The term “women’s empowerment” (or sometimes “woman/women empowerment”) has become familiar to those of us working in non-profit and charitable organisations. There’s a general sense that it’s good to empower women—and much impressive scholarship supports the notion.
Marilyn Waring’s 1988 book If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics exposed how the masculine bias of conventional economic measures ignores the unpaid labour of women in care giving, child raising, household maintenance, material support of men’s activities and many other areas crucial to social cohesion and overall economic resilience. It turns out that keeping women disempowered in the political, economic, social and religious spheres actually works against the interests of all members of society: men and women, children and elders.
So it’s in everyone’s interests to empower women. But what does that actually mean? Support for women in areas such as micro-credit, education and healthcare are, unarguably, contributing to very real changes in the everyday lives of women, particularly in developing countries. In Nepal, organisations such as VIN are pioneering just such initiatives, with measurably positive results.
Women’s Empowerment in Jitpurphedi, Kathmandu
The empowerment of women has been a central focus for VIN since its inception. In Jitpur, site of VIN’s pilot upliftment initiative, a women’s cooperative hosts a variety of valuable trainings, as well as a robust micro-credit system involving nearly 100 small women’s groups. These groups encourage regular saving, and create revenue-generating opportunities for rural women through business-minded lending policies.
These are important and encouraging developments—particularly given VIN’s policy of involving women at every phase of the programs affecting them. For as many well-intentioned organisations have discovered, power can never be given; it must be taken. For women to enjoy genuine empowerment, they must internalise a sense of their own, innate agency as active participants in the social, economic, religious and political dynamics of their communities.
It is said that when a butterfly tears its cocoon and begins forcing its way out into the world, one should never try to help it by cutting open the cocoon. The effort involved in breaking free exercises and strengthens crucial muscles; when the butterfly is deprived of this necessary passage, it soon dies for lack of the muscular development to survive in its new environment. The well-intentioned rescuer might believe she is empowering the butterfly to escape its cocoon, but in fact she is setting up a dependence that will prove fatal to the creature she is trying to save.
Merely correcting imbalances such as lack of access to funds, exclusion from social decision-making, relegation to low-status work, and so on can be likened to “helpfully” cutting open a cocoon. It is not the same as the empowerment of women unless it is accomplished on the women’s own terms. The American feminist activist Gloria Steinem once remarked, “Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself”. For the women of Jitpur, as for women everywhere, genuine empowerment can only happen to the extent that they determine for themselves what they want and need, and then initiate the activities that will lead them to acquiring those things.
Engaging the Imagination
The accomplishment of this vision of empowerment presents VIN with a two fold challenge. The first aspect of this challenge involves sparking the imagination and aspirations of the women in the locations where the organisation is active.
The women of Nepal—particularly those historically confined to village life—have spent generations in a social environment so pervaded with patriarchal beliefs and values that, like water to a fish, these constraints are considered natural. If this were not so, the women would long since have rebelled against their impoverished social status and diminished access to community resources. Thus, the first step in empowerment must be to introduce other possible scenarios.
Sadly, the most pervasive alternative scenarios villagers encounter are those advanced on television. Women, along with men and children, are exposed to a harshly unrealistic vision of material accumulation and the associated culture of obsolescence.
In the fantasy world of television, success is equated with consumption, which inevitably produces waste. Cavalierly tossing away one’s discards is thus a mark of success, whereas cleaning up those discards—caring for the environment—is associated with undesirable social status. It is no coincidence, then, that feminist economists have traced a clear connection between the disempowerment of women and the degradation of our planetary environment.
Picture a rural culture where everything has for centuries been reused and recycled. Under these conditions, the influx of disposable packaging and short-lived plastic items over the course of just a few decades has been overwhelming. It has taken the developed industrial countries quite some time to recognise the environmental problems associated with a culture of waste, and efforts to address these problems are still in their infancy. But although the developed world may be falling short of an adequate response, the fact is that they have the educational, economic and technological resources necessary to devise solutions. The residents of Jitpur do not; thus this lovely mountain village is strewn with trash.
But the problem of waste is only one face of the alternative scenarios villagers see on television. For women, “empowerment” is sold in the form of access to flashy fashions and the means to acquire them.This distorted vision further encourages a culture of cheap disposables, adding to the environmental problems already discussed.Spent lipstick tubes and empty shampoo bottles swell the growing heap of snack packets, grocery bags, discarded flip-flops and broken plastic buckets already littering the mountainside.
Perhaps more ominously, this false empowerment comes packaged in a Barbie-doll version of womanhood. The underlying assumption that women must strive to be “beautiful” goes unchallenged; only the definition of beauty has changed. To fall for this unreality is not empowerment at all, but merely a different form of enslavement to the interests of others.
VIN’s work in stimulating genuinely empowering aspirations, then, is two fold:
- supporting the essential recognition that the ancient patriarchal order need no longer dictate every aspect of women’s lives as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers
- the promotion of personal power rooted in the native strengths of women, rather than in a consumerist value system
These two initiatives are, of course, mutually dependent. It is by discovering their personal power that women begin to question engrained assumptions about their social roles and status. At the same time, the very process of questioning in itself demonstrates and strengthens women’s awareness of their personal power.
An Empowering Environment
The second of the two steps toward genuine empowerment for women that VIN can enact is that of creating an environment in which women are free to discover and develop their own visions.(This, of course, leads organically to a third step: supporting the initiatives that arise from this empowering environment.) The Jitpurphedi Cooperative represents just such a setting.
The cooperative initially brought together a number of independent women’s savings groups already operating in Jitpur. But it offers two important additional resources: bulk consumer buying power and distribution of products. In addition to traditional micro-credit services, then, the Jitpurphedi Cooperative also provides its members with access to discounted seeds, fertilisers and other commodities; and it sends to market those products developed by its members. In this way, the cooperative provides a continuous path of empowerment, from the building of capital to the realisation of returns on investment.
Along this path, VIN also supports various trainings calculated to empower cooperative members an several levels. Women are offered tuition in accounting, literacy, and basic arithmetic, computer and life skills. Through the Income Generation Program, women receive practical trainings in handicrafts and other potentially lucrative skills—as well as useful information related to health and hygiene. Thus, in a single day cooperative members might learn embroidery techniques and discover how to deal with physical problems ranging from back pain to uterine prolapse.
Importantly, it is the women themselves who determine what trainings will be held. Cooperative members identify community needs and then liaise with VIN, which sources the trainers and facilitates the trainings or workshops. In this way, women take the lead in providing relevant resources to the community as a whole—an important factor in enhancing both their own self-image and their status in village society.
The variety of trainings available reflects both the cooperative’s broad scope and VIN’s holistic orientation to social enrichment. VIN recognises that genuine and sustainable upliftment must address all aspects of life. In fact, the organisation’s other initiatives in the village can hardly be separated from the activities of the Jitpurphedi Cooperative. All contribute in their own ways to the empowerment of women.
The Jitpur Health Post, for example, offers free medical resources to the village’s families. When a husband or child is ill, it is typically the women who must set aside all other activities to care for them. Thus the benefit of the health post to women goes beyond just their own physical well-being to relieve them of redundant care giving tasks.
In the same way, the children’s clubs operating in all eight of Jitpur’s schools, while directly benefiting the children involved, also represent an indirect benefit to their mothers, aunts and grandmothers. Obviously, children trained in proper personal health, hygiene and sanitation, for example, can passthat learning on to other family members. But not only are the children furnished with valuable life skills; their involvement in the clubs encourages greater personal autonomy. This helps transform them from non-participating dependants to active contributors to their families’ well-being—a clear advantage to the adult women who are customarily tasked with maintaining smooth relationships within the extended family complex.
Yet another aspect of VIN’s holistic programming is the construction of sanitary toilets – its for total sanitation. How does this benefit women? One need only reflect that dealing with waste typically falls to those of lowest status. Although it is almost certainly the women who keep the family’s new toilet clean, this task is vastly more dignified and less time consuming than are those tasks associated with the old bucket system.
Thus it is that the Jitpurphedi Cooperative represents only the most visible aspect of VIN’s women’s empowerment initiative. The overall upliftment of the village through the programs mentioned contribute in other crucial ways to the environment necessary for genuine, sustainable women’s empowerment.
Walking the Fine Line
VIN has provided a legal framework to govern the activities of the Jitpurphedi Cooperative. It goes without saying that such a framework is necessary in order to maintain clarity and order in an operation involving hundreds of people and several layers of activity. Likewise, VIN has legally registered the cooperative with the Nepali government. This enables the flow of federal funding and subsidies, while also legitimising the operation in a larger social context.
Yet the enterprises supported by these externally sourced frameworks are the women’s own. As the cooperative matures, its members might decide to change its regulatory structure; there is nothing in the cooperative’s by laws to prevent such an initiative. Far from reflecting badly on VIN’s framework, a move of this nature would be cause for rejoicing. It would signal an important step toward the taking of power—which, as indicated, is the true measure of empowerment.
The Jitpurphedi Cooperative has already made many positive changes in the lives of Jitpur’s women. The most positive change of all, however, is still in process. This is the change that happens in women’s consciousness of their own, innate power. As long as VIN’s activities continue to support without imposing, to train without coercing, and to recede in proportion to the women’s advancement, it will provide an extremely valuable model for authentic women’s empowerment.
In particular, VIN’s template addresses the two crucial aspects of such empowerment: the stimulation of women’s imagination and aspirations, and the creation of an empowering environment. The balance and interaction between these two aspects are yielding real-life, everyday benefits to the women of Jitpur. And as noted, when women experience social and economic upliftment, the entire community benefits.
By
Jennifer Woodhull
South Africa
Volunteer for Buddhist Monastery program
Member of