Empowerment has a “transformative ability to affect power relations in societies”, and therefore the empowerment of women is an essential component of the development and interests of nations around the world (Moghadam, 2016). By covering such a wide range of processes, empowerment is hard to define theoretically or practically, as it includes many mechanisms in which women gain power and autonomy over their lives and develop the ability to make choices and decisions. This is important for individuals and across the world, and interlinks with empowerment through the provision of political and economic spaces; education; work; society and culture; and through innovation and developing technologies. Empowerment is closely linked with Goal 5 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, to ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’, and these international standards have received different implementations for women’s empowerment across the world. In this research, I will explore the different ways in which empowerment affects the livelihoods and opportunities of women and girls, and the changes over the past, present and to future recommendations.  I will specifically consider the empowerment of women and girls in the Europe and MENA regions, and provide a recommendation for governments’ key strategies.

 

In my research, I will use the following Glossary Terms, as defined by the Feminae Carta Research Team.

• Empowerment

• Power

• Equality

• Education

• Gender Mainstreaming

• Europe Region

 

In Europe, the current status of women’s empowerment is dependent on the access of women to services and opportunities within their lives. Women’s empowerment in Europe has been shaped by the legacies of colonialism and this affects the structures and rights of women in the world today. Over recent years, there has been significant progress in investing in skills and labour growth of women as a tool to fuel economic growth. This has been promoted based on the capability approach, meaning that empowerment is closely connected to individual freedoms and the capacity to make economic decisions (Hickel, 2014). Empowerment is also closely connected to European culture and the historic conceptions of freedom as being able to “act on one’s own authentic agency” and to determine choices around personal livelihoods and values, and therefore this demonstrates the importance of women’s identities in the empowerment of their personal value and worth. 

 

Empowerment in Europe currently focuses primarily on opening access to credit and labor opportunities, yet the concept of empowerment also involves liberation and expressing individual identity, which are not included in current measures. This can be seen in the case of the Gender Empowerment Measure, which is a tool to track the extent to which women and men are able to “participate in economic and political life and take part in decision-making” (Hickel, 2014). This calculates the empowerment of women through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures concerning income, government roles and other professions. 

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In the case of nations in the European Union, there have currently been some successful outcomes related to increased women’s active role in decision-making in the workplace, yet there are still institutional and resource structures related to leadership, healthcare, and services for the poor which hinder empowerment (Sustainable Solutions). 

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In the Middle East and North Africa (the MENA region), women’s empowerment is currently characterised by significant change in fighting the challenges to the lack of power and discrimination of women in society. In the MENA region, the World Bank has reported recent fast progress in developing women’s empowerment, based on human development indicators including female literacy rate, average life expectancy, infant mortality, and closing the gender gap in primary education enrolment. This is important for empowerment as it has provided women with opportunities previously unavailable as a result of investments from communities and governments.  As a result, this has led to educational empowerment, by providing girls with the tools, information and experience to perform well in schooling. This is demonstrated through the average years of schooling for 15-19 year olds having increased from 3.5 to 8.1 years over the past three decades (McCracken, 2015). The MENA region continues to face challenges to women’s empowerment, as seen in the varying gender educational outcomes. For instance, women typically face increased obstacles for continuing education, as they have a higher dropout rate of secondary education, and therefore this poses challenges for girl empowerment in the MENA region. 

Furthermore, an example of women’s empowerment in the MENA region is also affected by the impact of US interventions in Iraq, and the opposing views on patriarchal family structures, the meaning of freedom and progress (Hickel, 2014). There are international development agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) which focus on women’s empowerment in the ability of individuals to determine life outcomes and fulfilling potentials by breaking social norms and cultural constraints. USAID has used these initiatives to drive transformation in the MENA region based on the promotion of American values and ideologies in development for the functioning of the free market. While there are related concerns to these efforts, there is some progress being made with them, alongside local efforts to incite change led by women themselves on the ground.

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