MEANING OF WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
Meaning of Women’s empowerment
Women’s empowerment (or female empowerment) may be defined in several ways, including accepting women’s viewpoints, making an effort to seek them and raising the status of women through education, awareness, literacy, and training. Women’s empowerment equips and allows women to make life-determining decisions through the different societal problems. They may have the opportunity to re-define gender roles or other such roles, which allow them more freedom to pursue desired goals.
Then-First Lady Michelle Obama greets students during a Room to Read event with First Lady Bun Rany of Cambodia in support of the Let Girls Learn initiative, at Hun Sunni Prasat Bakong High School in Siem Reap, Cambodia, March 21, 2015.
Women’s empowerment has become a significant topic of discussion in development and economics. Economic empowerment allows women to control and benefit from resources, assets, and income. It also aids the ability to manage risk and improve women’s well-being.[4] It can result in approaches to support trivialized genders in a particular political or social context.[5] While often interchangeably used, the more comprehensive concept of gender empowerment concerns people of any gender, stressing the distinction between biological and gender as a role. Women empowerment helps boost women’s status through literacy, education, training and awareness creation. Furthermore, women’s empowerment refers to women’s ability to make strategic life choices that were previously denied them.
Nations, businesses, communities and groups may benefit from implementing programs and policies that adopt the notion of female empowerment. Women’s empowerment enhances the quality and the quantity of human resources available for development. Empowerment is one of the main procedural concerns when addressing human rights and development.
Women’s empowerment is key to economic and social outcomes. Benefits from projects that empower women are higher than those that just mainstream gender. More than half of bilateral finance for agriculture and rural development already mainstreams gender, but only 6 percent treats gender as fundamental. If half of small-scale producers benefited from development interventions that focused on empowering women, it would significantly raise the incomes of an additional 58 million people and increase the resilience of an additional 235 million people.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), increasing women’s empowerment is essential for women’s well-being and has a positive impact on agricultural production, food security, diets and child nutrition.
Several principles define women’s empowerment, such as, for one to be empowered, one must come from a position of disempowerment. They must acquire empowerment rather than have it given to them by an external party. Other studies have found that empowerment definitions entail people having the capability to make important decisions in their lives while also being able to act on them. Empowerment and disempowerment are relative to each other at a previous time; empowerment is a process rather than a product.
CULTURAL EMPOWERMENT
As a progressive society, standing for women’s rights and empowerment, we must stop viewing culture only as a barrier and an obstacle to women’s rights. Culture is an integral and huge part of diversity and a medium that seeks to ensure women’s equal opportunities. It recognises their freedom to take pride in their values, whether they are orthodox or modern in nature. This is not to say that centuries of abuse clothed in the spirit of culture should be allowed to continue, let alone be celebrated. Undoubtedly, traditions cloaked in the idea of empowerment should be objected to in light of feminism. For example, some research indicates that women only have an equal chance to have their written work published in peer-reviewed journals if the sex of the author is absolutely unknown to the reviewers. This is a result of historical habitual culture which has led to lack of representation of women in literary and therefore, strongly demonstrated why all cultural legacies cannot and should not be celebrated or encouraged.
There is a need for equal cultural rights for women to be acknowledged and implemented which would in turn help to reconstruct gender in ways that would rise above women’s inferiority and subordination. Furthermore, this would significantly improve the conditions for the full and equal enjoyment of their human rights on the whole as argued by the UN expert in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed.
Shaheed continues to add that the perspective and contributions of women must transcend from the margins of cultural life to the centre of the process that creates and shapes cultures around the globe today. “Women must be recognized as, and supported to be, equal spokespersons vested with the authority to determine which of the community’s traditions are to be respected, protected and transmitted to future generations.”
Role of education
People engage in public debate and make demands on government for health care, social security and other entitlements In particular, education empowers women to make choices that improve their children’s health, their well-being, and chances of acquiring survival skills. Education informs others of preventing and containing a disease. Such education empowers women to make choices that can improve their welfare, including marrying and having children. Education can increase women’s awareness of their rights, boost their self-esteem, and provide them the opportunity to assert their rights
Education is not universally available and gender inequalities persist. A major concern in many countries is not only the limited numbers of girls going to school, but also the number of educational pathways for those that step into the classroom. There are efforts to address the lower participation and learning achievement of girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.
In some parts of the world, girls and women are attacked for attending school, and societal efforts to stop this may be lacking.
Writer is: Khatra Said Abdulle.
