Women’s Empowerment

Women’s Empowerment: 

Women’s Empowerment

PowerPoint Presentation: 

Of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty around the globe, 70 percent are women. For these women, poverty doesn’t just mean scarcity and want. It means rights denied, opportunities curtailed and voices silenced. Consider the following: • Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, according to the United Nations Millennium Campaign to halve world poverty by the year 2015. The overwhelming majority of the labor that sustains life – growing food, cooking, raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining a house, hauling water – is done by women, and universally this work is accorded low status and no pay. The ceaseless cycle of labor rarely shows up in economic analyses of a society’s production and value. • Women earn only 10 percent of the world’s income. Where women work for money, they may be limited to a set of jobs deemed suitable for women – invariably low-pay, low-status positions. • Women own less than 1 percent of the world’s property. Where laws or customs prevent women from owning land or other productive assets, from getting loans or credit, or from having the right to inheritance or to own their home, they have no assets to leverage for economic stability and cannot invest in their own or their children’s futures.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

Women make up two-thirds of the estimated 876 million adults worldwide who cannot read or write; and girls make up 60 percent of the 77 million children not attending primary school. Education is among the most important drivers of human development: women who are educated have fewer children than those who are denied schooling (some studies correlate each additional year of education with a 10 percent drop in fertility). They delay their first pregnancies, have healthier children (each additional year of schooling a woman has is associated with a 5 to 10 percent decline in child deaths, according to the United Nations Population Fund) 2 and are far more likely to send their own children to school. Yet where women do not have the discretionary income to invest in their own or their children’s education, where girls’ education is considered frivolous, and where girls are relied on to contribute labor to the household, they miss this unparalleled opportunity to develop their minds and spirits. Their countries suffer too: the World Bank estimates that nations in South Asia and Africa lose .5 to 1 percent growth in per-capita income per year compared to similar countries where children have greater access to quality, basic education.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

In India, a CARE project working with adolescent girls noted that “they are often seen only as temporary people who will cease to be – at least for the father – once they have disappeared inside a marriage.”

PowerPoint Presentation: 

In Zambia, a Lenje man with many wives told CARE, “Women are like livestock,” meaning many things. They can be bought and sold, as cattle can, and they are a productive asset, as cattle are. To this man, women were extremely important – his cattle certainly were – but they had the status of a commodity.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

In Lesotho, an old adage says, “ A woman is the child of her father, her husband and her son.” The constitution treats women as minors, incapable of making decisions…Within the law, households [that do not have a “permanent” male in them] do not exist, which makes women even more vulnerable.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

Which aspects of women’s poverty, their lesser economic, legal and social status, are due to sex (the physical attributes and processes mandated by the cellular presence of XX or XY chromosomes), and which to gender (the economic, social and cultural attributes and opportunities that human societies have attached to being a woman or a man)? Gender differences pattern our identities, attitudes, roles, relationships and resources more deeply and persistently than class, race or other social constructs. In all societies, including our own, sex and gender are so tightly linked that we have great difficulty disassociating them. Gender roles perpetuated over time and space are normalized: they come to seem as much the natural order as sex differences. Helping women and men uncover and uproot the profoundly unjust gender norms that keep so many women mired in poverty and bereft of dignity is surely CARE’s most challenging undertaking to date.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

A key breakthrough in CARE’s evolving understanding of the underlying causes of poverty has been the explicit recognition of power as the currency of material and social well-being. Power has been defined by gender activities within the development arena as “the ability to get what you need, keep what you have and influence others to meet your interests.”

PowerPoint Presentation: 

A rights-based approach: • Insists that poverty is neither natural nor inevitable, but has roots in political and economic decisions; • Helps us identify the structural and societal causes of poverty and marginalization; • Aims to address relations between those who wield power and those who do not; • Provides a means of strengthening people’s capacities to claim and exercise their rights; and • Clarifies authorities’ duties to those they serve.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

Mata Masu Dubara : Preparing the Ground for Structural Change? Clearly, Nigerien women who are members of MMD enjoy increased skills, knowledge and resources. But have they moved beyond individual change to challenge the legal, political and familial structures that surround them? Over the years, participating women’s role and status within existing structures has changed. However, members have generally not chosen to challenge the structures themselves. For example, women report that they have a greater voice in household decision-making – over use of resources, for example, or children’s marriage prospects – but they have not yet banded together to challenge customary kinship and marriage structures that relegate them to subordinate positions in the home. Still, there are hopeful signs. Some MMD groups have created mutuelles – special savings that members can draw upon to purchase health care without woman seeking man to approve. Other MMD groups, with CARE’s help, have applied for loans from formal banks, surely a challenge to the banking industry’s view that poor, rural women are the greatest credit risk of all. And in the political arena, a surprise outcome of MMD is the number of members who have run for – and won – local offices in tandem with the government’s decentralization process. Women are entering politics in tiny but unprecedented numbers, thanks in part to MMD. But it remains to be seen how they will use their new positions to alter the lives of Nigerien women – or perhaps even to challenge the very nature of the political structures in which they now participate.

PowerPoint Presentation: 

Caution: Empowerment Work Carries Risks In our projects and our research, CARE strives at all times to benefit people and to do no harm. We consistently question how our work might place an individual at risk. This is nowhere more salient than in projects that implicitly or explicitly question the balance of power within a community or family, and particularly between men and women. Unintended consequences of empowerment work may fall into one of two categories: Backlash: Perhaps the most common consequences result from fear that empowerment is a zero-sum game; that for one person to gain, another must lose. In addition to the earlier India microfinance example, we have seen: ▪ Cases where emergency response prioritized women and children, whose needs were greatest, but left the women at greater risk of attack from men who would steal food and other aid items. ▪ Instances around the world in which women suffered abuse from husbands who feared that their participation in a project of any stripe would alter the status quo. ▪ A few cases in Niger where a woman’s growing financial status via participation in a savings group actually puts her at risk of seclusion within the home: Some families see this as a symbol of wealth. Gilding the Cage: Most people live within social structures so deeply normalized that they are seen as the natural way of things. An individual who benefits from some change in status or wealth may use that change not to alter structures, but to gain power within the very system that restricts her. For example: ▪ A woman in India may use increased income to purchase fetal screening and, per cultural preferences for sons over daughters, abort a female fetus. ▪ Discussions about female genital cutting may persuade a family not to drop the practice, but to perpetrate somewhat less severe forms on their daughters. ▪ In Bangladesh, a woman whose social status grows from improved financial security may use her new position to abuse the one socially-sanctioned power relation available to her: control over her daughter-in-law.

Conclusion: 

Conclusion CARE is deeply committed to improving the lives of poor women, men, girls and boys in some 70 of the least developed countries in the world. We choose to focus particularly on women, because in every society they struggle against gender norms that limit their resources and opportunities for improvement, and because we know that women’s empowerment is a tremendous resource for social change and a prerequisite in the broader fight against global poverty. But most fundamentally, we work with women because women are important in their own right. Everything CARE has learned about fighting poverty tells us that the most profound changes arise when we work not only with the most disempowered, but with the people and structures around them that can support or undermine their struggle for a life with dignity. At CARE, we strive for a world in which a person’s rights, responsibilities, opportunities and dignity are determined not by their status as male or female, but as a human being.