“We never let our guard down to get ahead”. Exploring the wellbeing of women participating in Fundación Paraguaya’s poverty alleviation programme

This dissertation critically examines the concept of wellbeing, as experienced by women living in poverty in Paraguay. Despite investment and conviction behind a global project of development over the past half-century, poverty persists. What is more, although there seems to be a consensus that wellbeing is a concept and an approach that will be beneficial for the millions of families living under poverty, questions remain about practical applications of what wellbeing actually means, what it entails for people themselves, and how the wellbeing approach interacts with poverty interventions, with a corresponding need for further research. To explore the wellbeing of women participating in a poverty intervention in Paraguay, in this research I seek to a) understand how women conceptualise their wellbeing, b) understand the temporal and dynamic nature of women’s wellbeing, and c) determine how their wellbeing is impacted by anti-poverty interventions. The objective of better understanding women’s wellbeing is to illuminate the complex dynamic between poverty and wellbeing in women’s lives over time and draw out subtleties related to their individual contexts to have a more nuanced understanding of wellbeing. This dissertation seeks to meet these theoretical and empirical gaps using a biographical life course approach to better understand the wellbeing of women participating in a Fundación Paraguaya’s anti-poverty programme. My data collection took place in Paraguay from April 2018 to July 2019 in seven urban and semi-urban towns with 16 research participants. My overarching argument is that wellbeing must be understood as multidimensional, interconnected, fuzzy, contextual, and subjective. Moreover, it is crucial to understand the temporal, dynamic, and relational components that have a direct impact on women’s wellbeing. Further, illbeing and wellbeing must be understood as two sides of the same coin. Lastly, gender norms have a direct role in the way in which women experience wellbeing.