The word empowerment as it relates to women’s rights has
become a popular catchword used by development agencies and organisations in development cooperation in recent
years. Commonly defined, empowerment means women taking control of their lives
through the development of their own skills, confidence and economic status. In
other words ‘empowerment’ essentially means the cultivation of agency, comprising
both economic and self -worth. Strategies to support the empowerment of
vulnerable groups in society such as for women in particular have been said to
assist the latter in realizing their own potential, capacity and worth as
agents for both personal and structural change. In terms of women’s rights the
term empowerment has therefore been closely linked to change particularly where
cultural and gender norms are concerned with promoting self-reliance and self –confidence,
encouraging women to act independently and to make their own choices. Within
the framework of development co-operation it is often understood that
development agencies and organisations are not in a position to empower women per se but merely to support and aid
such empowerment. Empowerment bluntly understood is thus contingent on the
agency and the ‘enlightenment’ of women themselves who come to the realization
mainly through the conduit of human rights education that their rights are
being violated.
Ethical concerns may however arise if development
institutions support or promote gender equality but in the process are culturally
insensitive and impose their own views and interests on the culture concerned
in terms of gender relations, all the while taking it upon themselves to define those issues or aspects of culture steeped in strong gender roles that require
change. In some instances a lack of recognition is given to the fact that each
society has embedded and different views on gender relations and that if in fact change is
to be envisaged, women themselves need to be the initiators and drivers of such
change. Recognition thus needs to be
given to either the initiated or ongoing efforts of women who already continue to challenge certain harmful cultural values or practices by seeking equality on their own accord. Instead noteworthy or incremental steps undertaken by women in their own particular communities are
often overlooked for fear that they do not meet the predetermined standard of
what “empowerment” should represent or look like to the outside world, to
development organizations themselves, and to the latter’s targeted public
sector and relevant sponsors and donors.
Furthermore, cognizance must also be given to the fact that
members of these targeted communities in some cases also succumb to the influence,
power and money of development aid and mimic or pretend to be empowered for
lack of education, money and lack of a better future. The resultant effect of
this is that the actual empowerment of women in these targeted communities
becomes questionable especially because it is arguably less genuine, thereby
making the impact of development work in this area difficult to assess and
measure. So in other words, difficulty arises in the assessment of the impact
of targeted development strategies especially if ‘empowerment’ comes to be based
only on external indicators such as group demonstrations, marches and picketing
that aim to outwardly invoke a display of empowerment rather than an inward
change or transformation. While on a more personal level and within the
immediate and extended social circle or family, a women’s preconceived cultural
gender role remains unchanged still preventing her from making or taking the necessary
decisions and exercising the choices she deems relevant or life changing. In
other words “empowerment” becomes a catchword bereft of any true power or efficacy,
and which in many cases might be indicative of an outward show of power rather
than a truly inward transformation of power having little or no real impact.
The
value of development agencies and organizations in the effective protection and promotion of human rights can be seen as a pivotal conduit through which the spread of human rights can take place, especially if and when they operate from the bottom up keeping the local and cultural context of the communities in which they work in always in mind. The well-known anthropologist Sally Engle Merry for
instance has recognized the value of intermediaries such as development agencies,
social movements and NGO’s for the development and promotion of human rights. She believes that such intermediaries may be
the most suited in translating ideas from the global arena down to the local
level and from the local level up to the global arena because they understand
both worlds well enough to serve as intermediaries between distinct social
worlds but at the same time she also recognizes that such groups are also
vulnerable to manipulation and divided loyalties, such as the pressure put onto
them by donors. So while these actors may in some instances be intimately connected to competing interests they nevertheless
can still play a valuable part in promoting the rights of the disenfranchised
and oppressed. The shift to a rights based approach to development in recent
years in Merry’s view, has brought the disciplines of human rights and development
closer to one another with the resultant effect that human rights
education is seen as key to the empowerment of peoples and therefore hence to
development.
