Raising Women's Participation in Cash for Work Programmes in Jordan

This thesis examines how cash-for-work (CfW) programmes in Jordan can be designed to raise women's participation, drawing on a practitioner survey (n=23) covering refugee camps and host-community settings across the full programme cycle. Against a backdrop of persistent gender gaps in CfW uptake and completion, the study asks which design features practitioners associate with higher participation, and how feasible those features are to implement under real operational constraints. The research produces three outputs: a six-domain Gender-Responsive CfW Participation Framework derived from access theory and the Jordan-specific literature; 36 setting-specific design recommendations, each traced to a literature standard and a documented practice gap; and a 16-indicator, pipeline-stage monitoring framework for tracking women's progression from outreach through completion. A central finding is that monitoring failures in the sector reflect a circulation problem, data that is collected but does not reach the practitioners who make design decisions, as much as a collection problem. Findings are interpreted as exploratory patterns rather than statistical generalisations, given the purposive sample and the absence of a central registry of CfW implementers. The study's primary limitation, and its main direction for future research, is that it captures practitioner perceptions rather than women participants' own experiences. The framework is offered as a practical, feasibility-aware tool for programme designers, donors, and evaluators working on gender-responsive livelihoods programming in displacement settings.