This paper is part of the research project “The Empowerment of All Women through Adult Education for a Sustainable Development” (2021-2024) funded by the State Research Agency of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation in the framework of the research plan targeted at the challenges of society. The aim is to identify educational actions which are contributing to the empowerment of women in a situation of more vulnerability, providing evidence of the social impact on their life and their communities' development, and identifying those characteristics that make them replicable and transferable to other contexts. Specifically, this contribution responds to two of the project research questions:

 1)    What educational actions are empowering disadvantaged women and promoting their community development in rural and urban areas?

2)    What characteristics make these actions replicable and transferable to other contexts?

 Offering educational opportunities to all women -focusing on those who are most vulnerable because they do not have basic academic qualifications, belong to immigrant, or refugee groups, ethnic minorities, women living with disabilities, survivors of gender-based violence, women living in remote and rural areas, and women over 65 years old, is one of the requirements of SDG5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls for the UN Agenda 2030. Furthermore, it is also a driver for the successful development of their communities, influencing their empowerment, economic development, health improvement and civic participation, as stated by the 4th Global Report on Adult Learning and Education elaborated by UNESCO (2019). Although women's participation in community education is increasing worldwide, according to GRALE, they tend to participate less in professional development programs and the most vulnerable ones do not participate yet.

Spain was a pioneer in promoting community education for women from the end of the 19th century until the end of the Civil War in 1939. Some experiences were the Institución Libre de Enseñanza [Institution for educational freedom] in 1870 within the framework of what would be the first organization for that purpose, the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer [Association for Women's Education]. Another example is the education for worker women promoted by movements such as Free Women (Ackelsberg, 2005; Kaplan, 1971, 1982; Ruiz-Eugenio, 2011)

This tradition was taken up by the community education movement, which reorganized underground at the end of the 1960s during the last stage of Franco's dictatorship and with more strength from 1975 and the beginning of the democratic transition (Flecha, 2000; Giner, 2018; Oliver et al., 2016; Sanchez-Aroca, 1999), inspired by Paulo Freire's Theory of Dialogical Action (Freire, 1970a, 1970b). Within the framework of these educational initiatives, the "Other Women" movement was created by women participating in community education who did not have higher education degrees and were often left out of the feminist public debate led by academic white women (Beck-Gernsheim et al., 2003; de Botton et al., 2006)

The “other women's” movement has international connections in the network of more than 5,000 schools as learning communities that exist in 18 countries in Latin America and Europe, in which the authors are part of the research team that trains the educators who implement the educational actions that are carried out (ENLARGE Consortium, 2018; Natura Institute., 2019; SEAs4all Consortium, 2016; Step4Seas Consortium, 2017).

To address these two research questions, the project relies on an international systematic literature review on women's education and empowerment. Moreover, it involves empirical research engaging dialogically with communities in the knowledge co-creation through 10 case studies in community education involving "other women" in a diversity of settings in six cities and one rural town in Spain. Systematic literature Review. The systematic literature review focused on articles published between 2010 and 2022 in peer-reviewed journals indexed in the Web of Science core collection and Scopus databases. The inclusion criteria of the literature were that the women who participated in the educational actions did not have higher academic qualifications, following the concept of "other women" elaborated by Lidia Puigvert. (Puigvert, 2001b, 2001a). The literature review was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the combination of keywords used was “Empowerment” in the title, abstract, and keywords (AND) “Women Education” in the title, to obtain an international snapshot. In this first phase, 103 articles were selected for review. In the second phase, the words for search has been “Dialogic feminism”, “Other women”, and “Women” combined (AND/OR) in title, abstract, and keywords with the educational actions that the “other women” have promoted in Spain and in other countries in the framework of the Schools as Learning Communities network. These keywords are “Dialogic gatherings”, “Dialogic model of violence/conflict prevention and resolution”, “Interactive Groups”, “Family education/family involvement in learning activities” and principles of dialogic learning on which these actions are based such as “Egalitarian dialogue”, “Equality of differences”, and “Solidarity”. In this second one, 38 articles have been selected for review. Fieldwork and case study development. The selection criteria for the cases are the following: projects, programs or educational actions involving women in a situation of greater discrimination due to their low literacy levels, minority cultural groups, migrants, refugees, older, with disabilities, living in remote and rural areas, low SES, unemployed, survivors of gender-based violence and all forms of violence including trafficking. For this paper, only the results of the systematic literature review are presented. The findings of the fieldwork will be presented in future editions of ECER.

Of the 141 articles reviewed, 83 (61 qualitative, 16 quantitative and 6 mixed methods) have identified 24 types of educational actions aimed at empowering the most vulnerable women that demonstrate 36 kinds of social impact in empowering women, their families, and their communities in urban and rural contexts in 46 countries around the world. The 24 types of education actions identified have been classified into four categories: 1) educational actions in the formal setting from literacy to training for access to higher education; 2) education and vocational training for employment; 3) education for access to knowledge in various fields such as science, health, and culture; 4) education for social and political participation. Among these educational actions, eight characteristics have been identified that can be transferred to educational actions that could be recreated in other contexts through dialogue with communities. These characteristics are the following: 1) Based on scientific evidence of social impact in diverse contexts; 2) Shared theoretical frameworks, among the most cited authors are Paulo Freire and Amartya Sen; 3) They create solidarity networks in their communities; 4) Dialogic and democratic organisation; 5) High expectations towards women participants; 6) Recognition of the equal right to live differently and express identity; 7) Educators committed to human rights and social justice; 8) Cooperation between governments, universities, NGOs and local communities. The 36 kinds of the social impact of these educational actions have been classified into four groups: 1) improvements in the women themselves; 2) improvements in their families and intimate relationships; 3) improvements in their communities; 4) contributions to feminism. To highlight just two related to the improvement of their families and on development of their communities: their children improve their academic performance and the women empowering their local communities by using their resources to benefit a wide-reaching network of individuals.

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