CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW
3.1 T HEORETICAL F RAMEWORK
3.1.6 Empowerment, Women’s Empowerment and Microfinance
Empowerment is conceptualised primarily through the practice and perceptions of those consciously involved in women's empowerment and gender equality. Scrutton & Luttrel, (2007) observe that the term has now become a buzzword used by organizations and programmes to obtain funding. The term is contested and has been defined in a variety of ways. In general, discussions about empowerment focus on activities related to social and economic empowerment (Luttrell et al., 2009). Economic empowerment aims to ensure that individuals have the necessary capabilities, skills, and resources, as well as access to financial resources, a stable income, and a certain way of life (Cornwall, 2016). The majority of
development organizations are concerned with gaining access to resources and assets. Page and Czuba (1999) describe human and social empowerment as a multifaceted social process that assists people in gaining control of their lives. They view it as a process promoting power or the ability to act in their lives, societies, and communities, particularly in relation to issues that they believe are important in their lives.
Empowerment refers to the ability to make strategic decisions that require power, options, and control in an individual's day-to-day life (Kabeer, 1999). This also includes autonomy, self-esteem, agency, and self-determination over life, as well as economic resources to positively impact people's lives and well-being (Malhotra et al., 2002). Empowerment refers to women's ability to own and control productive resources, including the ability to explore their full potential, determine their destiny, choose the number of children to have. It includes having the freedom to make a choice, and autonomy that directly and indirectly affects their lives and the lives of their families (Vaessen et al., 2014). Resources or assets are important to a person's well-being and can also be used to achieve well-being (Brown, 2015). Resources may provide women with the ability, power, and authority to participate in decision-making processes, which are referred to as agency (Kabeer, 2005). The World Bank (2016) defines empowerment as the process of building a person's or a group's assets and capabilities in order to make purposeful choices that translate into actions and results. There is no single or standard definition of empowerment but most definitions allude to exercising control over resources and decision-making processes that affect one's quality of life (Carr, 2016).
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Power debates lead us to investigate the concept and operation of power (Gammage et al., 2016). Gender theory describes power as about more than just having control over people and resources, leading to debates about empowerment. Empowerment discourse is aimed at women in pursuit of gender equality. SDG 5 focuses on gender equality and empowering all women and girls (UN, 2015). SDGs support women's empowerment, as well as the
liberalization of women's and gender equality (Edlund & Öun, 2016). Microfinance can push the sustainability agenda further, including achieving other SDGs such as decent work for all by 2030 with equal opportunities for all.
According to the ILO, higher inequality is caused by women spending a higher percentage of their time on unpaid domestic work (Charmes 2019). Women are required to perform
laborious domestic work in order to meet patriarchal expectations (Roomi & Parrott, 2008).
Labour-force participation could promote women’s financial independence and resilience to shocks. Ahl (2006) indicates that women’s domestic responsibilities and child care have a negative impact on business ventures. I will discuss the various types of power and how they contribute to inequalities and empowerment.
Power relations can be classified into four types: power over or the ability to influence and change existing structures, power to or the ability to organize and change current hierarchies, power with or power from group action, and power within or power from a person's
consciousness (Rowlands, 1997). The Chronic Poverty Research Centre (Prowse, 2009), defines "power to" as the ability to make meaningful life choices, including job selection.
This type of power; includes the ability to participate in social networks and community mobilization activities. “Power over” involves one’s ability to confront others and be assertive. “Power within” refers to self-esteem and the ability to cultivate the confidence required to overcome hopelessness and despondency. Women must be able to advance financially, socially, physically, and emotionally in order to achieve the aforementioned powers. Thus, the four-power framework was used to discuss the types of power that the women in this study demonstrated as a result of their participation in the fund. This is evident from the fact that empowerment implies that people need some level of power in order to have control over their lives (Edlund & Öun, 2016).
The concept of empowerment has been criticized for its inability to effect real change. While empowerment has the potential to reduce injustice, it does not always coincide with political or structural change or resource reallocation (Fiedrich et al., 2003). At first, empowerment
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was viewed as a radical project of social transformation in which social groups defined and claimed their entitlement as a group (Cornwall, 2016). Today's empowerment philosophies are founded on feminism and Paulo Freire's theories about the personal and intrinsic dimension of power (Luttrell et al., 2009).
Women's issues were first included on the development agenda in the 1970s. Ester Boserup's (1970) seminal work, Women's role in economic development, paved the way for women to be included in the development agenda. She was the first to discuss the role of women in development processes. However, feminists all over the world have previously criticized development processes and practices for their male dominance and conceptualization.
During the 1980s, the concept of empowerment became more prominent in development discourse as a result of major critiques of Western feminism by third-world feminists
(Luttrell et al., 2009) and the failure of traditional development approaches to assist poor and vulnerable groups (Kabeer, 1995). Women's empowerment is becoming more popular as a transformational and political idea for combating not only patriarchy, but also the mediating structures of ethnicity, class, religion, and race, among other structures that have determined the reality of women's condition and position (Jaka & Shava, 2018).
The following historical overview focuses on major accomplishments of feminist
organizations working on the relationship between women and development. In general, the feminist intention has been to change the conditions that affect women's lives through new policies and social action (Parpart, 2000). I discuss development approaches with the goal of bettering their lives of women through empowerment interventions. These approaches include Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), which attempts to improve on WID and the Gender and Development (GAD) approach. The WID approach is linked to modernization theory, and holds that women are not included in development processes. It aims to provide women with equal opportunities to participate in economic activities and gain access to capital. Its emphasis is on addressing gender disparities in
employment opportunities, while ignoring the reproductive side of women's lives (Rathgeber, 1990). In terms of education, it provides training and skills that enable women to participate in modern manufacturing sectors (Leach, 1998). The WID model does not address the power dynamics between men and women (Razavi & Miller, 1995). WAD is a neo-Marxist
feminism-based approach that arose from a critique of modernization theory. Their argument is based on dependency theory, which saw WID as limited, and WAD proponents claim that
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women will never receive equal shares of development benefits unless patriarchy and global inequality are addressed (Rathgeber, 1990).
WAD itself as come under criticism. The WAD approach is unable to examine the
relationship between patriarchy, contradictory production methods, women's subordination, and it does not question the relationships between gender roles (Smith, 2017). WAD does not regard women as a homogeneous group, but maintains that women's situations must be viewed in the context of the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and other factors that comprise a particular society.
Gender and development (GAD) is a concept influenced by socialist feminist thought, including participation and empowerment. The GAD approach arose in the 1970s as a bottom-up alternative to the dominant liberal top-down WID approach (Razavi & Miller, 1995). GAD challenges the logic of men and women's roles and seeks to transform gendered power relations that have disadvantaged women (Rathgeber, 1990). Gender equality was quickly raised to the top of the development agenda (Razavi & Miller, 1995). The UN's SDGs incorporate the goals of poverty alleviation, gender equality, and women
empowerment as a distinct priority (UN, 2015; UN Women, 2018).
The UNDP (2010) has stated on numerous occasions that improving gender equality through empowerment of women and poverty alleviation is critical for socioeconomic development.
Putting resources in the hands of women to achieve gender equality in communities leads to significant development (World Bank, 2015). Kabeer (1999) refers to empowerment as an increase in the ability to make strategic decisions in a context where specific groups were previously deprived.
The elements of empowerment described above emphasize the importance of an individual's ability to develop the unrestricted exercise of individual choice (Kurtis et al., 2016). From a broader perspective, social change is the result of individual and collective empowerment, which in turn is the result of women's consciousness and actions in relation to self, gender, family, religions, work, global women's conditions, and the feminism paradigm (Hall, 2013).
When women's perceptions, priorities, and performance shift, so does their business, with ramifications for society as a whole. Women's empowerment, according to Mahmud (2003), can be achieved by increasing women's resources and capabilities to participate, make decisions, negotiate, and both control and be held responsible for their lives. Financial resources help women advance, but other factors, such as gender roles and power dynamics,
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have an impact on how women can improve their lives, as I previously discussed. Women's access to capital and financial resources from microcredit institutions can also be influenced by power dynamics. According to the literature, women continue to face barriers to accessing productive and reproductive resources (UN Women, 2017), particularly in societies where customs and traditions favour men over women (Nyawo & Nsibande, 2014).
Empowerment could be seen as the process of eliminating gender inequality. Khader (2014) views empowerment as a process of reducing gender-related oppression. In patriarchal societies, men control the production and distribution of assets in the family, resulting in inequality at the household level, with power concentrated in men's hands. This gives men greater power because they are assumed to be breadwinners, while women are regarded as children (Women and Law in Southern Africa, 2001). All post-colonial African societies are defined by patriarchy as a structure that encourages male dominance over women, and perpetuates inequalities (Kramarae, 1992). Women may have the autonomy to earn a living through an income-generating activity in some societies, but they do not have control over the money they earn (Rawat, 2014). These are some of the many aspects of patriarchal societies that can contribute to women's disempowerment, despite significant efforts to improve their socioeconomic conditions and livelihood opportunities (Nyawo & Nsibande, 2014). Livelihoods are defined as the activities and resources used to earn a living, and the livelihood assets that are available to improve one's standard of living are central to the sustainability of one's livelihood (Vercillo, 2016).
This discussion makes it clear that empowerment is a multifaceted social process that can help individuals gain control over their own lives (Page & Czuba, 1999). In the discipline of psychology, empowerment refers to a process that assists people to act on issues that are important for their individual lives, families, communities, and society (Bandura, 1986).
Empowerment includes the belief that goals can be achieved, and is based on the awareness that efforts and action toward those goals exist. Believing in one's ability to do something is a necessary condition for taking action (Zimmerman & Warchusky, 1998). Empowerment can also be viewed from an African perspective where African feminism challenges the
patriarchal societal norms of all kinds (Nkealah, 2016). Many African feminists consider that it is the feminism of more liberal derivatives that is observed in many women development initiatives, including Women in Development (WID), gender equality, women empowerment strategies, and so on (Ahikire, 2014).
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