1. Walk to Equality: Ensuring
Safety and Empowerment of
Women
Women constitute nearly 50% of the
population, undertake most of the work (two thirds) but only receive
one tenth of the total income rather than men. The working hours of
women are longer than that of men, often 12-16 hours per day. In
addition to their domestic responsibilities in child care, women have to
be responsible for housework, such as fetching firewood, water and

2. cooking and even hard work as ploughing and raking, planting,
transplanting and harvesting. Women have to suffer from continuing
under nutrition and two thirds of them are anemic. Rural women lack
sex education and have poor health due to frequent pregnancies. The
illiterate women especially lack of information on balanced diet, family
planning,house cleaning and other information to improve their health
and the quality of life. They have lower status and low paid
occupations, lower economic positions so they are less conscious and
lack self-confidence. They have a few books and a little time to read so
they can not appreciate the benefits of reading and have no motivation
for reading.
The term "empowerment" has become one of the most widely used
development terms. Women's groups, non-governmental
development organizations, activists, politicians, governments and
international agencies refer to empowerment as one of their goals. Yet
it is one of the least understood in terms of how it is to be measured or
observed. It is used precisely because this word has now been one of
the fashionable concepts to include in policies/projects that there is a
need to clarify and come up with tentative definitions
• The Concept of Empowerment
• Empowerment has become a widely used word. In spheres as
different as management and labor unions, health care and
ecology, banking and education, empowerment also taking such
place. It is also a concept that does not merely concern personal
identity but brings out a broader analysis of human rights and
social justice.
• Constraining Factors for Women Empowerment :

3. • Heavy work load of women;
• Isolation of women from each other;.
• Illiteracy;
• Traditional views that limit women's participation;
• No funds;
• Internal strife/militarization/wars;
• Disagreements/conflicts among women's groups;
• Structural adjustment policies;
• Discriminatory policy environment;
• Negative and sensational coverage of media
The Basic Problem
– Women have many stages in their lives . They do
come across many ups and downs . First they are
small children and then teenagers, then comes
the phase of young women . After that they are
married, have children, take care of them, and as
the process proceeds, they finally become old

4. ladies. In every phase of this process they have
big roles to play, many sacrifices to give.
• What is the need for women empowerment?
• Because the condition of women has become worse than ever
before. In this contemporary world, women need to gain the
same amount of power that men have. Now, it is time to forget
that men are the only holders of power. In India, women are still
facing different obstacles in male-dominated cultures. The things
are related to o e ’s status a d their future. Ho e er, I elie e
that Indian women are slowly getting empowerment in the
sectors like education, politics, the work force and even more
power within their own households. The worth of civilization can
be arbitrated by the place given to women in the society. Gender
discrimination is a root cause of hunger and poverty. Women and
girls—the majority of the poor—face a lifetime of marginalization,
often reinforced by violence or the threat of violence. As pointed
out 40 years ago by Ester Boserup, development activities that fail
to deliver the majority of their inputs to females are actually
making things worse by widening the gender gap.
• Progress is ei g ade, parti ularly through i reasi g girls’
enrollment in school. Far too little progress, however, has been
ade i other riti al se tors su h as a o a ’s health a d
nutrition, income generation and having voice in the decisions
that affect her life. Here are ten vital interventions (not in any
necessary order) that are making a difference.
• 1. Gender analysis. Too often, gender is an afterthought in project
design. Projects that intend to include women are designed to

5. work within a prevailing culture that advantages men and
prese ts u erous o sta les to o e ’s parti ipatio —not the
least of hi h is o e ’s triple urde of i o e ge eratio ,
subsistence farming and caring for the family. Often, mid-project
it is discovered that women are not participating and then steps
are taken to empower women to participate in a program that
simply does not work for them, only adding further burden and
anxiety.
• 2. Reducing drudgery. Wo e do ’t ha e time for development.
They are the first to rise and the last to go to bed, working on
average twice the hours of men, often with the most
backbreaking work: hauling water and firewood, pounding grain,
weeding farms using short-handed hoes and with children on
their back, head-carrying produce to market and working as
laborers.*Technology is only appropriate if it is appropriate for
women. Investments in daycare centers, grain mills, wheeled
carts, nearby water supplies and sustainable woodlots can free up
o e ’s ti e for trai i g, leadership a d e e terprises.
• 3. Rights awareness. Ma y of the orld’s ost i po erished
women are confined to their households. They lack mobility and
freedom of association and have no opportunity to learn their
rights and take action to improve their lives and those of their
family members
• One successful strategy implemented by The Hunger Project in
Ba gladesh is ourt yard eeti gs led y Barefoot La yers. I
this program, at least two of the most dynamic women volunteers
in each village receive intensive training in the legal and

6. reproductive rights of women. Given the trust and respect they
already have in the village, they bring rights awareness to the
doorstep of women currently confined to their homes. The
Barefoot Lawyers become the one link impoverished women have
to the worldwide movement for social justice, as well as to
resources and educational opportunities.
• 4. Equal leadership. Women are denied a voice in the decisions
that affect their lives. The best way to transform this condition is
to uncompromisingly require that at least 50 percent of
leadership positions be reserved for women: from village councils
to parliaments. Studies show that when women becomes leaders
in their local community, they transform the development
agenda—focusing on water, sanitation, health, education and
nutrition, and combating corruption, social exclusion and
domestic violence.
• A o a ’s jour ey i fi di g her leadership oi e a e greatly
accelerated by mentoring, building an organized constituency
among the women of the community, leadership training and
building federations with other women leaders
• 5. Organize. In unity, there is strength: economic, political and
social. Investments in building strong grassroots women's
organizations, federations and cooperatives provide women
sustainable platforms for advocacy and mutual empowerment.
• 6. Financial services. Muhammad Yunus has called access to
financial services a human right. The recent book, Portfolios of the
Poor shows how women need credit not only for starting or
supporting small enterprises, but also for coping with great

7. seasonal fluctuations in family income. Poor women often juggle
multiple loans at usurious rates just to survive.
• Numerous studies show that when women control money, it is far
more likely to be invested in the health, nutrition and education
of children than when men control the money. And in cultures
where women even touching money has been taboo, the visible
presence of women as economic players in the community, to the
benefit of all, catalyzes progress towards social and political
equality.
• 7. Functional adult literacy. Hundreds of millions of women have
never had the opportunity of formal education. Women are twice
as likely to be non-literate as men. Literacy is more than skill
acquisition; it is the reclamation of autonomous selfhood and
agency. This means women experiencing themselves as makers of
history rather than the victims of it. It means they can avoid being
cheated in the marketplace, learn far more rapidly, and connect
and find themselves in the great currents of human discourse
worldwide. Recent innovations are speeding the end of illiteracy,
such as subtitling Hindi films in Hindi, so that women learn to read
as they sing along.
• 8. Health services. Access to affordable health services is a
fundamental human right for women and their children, a right
that is out of reach for hundreds of millions of women. Treating
the illness of a child can bankrupt a family. The lack of prenatal
care and attended childbirth can be fatal. Most women are
constrained by the distance they are able to walk back and forth
in a day with their child—meaning it is vitally important that

8. health care be within 10 kilometers, including reproductive health
and pre-natal care, nutrition training and micronutrient
supplements.
• Expanding the number of nurse midwives and providing them
with a suitable clinic, housing, basic supplies and regular
supervision can meet the vast majority of unmet medical needs—
and is already doing so for millions of people. Governments have
learned that if they train middle-aged women as nurses, they will
likely stay in the community where they have roots. When
equipped with cell phones and access to physician consultations,
they can save even more lives.
• Scarce professional skills can be greatly leveraged by the
voluntary efforts of community health committees and trained
volunteers who can fan out from the nurse midwife and bring
health education and services to the remotest locations
• 9. Halting child marriage. Marriage before age 18 is a profound
iolatio of hu a rights. It uts short a girl’s edu atio a d
freedom of choice. It also often costs her life, because early
pregnancy is a leading cause of maternal mortality. As women
have organized and gained voice, they have made halting child
marriage a top priority. Awareness campaigns are coupled with
direct action to intervene and halt child marriage.
• 10. Prosecuting gender-based violence. In many cultures,
domestic violence (including rape, incest and murder) is endemic
a d early al ays o urs ith i pu ity. Wo e ’s fa es are
burned with acid when they spurn romantic advances; honor
killings occur if women fall in love. In many areas, if a woman

9. were to report abuse or rape at a police station, she may be
attacked again or imprisoned for having had unlawful sex.
• Today, as women organize, they are finding others with whom
they feel safe to reveal their secrets of abuse. They can act
collectively to demand justice from the police. Women are
connected to networks that can draw public attention to cases;
and this glimmer of a chance for justice is encouraging more
women to step from the shadows.
 References:
 Afshar, H. (Ed. 1991) Women, Development and Survival in the
Third World. New York: Longman.

10.  Anand, A. (WFS/Women's Feature Service) (Ed. 1992) The Power
to Change; women in Third World Redefine Their
Environment. New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd.
 Azad, N. (1986) Empowering Women Workers: The WWF
Experiment in Indian Cities. Mylapur, India: WWF.
 Denison, R. (1995) Call Us Survivors! Women organized to
Respond to Life-threatening Diseases (WORLD) in Schneider,
Beth E. and Stoller, Nancy E. (Ed.) Women Resisting AIDS:
Feminist Strategies of Empowerment, pp. 195-207. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
 Gutierrez, G. (1994) Mothers of East Los Angeles strike back, in
Bullard, Robert D. (Ed. 1994) Unequal Protection, Environmental
Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books.
 McFarlane, J. and Fehir, J. (1994) De Madres a Madres: a
community, primary health care program based on
empowerment. Health Education Quarterly, 21(3): 381-94.