Page 93

CEP template 2012

Wome n ’s e c o n omi c emp owe rme n t ylvie Bouchard / Shutterstock.com Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2014/15 91 Land and property are the foundation of economic empowerment for women say in decisions about family size, to enjoying freedom of movement, and to being unafraid to disagree with the husband’ (Oppenheim Mason, 2005). Acknowledgment of the potential for micro-finance (and similar) schemes to contribute to empowerment by providing increased access to financial resources (and increasing income), and recognising their limitations for driving transformational change, leads to an important consideration of how economic empowerment – and, indeed, empowerment more broadly – is conceptualised and should, therefore, be achieved. Empowerment is a relative concept (defined against what existed previously) and transformative by nature; in its broadest sense, it is ‘an expansion of freedom of choice and action’ (Malhotra and Schuler, 2005). While the economic aspect of empowerment is the most studied, empowerment is a multidimensional concept encompassing social, psychological and political components (Narayan, 2005). It is also contextual and operates at different levels and across different spheres (individual, household, community and national) with potential for variation in terms both of progress and the definition of what it means to be ‘empowered’ within and across these levels and spheres. Empowerment in one sphere does not necessarily translate to empowerment in another. In conceptions of empowerment, resources (such as education and employment) are considered to be ‘enabling factors’ for, rather than indicators of, empowerment. And, as a process, empowerment must engage women (rather than be done to them): women must be agents of the change and have agency, in other words they must be able to formulate strategic choices, and control resources and decisions (Malhotra and Schuler, 2005). Understanding empowerment as multi-dimensional, transformative, relative and concerned with access to and power over resources influences both the types and the targets of interventions. One definition of women’s economic empowerment emphasises its two components, namely resources (access to) and agency (control over): ‘A woman is economically empowered when she has both the ability to succeed and the power to make and act on economic decisions’ (Golla et al., 2011). Resources include human capital (knowledge, skills) as well as financial capital and other resources, including land and property. But the critical ‘next step’ of economic empowerment is determining how these resources are distributed and used, which is a political process embedded in the deeper norms and institutions that govern the ‘rules of the game’. Thus, it is more useful to consider micro-finance schemes and support to entrepreneurs as ways to encourage, or pre-requisites for, empowerment, contributing to overcoming the constraints that limit women’s agency on a practical, everyday basis rather than necessarily transforming the deeper systems that support these constraints (Kabeer, 2005). Figure 1 demonstrates the interaction between projects/programmes that provide access to resources alongside those that aim to redefine the norms and institutions that determine how resources are distributed. Combined, these efforts contribute to securing empowerment through increased power/agency and economic advancement.


CEP template 2012
To see the actual publication please follow the link above