Acknowledging that women’s empowerment is a process in which women to participate, negotiate, influence and hold accountable, the institutions that affect their affect their lives is a step in the right direction. This necessitates harnessing women’s power, utilizing their potential and encouraging women to work towards goals defined by them. Creating conditions demands the incorporation of women’s voice and agency as central prerequisites in gender empowerment policies and programmes (World Bank 2014).

Defining Empowerment:

The World Bank (2002) identifies empowerment as being about increasing people’s choices and freedom of action to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives.

Critiquing the Concept:

• Governmental and other empowerment policies focus on gender relations but fail to recognize that women are a heterogeneous group.
• Accordingly, less attention is paid to women as dynamic, spirited individuals with an abundance of talents and qualities that could contribute to their own empowerment i.e., that include women themselves as a resource in their own empowerment. As result, conventional “one size fits all” empowerment programmes fail to address problems of the most marginalised women because they have not recognised that women’s aspirations and needs are complex, sometimes contradictory or that women may have varying motives for challenging or not challenging the existing status quo.
• To challenge the dominant beliefs of the society in terms of hierarchy, patriarchy and power politics requires empowerment policies and programmes that seek to and understand how the convergence of multiple identities with gender manifests to impede women’s empowerment.

Taking Gender Empowerment Seriously:

• To have a voice is to be a citizen but having a voice without being listened to is to deny citizenship.
• If gender empowerment is to be attained, women’s voices need to be heard in a broad range of decision-making forum, from households to national parliaments.
• There must be space for women to voice their needs and challenge gender norms in their community-individually and collectively without fear.
• Further choosing an empowerment process that focuses on the experiences of the women in their everyday life has a number of consequences.
• Amplifying the voices of women and increasing their agency can yield broad development dividends for them and for their families, communities, and societies”.

SHGs: Micro-Credit and Micro-Empowerment:

In the process of their engagement with various Self-help Groups, women acquire collective consciousness that is empowering which enables them to be an active agent in household decision making, raise a voice or form an opinion but only in a limited sphere. Thus, in the field areas, SHGs have become an organised space to offer solidarity and collective identity to marginalised rural women and provided the possibility of credit at the doorsteps. It is also true that gains in women’s economic status and their entitlements may be symbolic or limited in nature due to the prevailing patriarchal attitudes within the household.