Why Women's Empowerment?

In decades of working to alleviate poverty around the world, leading humanitarian agencies have consistently deepened their understanding of why entire groups of people live in chronic want and despair. Today, at the onset of the 21st century, the world should be committed to uncovering and uprooting the underlying causes of poverty, including the human-made social, political and economic power structures that consistently exclude certain groups of people - and none more consistently and persistently than women in every society on the planet.

If the lives of poor women are to improve, individuals must gain power to change and effect change; structures that dictate social, economic and political power-holding must be altered; and human relationships must be created or modified to support change. This view of women’s empowerment serves as both a guide to designing work and as a tool to help measure the impact of work meant to promote the well-being of women. And it is useful in virtually all types of development programs that help communities improve the quality of and access to water, health services, education and microfinance services (to name a few), and those programs in which communities are guided to confront specific social injustices such as violence against women.