARE Ethiopia’s Theory of Change for resource poor
urban females (see Figure 2), moves beyond individual self-improvement, towards transforming the power dynamics
and structures that served historically to reinforce gendered inequalities in urban communities.