2   Education as a means for empowering women

Nelly P. Stromquist

Education has often been seen as one of the keys to empowerment. This chapter presents the concept of empowerment from an educational perspective, namely, how it has been applied in formal schooling with young students and in non-formal education programmes, with mostly adult populations. It offers a wide scope, appraising efforts in various parts of the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America – a reflection of the existing literature, which is often available only in the form of conference papers or institutional reports. As we explore the applications of the empowerment concept in the educational arena, we consider the objectives it has sought, the forms it has taken and the instructional modes it has utilized. This chapter also presents and evaluates several case studies of educating for empowerment.

Revisiting the concept of empowerment

The concept of empowerment has special resonance within the women’s movement today. Although its origins are unclear, the evidence points to an Asian rather than a Western inception, perhaps best reflected in the publication by Gita Sen and Karen Grown, Development, Crisis, and Alternatives, widely distributed at the Third World Women’s Conference in Nairobi in 1985. An exhaustive interrogation of the ideas and actions in the USA’s feminist movement reveals no such concept in almost forty years of the movement’s efforts to reframe and advance the condition of women in society (DuPlessis and Snitow 1998; see also Ware 1970). Contrary to popular belief, the concept of empowerment did not formally originate with Freire. His ideas of conscientization are totally compatible with the notion of empowerment, but conscientization (or deep awareness of one’s socio-political environment) is really a precursor to the development of empowering skills and feelings. In fact, the word ‘empowerment’ still has no fixed translation in Spanish, some preferring potenciamiento, others poderío, and yet others the neologism empoderamiento.

At times the concept has been used in an all-encompassing manner that has amounted to co-optation. For instance, one can find in the educational literature claims that attending classes is ‘empowering’, that story-telling is ‘empowering’, that motherhood is ‘empowering’. While there are multiple definitions of empowerment, I prefer to use one I proposed several years ago (Stromquist 1995). Empowerment consists of four dimensions, each equally important but none sufficient by itself to enable women to act on their own behalf. These are the cognitive (critical understanding of one’s reality), the psychological (feeling of self-esteem), the political (awareness of power inequalities and the ability to organize and mobilize) and the economic (capacity to generate independent income) (Stromquist 1995).

Educational settings have the potential to foster all four dimensions but require the educational programme to be designed explicitly to achieve each of those ends. While the interlocking nature of these dimensions can contribute to making empowerment irreversible, the path to the development of an empowered woman is not easy. It necessitates persistent and long-term interventions in order to break old patterns of low self-worth and dependence, and to foster the construction of new personalities with a realistic understanding of how gender functions in their society and strategies for its modification.

Empowerment within formal schooling

In recent years, especially those following the Fourth World Conference on Women (in Beijing, 1995), several governments have taken steps to modify the textbooks used in primary and secondary schooling, and, to a lesser extent, to provide teachers with gender-sensitive training. The former effort has typically involved the introduction of more inclusive language and images that offer a more balanced representation of women and men in society; the latter sought to make teachers aware of how their own sexist attitudes affect classroom practices and performance/career expectations for girls and boys. Training has also provided teachers with new pedagogical strategies to foster gender equality in the classroom.

Most of the interventions in the formal school system have, unfortunately, been sporadic, superficial and far from comprehensive in content. Even in pilot projects characterized by careful interventions, the training of teachers has usually meant at most three days over the course of a school year (Lazarte and Lanza 2000; Cortina and Stromquist 2000). Curriculum changes have generally brought explicit references to the roles men and women have played in history and play (and should play) in contemporary society. Deeper treatments of sexual stereotypes and sexism in education have been minimal, in part because they are often contested. In Argentina, for example, the Catholic Church successfully blocked the nationwide introduction of a gender-sensitive curriculum (Bonder 1999). In Mexico, conservative sectors of the Catholic Church have also led the fight against sex education in the schools (Bayardo 1996). Similar interventions have occurred in Peru and the Dominican Republic. To my knowledge, no country has designed, much less implemented, a graduated curriculum for the introduction of gender suitable to the age and experience levels of girls and boys at each grade of schooling.

Girls’ access to schooling in many developing countries is so low that the term empowerment has been used to mean mere participation in the formal system. This is problematic because it assumes that the experience and knowledge attained in schooling automatically prepare girls to assess their worth and envisage new possibilities. It ignores the reproductive function of formal schooling, particularly in more traditional societies. Is a gender-sensitive education the same as an empowering education? Does it make sense to apply the term to young girls by virtue of their presence in formal institutions? I think it can, but only when important modifications have fitted the concept to the age of the student and to the nature of the institution in which she finds herself, and only if special measures to empower students take place.

Typical of governmental programmes that describe themselves as empowering, this statement describes a sex education programme offered by an Asian government:

[The program content covers] communication with the opposite sex, selection of marriage partner, married life, family planning, and marital problems …. The sex and family education are [designed so that learners] perform their duties and roles as a good person and member of family as well as society …. Through sex education, male and female students will realize how to appropriately act their roles with their sex counterparts.

(Singussawin and Ratansing 1999: 5)

Judging from the above description, this sex education programme, far from being empowering, seems designed to prepare girls and boys to accept more readily established traditional gender roles.

Other programmes seem to have more potential for empowerment. The Girls’ Access to Education (GATE) Project in Nepal aims to provide literacy, health knowledge and skills to girls of ages ten to fourteen who had never entered school or who had been forced to drop out. The curriculum includes health and sanitation, reproductive health, nutrition, environmental health, adolescent psychology, population and health, and empowerment. Specifically under the category of ‘empowerment’, it covers ‘awareness of girls’ trafficking, importance of girls’ schooling, domestic violence and sexual abuse’ (World Education 1999: 4). The GATE curriculum thus contains elements that can build critical awareness of gender issues in girls. However, the extent to which the empowerment component meshes with or amplifies the other curriculum themes remains unclear.

To achieve empowerment through education, several concepts must be introduced at appropriate levels. When referring to primary and secondary schooling, empowerment should enable girls (children and adolescents) to develop the knowledge and skills to nullify and counter sexual stereotypes and conceptions of masculinity and femininity that limit the social potential of women. Empowering girls should mean offering them courses with content that not only attacks current sexual stereotypes but also provides students with alternative visions of a gender-free society. These courses should also provide them with education, not only on the anatomical and physiological aspects and consequences of sex, but also on the social aspects framing sexual relations. Schools engaged in efforts to foster the empowerment of girls should enable them to increase their participation in class, to learn not to be intimidated by boys and to speak their own minds. In that way, girls would be able to explore a more complete range of life options and develop fuller personalities. An empowering education in the schools would reduce the creation of masculine norms among boys, thus decreasing their desire to be superior to girls, to avoid dealing with emotions, to set themselves as different in nature from girls and to engage in sexual ‘conquests’. This empowering education, as noted earlier, would have to be sensitive to the age of the students, introducing knowledge and information that is progressively tailored to the increased age of the girls and boys. Students in formal schooling are capable of developing the cognitive and psychological dimensions of empowerment. The other two – political and economic – will most likely have to wait until they are adults. However, formal schooling can establish the basis for these dimensions.

At older ages of schooling – when (some) women are attending university – the possibilities for empowerment may be stronger because: (1) university access in most countries is expanding and universities provide increasingly better-designed programmes on gender and women’s studies, and (2) being older, university students are more mature and (some) can reflect on the implications of complexity of their surrounding society. Women’s studies programmes started in the USA in 1972, in Western Europe in the 1980s and in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Latin America initiated these programmes in the mid-1980s. Similar programmes emerged a few years later in Asia and Africa.

Gender and women’s studies programmes have made it possible for students to gain a greater understanding of how gender forces operate in society. These programmes have influenced the development and dissemination of new theoretical and methodological approaches dealing with the nature of gender, national development and social change. Further, many of the graduates of these programmes have been able to embark on careers that have made a difference in the way gender functions in institutions. In many developing countries, women’s studies graduate programmes have joined state machineries working on equality for women.

However, two major weaknesses still handicap these programmes. First, they attract a very small proportion of university students. Many young women, seeing the increased representation of women in all spheres of society, do not recognize the need for such knowledge. Their regular programme of studies may be too demanding to accommodate additional courses, and women’s studies are rarely integrated into regular academic programmes. Universities, as institutions, have not been very responsive to women’s studies as a new field. Indeed, after almost thirty years of existence, the field is only weakly institutionalized in many universities. Women’s studies usually does not have departmental status. It typically depends on the sponsorship of a related department, whose needs and priorities often lie elsewhere.

Empowerment among adult women

To talk of the empowerment of adult women, we must examine the work of women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs), entities that render concrete the women’s movement through their educational actions and political demands. However, the full functions and impacts of women-led NGOs have received academic attention only recently (Alvarez 1990; Yudelman 1993). Although women-led NGOs vary depending on the functions they fulfil (from providing assistance for basic needs to transforming attitudes and behaviours) and the geographical area they cover (from neighbourhoods to the national level), these organizations provide key examples of mobilization and articulation around gender issues. Women-led NGOs have existed throughout Latin American and in several places in India since the early 1970s. They appeared in Africa and other parts of Asia in the mid-1980s. Not surprisingly, some NGOs tend to be more professional and politicized than others. Many women-led NGOs are multiclass movements, comprising a middle-class leadership with low-income women among their most important beneficiaries, seeking objectives that permeate all social classes.

It is with adult women outside of formal education that empowerment at present reaches its highest forms. Not only are adults more capable of reflective thought – typically derived from family, work and other everyday experiences – but they can also acquire new knowledge in less restrictive and more creative settings, such as those provided by non-formal education programmes.

Being a synthesis of new knowledge, dialogical communication and a reflection on personal experience, empowerment develops best initially at local levels, in small groups and in women-only settings. Moore notes that ‘activists need a social and cultural space within the prevailing order – a more or less protected enclave’ for them to grow intellectually (1978: 482). A similar point can be made for women who are developing their gender awareness. The importance of new spaces for learning has also been noted in the political literature. Selbin (1998: 2, citing Hakim Bey) describes these spaces as ‘temporary autonomous zones from which people seek opportunity, a moment in which they endeavour to take control, perhaps for the first time, of their lives’.

Educational interventions of an empowering nature must perforce challenge patriarchal ideologies. As Patel illustrates from her own experience in India, the empowering organization must locate the geopolitical region in which it wants to work. Women must set aside a separate time and space for themselves to question collectively their situation and develop their critical thinking about it, prioritize issues to tackle and acquire skills that enhance women’s individual and collective autonomy (Patel 1996). The creation of these alternative social spaces for the discussion of gender issues has been extremely useful. In Kenya, for instance, women’s organizations have enabled women to refuse forced marriages or genital mutilations, to argue against male control over their sexuality and to protest violence against women. Precursors to these political stands have been gender sensitization, legal awareness and civic education programmes – all conducted in women-only groups and within women-led NGOs (Nzomo 1994).

The alternative spaces provided by these women-led NGOs promote systematic learning opportunities through the workshops (courses of short duration on specific themes) they offer on topics of great relevance to women’s advancement: gender subordination, reproductive health, domestic violence, gender and legislation, gender and politics, and others. They also make possible a wide range of informal learning, which occurs through processes such as mobilization and organization, or through less intense activities such as role modelling, participation in global networks, lobbying, monitoring, and testing one’s leadership. Literacy, a high-profile topic for women, often results in empowerment of a psychological nature. However, much of the gain in self-confidence and more autonomous practices at the family level seem to derive not merely from learning to code and decode print (which seldom seems to reach anticipated levels). Rather it arises from classroom experiences that provide the opportunity for women to discuss problems with others and exchange viewpoints in their relatively frequent meetings for literacy training (for more on this see Stromquist 1997).

An example of the political character of empowerment-focused educational programmes comes from the Women’s Development Collective (WDC) in Malaysia, which describes empowerment ‘as a process of changing the balance of power, i.e., between the powerful and powerless, haves and have-nots, and men and women’. The WDC defines power as control over resources and ideology in social, economic and political contexts. The WDC’s main non-formal education programmes are: gender and feminist analysis, health and safety at work, understanding and use of laws, and leadership and organizing. According to the WDC, empowerment should not merely promote critical awareness; it should enhance the ability to act for change. In reflecting upon its work, WDC raises questions such as ‘What criteria can we develop to assess how empowering a particular strategy or intervention is? Is consciousness and mobilization greater than providing access to concrete schemes and resources in an empowerment process?’ (Abdullah 1999: 3).

Learning processes in the empowerment of adult women

Internal (psychological and cognitive) as well as collective processes (political, organizational, economic) are involved in the acquisition of feelings and practices of empowerment among adult women. Below we review some of the elements that promote such empowerment.

Recognising oppression at the personal level

Awareness of the existence of oppression at the personal level requires recognition of oneself as a victim in particular circumstances or in recurrent social transactions. Although some observers argue that self-recognition as a victim moves a person into a passive role, the contrary can be asserted. Far from producing a defeatist attitude, the understanding of oneself as a victim is the first step toward redressing the inequity of social and economic treatment.

The complex set of conditions and interlocking forces that affect women has been explored by the women’s movement through efforts of gender consciousness-raising. Ware defines conscientization as a ‘close examination of the individual lives of group members to determine how society must be changed to eliminate the oppression to which all women can testify’ (1970: 109). Consciousness-raising has been the method most utilized for women to recognize and challenge their subordination and marginalization. The term has a distinct trajectory within Marxist thought and certainly influenced feminists who came from within the political left. In use since 1969 in the women’s movement, conscientization also owes its origins to the industrial experience of US workers. The acquaintance by the women’s movement of Paulo Freire’s conscientization methods (which also call for dialogical circles but focus on social class rather than gender issues) came much later. Ware, one of many who participated in the early consciousness-raising efforts of women in the USA, describes the process as:

A greatly improved descendant of the T-groups that industrial psychologists instituted to effect a working team out of a group of men in competition for promotion. In the original T-group, the personal problems of the men were seen as obstacles to be eradicated. In the women’s movement, consciousness-raising focuses on women, i.e., social problems as the central issues on which political attention should be directed.

(1970: 109)

Gender consciousness-raising efforts serve to render the personal public and hence to seek collective responses. Since consciousness-raising promotes a belief in women’s autonomy as subjects, it fosters among participants a sense of their independent worth and needs. It enables women to see themselves as individuals with agency beyond their responsibilities for home and family. More bluntly, such consciousness-raising efforts seek to instil in women an awareness of their role and needs as citizens, not just as mothers or wives. NGO work in the area of empowerment has identified as a common difficulty the task of helping women think of themselves, independent of family obligations.

Developing resilience

A notion of resilience is particularly relevant to the increased empowerment of women. This concept, which emerged in the context of US education to describe the ability of certain Afro-American children to succeed in their education while facing numerous obstacles, refers to the ability to persist, not to be overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable difficulties – to ‘bounce back’. Linda Winfield, one of its original proponents, defines resilience as ‘protective mechanisms that modify the individual’s response to risk situations and operate at turning points during his or her life’ (1994: 3). She sees resilience also as synonymous with ‘coping, persistence, adaptation, long-term success despite adverse circumstance’ (1994: 3). Resilience here is taken as the ability to persist in one’s goals despite being ridiculed for such attempts.

Facing conflict productively

An important feature of empowerment is learning to deal with conflict. Since empowerment is oriented toward social change, conflict is likely to emerge at two levels: externally, with the surrounding institutions that maintain the established order in society, and internally, by positioning women’s needs and desires against those expressed by their close family/household members. Conflict can be exploited as a means to create critical awareness and a strategy to strengthen collective action. Conflict should not be avoided but should be employed judiciously. Well-managed conflict develops negotiating skills, allowing women to state their rights with determination and controlled sentimentality.

In several Latin American countries, Chile being a case in point, access to contraception, legalized therapeutic abortion, and divorce are demands by the women’s movement to which the Catholic Church is strongly opposed (Dandavati 1996). Indeed, women’s empowerment is reflected in their persistent demands for these rights despite strong opposition and in their willingness to engage in the proscribed practices.

Resolving rivalries among women

A central objective of empowerment is to create gender solidarity among women. While various motives can bring women together, at the group level women often either distrust each other or engage in personal rivalry. This rivalry is itself a product of women’s socialization, which leads them to see men as superior and, conversely, women as inferior and as competitors for the small socio-political space open to them. Practitioners who have engaged in systematic efforts to enhance the skills of women leaders find that rivalry among women is one of the most resistant impediments to the development of empowering strategies. Thus, some women leaders tend to disqualify and even to express strong opposition to other women leaders to prevent them from attaining important public positions or representative office. In a Chilean experiment to develop greater skills among women leaders, feelings of rivalry were explicitly brought into the curriculum and women learned to be conscious of their attitudes toward other women holding leadership positions, and to be aware of their persistence in thinking that alliances with powerful men were more effective than working with women. As a result, women leaders learned to develop more alliances with other women (Valdes 2000).

Engaging in political thinking

The empowerment of women implies the dissolution of power structures that function to the nearly exclusive benefit of men. To accomplish tangible changes in power configurations, women find that they must learn to think tactically and strategically, that they must learn how the formal political processes work and that they must acquire negotiating and monitoring skills.

These political skills can be learned through discussion of past events and through various simulation exercises. However, the most effective learning occurs through actual engagement in change and mobilization efforts within specific groups. This has also been the case among women-led NGOs, as will be seen below.

Types of empowering knowledge

New, accurate knowledge about gender, politics and ideology is indispensable in the creation of empowerment. However, not every ‘empowerment’ project provides knowledge that is actually empowering. Typical topics in courses addressed to women, particularly low-income women, include agricultural skills, skills for production, family planning and literacy. In government-sponsored programmes, one often finds social improvement courses on family healthcare, family food and nutrition, sewing and crafts.

These programmes, especially in the African countries, tend to be reformist, incremental and conservative (Ityavyar and Obiajunwa 1992). If the topics covered are presented in a way that de-links them from the dynamics associated with patriarchy, sexuality, colonialism and power, chances are that the new knowledge will not be empowering. It would have failed to place that knowledge in the context of women’s conditions and the need for challenging asymmetrical gendered power. Usually, empowerment is fostered through knowledge of issues such as health, work, legislation, politics, domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape. However, this training requires competent facilitators who can help participants, through class exercises and discussions, to connect the personal with the social and the political.

In the area of human rights, women have been empowered by providing them with knowledge of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (see chapter by Ali). Legislation, however limited in scope, is always ahead of implementation. Therefore, knowledge of the laws creates spaces for action, promotes their implementation and ultimately helps to inject a rights-based approach to development.

Leadership training

In several ways, empowerment is very much connected with leadership training. This is well illustrated by a programme for training women leaders in Chile. The training programme focused on setting up supportive networks for these women, promoting a variety of leadership styles and, very importantly, trying to reduce their feelings of exaggerated stereotypical identity as women (referred to in Spanish as identidad), which is a consequence of gender socialization (Valdes 2000). Women were trained to acknowledge their own individuality or, in the programme’s words, to develop their capacity for ‘individuation’, defined as ‘the ability to have a singularized self-perception, with an individual project, able to distinguish oneself from the collective affiliation or social instances that give one’s identity’. This individuation was fostered through the development of skills to make proposals, to capture collective needs and identities, to face conflict and demands, to propose solutions, to question whomever was deemed to need questioning and to develop a critical gender vision. The training programme also enhanced the capacity to recognize one’s desires, to understand the diversity of positions/perspectives as a source of conflict and to develop skills to negotiate and to resolve. A fundamental feature of this leadership programme has been its attempt to clarify the link between women’s individual problems and difficulties, and those that exist at the national level (Valdés 2000).

Innovative pedagogies

Making a distinction between the instructional order (what is to be learned) and the regulative order (the context in which the new knowledge is learned), Zúñiga (1999) maintains that many non-formal education programmes provide a rigid instructional order, as they emphasize the transmission of specific knowledge, abilities and attitudes. However, they also offer a relaxed regulative order, characterized by flexible interaction, with open and friendly social relations between trainers and trainers. This regulative order is further supported by the use of social dynamics that favour group learning and collective work. Zúñiga’s point, thus, is that despite strong directives about curriculum content, the relaxed transactional approaches that characterize these non-formal education programmes account for their popularity with women participants.

Several innovative instructional methods have been tried in non-formal education programmes for women. These include the use of songs, simulation exercises, games, role playing and popular theatre. A Philippine programme in existence for several years has identified three phases in the implementation of empowering methods in the classroom: (1) working with the women’s awareness of and adjustment to social realities, (2) challenging their received knowledge, and (3) linking their new learning to their practical experience. They work these phases through three essential instructional strategies: story telling, which seeks to teach the women ‘how to understand forests but also trees, branches, and leaves’; learning from polemics (fostering constant arguments within the classroom); and constantly providing feedback (de Vela 1999).

The contributions of informal learning

The women-led NGOs foster the crucial political dimension of empowerment through informal learning. As noted earlier, these types of knowledge and skills are learned most effectively through interaction among women in non-threatening physical and social spaces. Among economically disadvantaged women – whose levels of formal education are low – a major obstacle to action, as perceived by the women, is their inability to speak correctly. This is especially true for indigenous women who are often afraid to express themselves (CEIMME 1995). The positive effects of these spaces for developing women’s confidence for presenting views and opinions cannot be overstated.

It is widely understood that women must organize if they are to create a political force and that they must mobilize if they are to expand their political power. Below, we examine the specificities of organizing and mobilizing, and how empowerment contributes to and is simultaneously enhanced by these two processes.

Organizing

By joining women-led grassroots groups, particularly NGOs, women identify common experiences and conditions, and consequently develop shared identities. As Oxhorn observes (1998: 7), ‘shared identities, the ability for self-organization and even a history of collective struggle are sources of power which can enable disadvantaged groups to challenge the status quo’. Organizing, in the context of aggregating demand in systematic and orderly ways, implies the adoption of some form of structure and process shared by the group. This means creating collectivities with leaders and followers, establishing ways of doing things and obtaining financial and knowledge resources for successful operations.

To become organized, women must feel empowered enough to want to act autonomously, on their own agendas. In the process of becoming organized and acting as a group, the sense of empowerment is further increased. Organization at the local level is essential to accomplish immediate aims linked to the household and the community, but women have learned that they must be organized beyond the local to increase their capacity to interact with the state. The organization of women’s groups constantly faces new challenges since the new relations being formed between the women’s movement, political parties and civil society can seldom rely on established models and new social experimentation is needed. Additional challenges for women today are those brought by the phenomena of economic and technical globalization (see Youngs, Gardiner Barber and Staudt in this volume).

Mobilizing

In a sense a person must first become part of some collective group to develop a collective identity; but developing a sense of collective identity also leads women to mobilize. After analysing the work of several successful movements for land redistribution in Latin America, Grindle (1996) observes that one commonality among them has been independent and sustained mobilization. This is doubly applicable to women’s groups, whose movements not only seek vindication of claims to personal rights but strive for social transformation as well.

Through collective struggle, collective identities are created and refined as new sources of political power. This is especially important because women have not engaged, and most likely will not engage, in physical struggle to achieve objectives of equity and gender justice. Most political mobilizations of women tend to be based on non-traditional female roles, but, as political action continues, the range of issues is expanded to reach transformative levels. In several instances, mobilization by women has escalated from demands for basic neighbourhood services to redefining their rights as citizens. These shifts toward more complex and broader types of social demands can be observed in the work of groups that began as mothers’ clubs in Brazil, neighbourhood groups in India and communal kitchens in Peru. Through the experience in organization and mobilization that participation in NGOs provides, women attain a sense of personal and collective empowerment.

Mobilization serves as a means to create a political agenda as well as to demand the implementation of that agenda. It requires a belief in one’s ability to influence others. The act of mobilizing creates opportunities for women to develop skills and discover new talents. As Winfield observes (1994: 3), ‘self-efficacy and self-esteem are learned through positive social interaction and successful accomplishment of tasks’.

It is well recognized that women will not be able to enhance their political power without mobilization and that part of this mobilization must include coalition building. At the same time, consolidation of small efforts into larger groups for feminist action tends to expand women’s political agendas, which at times may introduce topics about which there is no consensus. Examples of such issues are the priority given to sexual orientation and the extent to which the women’s movement should work independently of support from either the state or international development agencies.

Combining the cognitive and the economic dimensions of empowerment

Because many adult women depend financially on their families and men, empowerment for that group must have an economic component. Therefore, a number of non-formal education programmes for women combine the provision of emancipatory gender knowledge with the supply of productive skills, management skills or micro credit. These programmes report high levels of psychological and economic empowerment among their participants.

Evidence from the experience of non-formal education that targets poor women in Latin America indicates that the most successful efforts have been those which offer both a material and a subjective dimension, i.e. those that consider improving the quality of life of women and their families by increasing economic resources of the household as well as seeking to enhance the women’s self-esteem (Ruiz Bravo 1992). This has meant providing women with material resources (credit, food) in addition to the symbolic and cognitive resources (education, information, training).

A project in the Philippines, Women in Enterprise Development (WED), defines empowerment as ‘a process of enabling an individual to gain access to and control of resources, optimally utilize the resources and enjoy the benefits that accrue due to the efforts exerted’ (Lim 1999: 4). The WED project aims at developing entrepreneurship; increasing productivity, income and managerial capabilities of the learners; and promoting and improving health and nutrition habits through adult education/functional literacy (Lim 1999: 6). The project’s literacy sessions are used to enable women to ‘understand and be aware of the undesirable situations they are in and the cause of the oppressing conditions’ (1999: 7). In WED, the cognitive aspect of empowerment is a small component relative to greater inputs of entrepreneurship, credit, markets and technical assistance.

Two additional examples of how empowerment is being implemented through an economic dimension come from the Women’s Economic Empowerment and Literacy Project (WEEL) in Nepal, in which women participate in savings and credit groups to improve their livelihoods. This project links literacy and training curricula. It does not provide skills for the actual production of goods, but rather skills in marketing, product feasibility and management, record keeping, accounting and the like (Shrestha 1999). The other example comes from Pro Mujer in Bolivia, which provides women with a holistic array of courses, including reproductive health, communal organization and leadership, productive and marketing skills, and micro-financial services (involving individual loans usually ranging from US$50 to US$100) (Pro Mujer c. 1999). According to its own evaluations, 64 per cent of the women in this programme have gone on to occupy community leadership positions, and 67 per cent have reported increased revenues.

Institutional development and support

The empowerment skills women gain enable them to create more effective social movements. These, in turn, support the empowerment of more women. The social movements must operate simultaneously on two fronts. As Dandavati (1996: 141) explains: ‘social movements struggle to maintain their autonomy and yet be political actors and work with political parties and the state’. In the years in which the contemporary women’s movement has been active, crucial support has been obtained from several institutions, most of them operating within the non-governmental sector.

In the Latin American context, it is essential to recognize the supportive role of the Council for Adult Education in Latin America (Consejo de Educación de Adultos para América Latina, CEAAL), which functions as the main umbrella for NGOs working on popular education in the region. In the 1980s, women-led NGOs complained of the lack of gender perspective in mixed (comprising men and women) NGOs. Since 1990, largely as a result of this criticism, CEAAL has undergone three changes in its organization: it has incorporated a gender perspective in its programming, developed greater sensitivity to social movements and engaged in more systematic gender research.

Since the early 1980s, a group within CEAAL, but with financial and decision-making autonomy, has been the Women’s Education Network (Red Popular de Educación entre Mujeres, REPEM). Comprising approximately 180 NGOs working on gender and education, REPEM’s work has grown rapidly from facilitating the creation of a regional communication and information network to assuming leadership in the advocacy of women’s adult education in the world. This was demonstrated by its key role in the official documentation produced at the 1996 Fifth World Conference of Adult Education in Hamburg, Germany. The conference’s Plan of Action acknowledges the importance of education for women’s empowerment and calls for governments to endorse the role of women-led NGOs in the process of adult education. At the present time REPEM is lobbying and monitoring governments in the region in order to ensure that the Hamburg agreements become a reality. Again, the work of REPEM is very much a product of the acquisition of empowerment skills, many of which were gained through participation in workshops organized by women-led NGOs and their multiple organization and mobilization efforts.

In the past ten years, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has encouraged the production of gender-sensitive materials in programmes dealing mostly with non-formal education for adult women in Asia and Africa. These efforts have involved removing sex-stereotyped images and replacing them with representations of men performing domestic tasks and women in professional roles or as traders and farmers. This has led, in Africa, to the production of booklets with simple stories of:

the lives of common people in Africa in the language that they understand. Free of difficult and confusing technical terms, full of anecdotes, local humor and parlance, they stand a good chance of being able to [be] read. More importantly, these booklets help young women and men reflect on their situation. True, they don’t give answers because there are no ready-made answers. But they do help provoke thoughts and ideas and provide alternatives to help people further explore the issues so close to their realities.

(Aksornkool 1999)

Many attempts by governments to improve the condition of women, however, involve the use of ‘culturally acceptable’ strategies. This, at one level, sounds reasonable but at another becomes quite contradictory. Often, it translates concretely into the avoidance of conflict and the presentation of very bland material that scarcely challenges either patriarchal ideologies or the existing sexual division of labour. Changes in the social relations of gender necessitate modifying cultural norms, values and practices. So, while empowerment should lead to the identification of cultural aspects that need to be changed and to strategies for achieving this transformation, most new efforts and materials produced through governmental programmes, even in ostensibly modern and democratic countries, avoid dealing with such potentially disruptive social modifications.

Conclusion

Subjective changes, such as increased levels of critical understanding, self-esteem and confidence, are crucial for the development of stronger, more assertive personalities. The cognitive and psychological dimensions of empowerment have been attained through access to gender-sensitive materials and teachers in the case of young women in the formal school system, and through participation in various kinds of workshops in non-formal education settings in the case of adult women. On those occasions, significant knowledge and skills are acquired to create new identities and autonomous agency among women, and even to develop a new democratic culture.

Formal education can ‘empower’ girls, but the concept takes a different form given the age of the students and the institutional parameters in which their learning takes place and in which ‘useful knowledge’ is defined. Unfortunately, in most nations, very little systematic learning occurs in schools to empower girls from a gender perspective.

At this moment, women-led NGOs, primarily in developing countries, have enabled women to realize the full dimensions of empowerment – not only the cognitive and psychological but also the economic and political dimensions. Though non-formal education programmes cannot always provide the best mix of experiences to foster thorough-going empowerment, the social spaces they create, the activities they promote and the flexibility they enjoy in dealing with new knowledge, and the forms by which it is conveyed, are contributing substantially to the emergence of ‘empowered’ women as individuals and groups.

Globalization forces today, which position states as competitors in the market rather than as providers of social welfare, may provide disincentives for government to engage in empowering initiatives for women and other disadvantaged social groups. The options left open are neither numerous nor well endowed. It is here that work based on hope, persistence and self-reliance emerges as crucial.

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