For only $100, you can empower a woman in India. This manageable amount, according to the website of the organization India Partners, will provide a woman with her own sewing machine, allowing her to take the very first step on the march to empowerment.
Or you can send a chicken. Poultry farming, according to Melinda Gates, empowers women in developing countries by allowing them to “express their dignity and seize control.”
If chickens are not your empowerment tool of choice, Heifer International will, for $390, deliver an “enterpriser basket” to a woman in Africa. It includes rabbits, juvenile fish and silkworms.
The assumption behind all of these donations is the same: Women’s empowerment is an economic issue, one that can be separated from politics. It follows, then, that it can be resolved by a benevolent Western donor who provides sewing machines or chickens, and thus delivers the women of India (or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever in what’s known as the “global south”) from their lives of disempowered want.
Empowerment did not always stand for entrepreneurship starter kits. As Nimmi Gowrinathan, Kate Cronin-Furman and I wrote in a recent report, the term was introduced into the development lexicon in the mid-1980s by feminists from the Global South. Those women understood “empowerment” as the task of “transforming gender subordination” and the breakdown of “other oppressive structures” and collective “political mobilization.” They got some of what they wanted when the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 adopted “an agenda for women’s empowerment.”
In the 22 years since that conference, though, “empowerment” has become a buzzword among Western development professionals, but the crucial part about “political mobilization” has been excised. In its place is a narrow, constricted definition expressed through technical programming seeking to improve education or health with little heed to wider struggles for gender equality. This depoliticized “empowerment” serves everyone except the women it is supposed to help.
In handing out chickens or sewing machines, Western feminists and development organizations can point to the non-Western women they have “empowered.” The non-Western subjects of their efforts can be shown off at conferences and featured on websites. Development professionals can point to training sessions, workshops and spreadsheets laden with “deliverables” as evidence of another successful empowerment project.
In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.
Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s poultry farming projects. Bill Gates has insisted that because chickens are small animals kept close to the home, they are particularly suited to “empowering” women. But researchers haven’t found that giving out chickens leads to any long-term economic gains — much less emancipation or equality for half the population.
To keep the money coming, the development industry has learned to create metrics that suggest improvements and success. U.S.A.I.D. statistics on Afghanistan, for instance, usually focus on the number of girls “enrolled” in schools, even if they rarely attend class or graduate. The groups promoting chicken farming measure the short-term impact of the chickens and the momentary increase in household income, not the long-term, substantive changes to women’s lives.
In such cases, there is a skirting of the truth that without political change, the structures that discriminate against women can’t be dismantled and any advances they do make will be unsustainable. Numbers never lie, but they do omit.
Sometimes development organizations actually render women invisible in the service of their narratives. One of my co-authors heard from a worker with an anti-human trafficking group in Cambodia about a Western donor organization filming a fund-raising video. When a woman was produced she was rejected because she didn’t fit the image of a young, helpless survivor that donors wanted.
When non-Western women already have strong political identities, their removal is sometimes required even if it involves pushing them back into the very roles from which empowerment was meant to deliver them. In Sri Lanka, a former soldier for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam told one of my co-authors that she and other ex-fighters were offered classes in cake decorating, hairstyling and sewing. A government official confessed that despite years of training programs, she had never seen any of the women earn a living from these skills.
It’s time for a change to the “empowerment” conversation. Development organizations’ programs must be evaluated on the basis of whether they enable women to increase their potential for political mobilization, such that they can create sustainable gender equality.
On the global stage, a return to this original model of empowerment requires a moratorium on reducing non-Western women to the circumstances of their victimhood — the rape survivor, the war widow, the child bride. The idea that development goals and agendas should be apolitical must be discarded.
The concept of women’s empowerment needs an immediate and urgent rescue from the clutches of the would-be saviors in the development industry. At the heart of women’s empowerment lies the demand for a more robust global sisterhood, one in which no women are relegated to passivity and silence, their choices limited to sewing machines and chickens.
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