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Marginalisation of women through economic empowerment programs
26-10-2017
The Washington Post yesterday published a feature spotlighting ‘women empowerment’ and criticizing the international humanitarian institutions for misapplication of the concept. The newspaper spoke to the Croatian researcher in human rights and mass atrocities, Kate Cronin-Furman, who said the notion has been reduced to the mere increase in income or so-termed economic empowerment of women. Aid agencies tend to achieve this through encouraging women to take sewing or makeup classes, while completely disregarding the core part of their mission, which is to free them from the limitations of a male-dominant mindset, subordination and from oppression through collective political mobilization and give them power to reach decision-making levels. Cronin-Furman gave example of the Tamil women of Sri Lanka who, because of their political principles, had been on the front lines fighting among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil during the civil war which ended in 2009. Those women were sent by one international aid organizations to learn cake-making as a source of livelihood and rehabilitation. Furman said these women not only did not benefit economically from the training workshops, but the latter made them worse off and they discontinued participating in political life. Such empowerment programs, Furman mentioned, are in fact impeding the empowerment or women because they contribute to cutting them off from the vital opportunities at hand. Furman went on to say that a large number of women rights organizations believe that empowering a woman is by giving her a chicken or a sewing machine, ignoring an important fact which is, that women suffer not just because they don’t have an independent source of income, but because they are part of a political system that hampers their advancement and access to power. Furman concluded by saying that in order to change this reality, women need a political push and support through altering the current legislations and policies. She said only few of the development non-profit organizations make political change a priority on their agenda.
The Washington Post, October 25, 2017
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