economic empowerment essay

A better life everyone can afford: Lifting a quarter billion people to economic empowerment

At a glance

• The “empowerment line” gauges progress toward a world in which everyone can meet their essential needs. This threshold, set well above the international poverty line, is the point at which people can afford a standard basket of essential goods and services and begin to save.
• Economic growth is rapidly improving living standards in lower- and middle-income countries, but this effect stalls out in advanced economies. In wealthier countries, higher costs and inequality prevent about 20 percent of the population on average from reaching full economic empowerment.
• Struggling households benefit from higher incomes only when those gains translate into greater purchasing power. Comparing economies at every step of the income ladder reveals that the essentials generally become more expensive as countries become wealthier—and these cost increases tend to match or exceed income gains for the bottom 20 percent of households. Housing is the biggest affordability issue for higher- and middle-income economies; food costs are an important differentiator elsewhere.
• If all countries could lower the costs of essential goods and services to match peers with better affordability at the same income level, almost a quarter billion additional people could reach the empowerment line. These outperformers show that it is possible to limit household expenditures on basic goods and services.
• While affordability is influenced by policy and the delivery of public services, the private sector has scope to act. In addition to easing cost burdens for their own workforces and across their value chains, businesses can develop affordable offerings in housing, energy, food, healthcare, and communication. They can find opportunities to pass on productivity-driven savings to consumers and expand low-cost business models into underserved regions and populations.

High costs for the necessities of life have millions feeling as if they can’t get ahead. Postpandemic inflation has given prominence to a structural issue that’s been brewing for years: the cost of the basics is out of reach for too many households.

The empowerment line, introduced in previous research by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), offers a way for public- and private-sector leaders to monitor this issue. It considers the daily expenditure needed to afford a basket of essential goods and services that constitute a frugal but decent living standard (see sidebar, “What is the empowerment line?”). A sharply higher standard than the international poverty line, it is designed to encompass those who are not formally counted as poor but are still unable to make ends meet. As of 2020, 9 percent of the global population lived in extreme poverty, while 60 percent lived below the empowerment line. 1 “Poverty—overview,” World Bank, October 2023; and From poverty to empowerment: Raising the bar for sustainable and inclusive growth , McKinsey Global Institute, August 2023.

This analysis extends our earlier research by analyzing empowerment outcomes for countries of differing income levels. It also highlights a major issue that needs to be tackled to unlock further progress: affordability. Comparing countries, we see the cost of the basics rising in tandem with GDP per capita. Those cost increases largely or wholly eat up the additional income that goes to the bottom 20 percent of the population when a country attains a higher rung on the income ladder. That pattern is one of the factors preventing wealthier countries from achieving universal economic empowerment.

Much of the debate on how to help struggling households centers on boosting incomes and reducing inequality. But the puzzle can’t be solved in full without addressing the cost side of the ledger as well. Indeed, if countries with more expensive empowerment baskets could lower those costs to match better-performing peers of similar income levels, some 230 million additional people would be above the empowerment line today. The global population that is fully empowered would grow by about three percentage points.

In advanced and emerging economies alike, the high cost of housing is often the biggest factor keeping a decent standard of living out of reach. In lower-income countries, food costs are also a pressing issue. This creates real stress, since the costs of essential goods and services have been rising faster than overall inflation—and lower-income households devote a larger share of their budget to these items. 2 See The social contract in the 21st century , McKinsey Global Institute, February 2020; and Jakub Caisl et al., The uneven impact of high inflation , OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalities, working paper number 18, October 2023. Putting essentials within reach for everyone would require addressing structural issues, including low productivity growth in sectors such as education and construction, constraints on access and supply, and low levels of competition.

A broad “affordability agenda” could relieve at least part of the burden for households on the margins. Policies and public investment would need to be part of the answer—but the private sector can make a real difference, too. In tackling this issue, companies may find opportunities to boost employee productivity, gain a labor cost advantage, and find new sources of revenue in underserved markets.

Economic empowerment rises with income, but only to a certain point

What is the empowerment line.

The empowerment line is MGI’s estimate of the expenditure required for every individual in a given country to access nutritious food, housing and energy, safe water, transportation, healthcare, education, clothing, and communication, with some minimum spending on recreation or community activities. It implies a frugal life but enables people to focus on more than mere survival.

This is the point at which people can begin to meet some of their material wants and exercise more choices about where and how they live. Critically, the empowerment line also includes a small margin for savings to reduce the risk of falling back into poverty; only beyond this point can people start to build wealth. At a societal level, lifting people meaningfully above poverty is correlated with improved metrics ranging from reduced childhood mortality and longer life expectancy to additional years of schooling and expanded digital and financial inclusion. 1 From poverty to empowerment: Raising the bar for sustainable and inclusive growth , McKinsey Global Institute, August 2023.

Empowerment extends and complements the “living wage” concept that has gained traction for employers and workers to evaluate wages against living costs. Because it is based on consumption, however, it can apply to the entire population (including children, the elderly, and people with disabilities or caregiving responsibilities), not only workers. It is agnostic as to the source of spending power; in addition to reflecting earned wages, it captures spending by people relying on government transfers and retirees spending down accumulated lifetime savings.

To calculate the empowerment line, we use detailed 2022 and 2023 cost-of-living data from the WageIndicator Foundation, which conducts surveys to understand spending on a defined basket of essential goods and services (not the economy-wide basket used in measures of purchasing-power parity, or PPP). For example, housing costs are for a rented two-bedroom apartment in an average urban area, while food costs are for a balanced diet making up 2,100 calories per day (accounting for food differences across economies). We also layer in buffers for savings and social participation. 2 We calculate social participation as 10 percent of basic needs, based on WageIndicator Foundation data. That includes the cost of recreation, hobbies, or enrichment activities. It also serves as a buffer to account for any expenses specific to individual countries that may not be reflected in the global framework. We also include a savings buffer equal to 5 percent of the total empowerment basket. In higher-income economies, housing tends to make up the largest share of the basket (about 40 percent), while food makes up the largest share (approximately 35 percent) in lower-income countries.

These data already reflect the in-kind services provided in a given country. Education or healthcare that is fully provided by the government, for example, lowers the empowerment line. Because the data are based on household surveys, the perception of a safety net also plays a role; public programs that do not fully reach their intended populations may not be fully reflected in empowerment line figures, and households may not consider rebates or tax credits when providing an estimate of their out-of-pocket costs.

Empowerment costs may differ across countries because of varying production costs of essentials, profit margins for producers, and the extent (and effectiveness) of subsidies and other in-kind social benefits. Because details about those components of the empowerment line cannot be discerned from survey data alone, it is beyond the scope of this research to disaggregate them, although that would be a promising area for future research.

In this research, the term “affordability” describes whether it takes relatively high or low expenditures by households to acquire the essential goods and services in the empowerment basket, based on comparing costs across all countries in the same income band. In addition to capturing differences in production costs, this approach captures differences in whether households must pay for goods and services out of their net income or whether they are publicly provided. For example, fully tax-funded education systems are more “affordable” than alternative models that charge fees.

Note that for a subset of 20 of the lowest-income countries, our analysis sets the empowerment line at a standard “floor” of $12 per person per day in PPP terms rather than using a bottom-up calculation of local costs. Although the empowerment basket may actually cost less than $12 in these countries today, this choice reflects the aspiration to set an ambitious global target for minimum living standards, and this requires a higher adjustment in the poorest countries, enabling quality improvements where needed.

Having established the empowerment line, we can then calculate the share of population below it in each country, using consumption data from Oxford Economics and distribution data from World Data Lab, which gets us to a daily per capita spending figure for each country. Like the empowerment line itself, daily spending figures reflect impacts from cash transfers and public income-assistance programs.

There is broad agreement that living wage data quality and methodology (which our research builds on) could be improved, and we acknowledge these limitations. 3 Carlotta Balestra, Donald Hirsch, and Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead, Living wages in context: A comparative analysis for OECD countries , OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalities, working paper number 13, OECD, 2023. In addition, we estimate the empowerment line at the national level, which does not reflect substantial variations within countries; economic empowerment requires higher levels of consumption in a booming city than in a small rural town, for example. The estimates are calculated on a per capita basis, but at the household level, spending patterns will vary with the number and characteristics (such as work status) of household members.

Most countries gauge progress in living standards by looking at GDP per capita or household income, but that doesn’t fully reflect what it takes to get by in a given place. Progress toward economic inclusion requires factoring in both what households bring in and what they must pay out. The empowerment line captures those outlays. It can shed light on whether people have sufficient spending power to meet all their fundamental needs (see sidebar “What is the empowerment line?”).

Globally, growth fuels economic empowerment

In perhaps the greatest achievement of modern times, more than a billion people have exited extreme poverty over the past three decades. Most were in the fastest-growing lower- and middle-income economies, including China and India. 3 From 1990 to 2013, for example, 1.1 billion people emerged from extreme poverty globally, more than 90 percent of them from countries whose GDP grew at least 5 percent per year. See Outperformers: High-growth emerging economies and the companies that propel them , McKinsey Global Institute, September 2018; and Four decades of poverty reduction in China , World Bank, 2022. This has produced substantial global progress in human development outcomes such as child mortality and average years of schooling. 4 “Children: Improving survival and well-being,” World Health Organization, September 2020; and World development report 2018: Learning to realize education’s promise , World Bank, 2017.

A point-in-time view of 120 countries shows that those with higher average incomes typically have larger shares of the population above the empowerment line. Climbing the income ladder is critical: only about 20 percent of the population is fully empowered in lower-income economies, but that share increases to roughly 50 percent in middle-income economies and about 80 percent in higher-income economies. At the global level, this is the crux of the matter, since more than 4.7 billion people had not yet reached the empowerment line as of 2020. 5 From poverty to empowerment: Raising the bar for sustainable and inclusive growth , McKinsey Global Institute, August 2023.

Note that our analysis uses a snapshot of 2022 data and does not track the relationship between GDP per capita and empowerment over time. But academic literature, as well as our own analysis of related metrics, indicates that the point-in-time results across countries also apply to individual countries as they grow. Economic growth is how a country reaches a higher rung on the income ladder—and it is the most powerful mechanism for improving living standards in lower- and middle-income economies. 6 The relationship between growth and well-being is well documented. The UN’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (which combines measures of health, education, and living standards) and the EU’s material deprivation rate (which tracks the share of the population that cannot afford items needed to lead an adequate life) finds a positive, statistically significant relationship between per capita GDP growth and improved outcomes in these measures across countries. See also Maria Emma Santos, Carlos Dabus, and Fernando Delbianco, “Growth and poverty revisited from a multidimensional perspective,” Journal of Development Studies , volume 55, issue 2, 2019; this research finds that a 1 percent increase in the economic growth rate leads to a 0.6 percent reduction in the multidimensional poverty index. The relationship between the EU’s material deprivation rate and per capita GDP growth is based on data from Eurostat as of March 2024.

MGI’s previous research shows how faster productivity-driven growth could lift incomes and transform lives on a massive scale. Ramping up growth is no easy feat, however. It involves not only maintaining baseline growth in the face of headwinds but also boosting productivity, which requires greater competition, innovation, and labor mobilization. 7 Investing in productivity growth , McKinsey Global Institute, March 2024. While growth increases incomes on average, ensuring that those below the empowerment line share in the benefits depends on employers creating better jobs and training workers to step into them. This dynamic does not happen without intentional and well-coordinated effort.

In economies where growth has collapsed, the consequences for vulnerable households are immediately apparent. With its long-term economic challenges unresolved, Argentina has recently experienced both stagnation and skyrocketing inflation, pushing many middle- and working-class families into precarious circumstances. 8 Déborah Rey, “Rising poverty grips Argentina as runaway inflation takes its toll,” Associated Press, September 27, 2023. A serious hunger crisis has developed in Pakistan, where growth ground to a halt in 2023 amid a similar inflationary spiral. 9 Abid Hussain, “Why is Pakistan ranked 99th on the Global Hunger Index?” Al Jazeera, July 26, 2023. For more on the broader relationship between downturns in growth and poverty, see, for example, Correcting course: Poverty and shared prosperity 2022 , World Bank, 2022; Stephen N. Broadberry and John Joseph Wallis, Growing, shrinking, and long-run economic performance: Historical perspectives on economic development , NBER working paper number 23333, 2017; and Heidi Shierholz and Elise Gould, Poverty and income trends paint a bleak picture for working families , Economic Policy Institute, September 2010. This underscores the link between growth and living standards.

Higher average incomes don’t translate into economic empowerment for everyone in wealthier economies

While higher income levels correlate with better empowerment outcomes, that relationship dissolves at the top of the income ladder, once countries exceed about $20,000 in GDP per capita (Exhibit 1). Reinforcing what we see from this static view, research has found a similar pattern over time in Europe. In the continent’s lower-income economies, there is a positive, statistically significant relationship between growth and lower material deprivation, but that relationship does not hold for its higher-income economies. 10 Based on our analysis, a 1 percent growth rate correlates with a four-percentage-point improvement in material deprivation rates in lower-income European economies. Based on March 2024 Eurostat data.

Image description:

A scatterplot shows 120 dots representing countries, with the share of population above the empowerment line on the vertical scale and GDP per capita on the horizontal scale, ranging from zero to $125,000. The dots are mostly bunched at the far left but trend sharply upward as they near $20,000 on the horizontal scale, but that trends starts flattening to the right of $20,000. Dots are organized into three categories: first, 44 countries with income below $5,000 and empowerment ranging from nearly 0% to 50%; second, 40 countries with income from $5,000 to $20,000 and empowerment ranging from about 25% to 75%; and third, 36 countries with income above $20,000 and empowerment ranging from about 55% to 90%.

End of image description.

In short, very high levels of general prosperity are not a guarantee of baseline security for everyone. For example, although GDP per capita is more than three times higher in Switzerland than in Spain (in USD terms), their shares of the population below the empowerment line are similar. Even the wealthiest economies have not lifted the last 20 percent or so of the population above the line.

Boosting incomes is the biggest determinant of empowerment for much of the world, but not in wealthier countries. In fact, differences in GDP per capita alone explain 79 percent of the variations in empowerment outcomes across lower-income economies and 43 percent across the middle-income segment. 11 We define lower-income countries as those with GDP per capita of less than $5,000 and middle-income countries as those with GDP per capita of $5,000 to $20,000. For more on our country sample and the regression used to determine the share of variation explained by income, see the technical appendix. For these two groups of countries—which happen to be home to more than 85 percent of the world’s population—reaching the next rung on the income ladder is key. That is achieved through economic growth, which creates jobs, increases household incomes, and generally expands access to goods and services. However, differing levels of GDP per capita explain less than 15 percent of the differences in empowerment outcomes across the wealthiest countries (Exhibit 2).

A vertical bar chart plots the percentage of explanatory power that certain factors have in people’s ability to reach economic empowerment across 120 countries, with bars for the three income groups introduced in the previous exhibit. GDP per capita alone has explanatory power that descends as income grows, with bars shrinking from 79% in lower-income countries to 14% in high-income countries. But in contrast, GDP per capita combined with factors of affordability and inequality have higher and rising explanatory power, from 85% in lower-income countries to 95% in higher income countries.

Globally, countries with similar levels of GDP per capita have notably different shares of their populations above the empowerment line; the variations are 20 percentage points on average. These differences matter: keeping income levels constant, if all countries matched the empowerment outcomes of their best-performing peers, 360 million more people would be above the line today. 12 A country’s peers are defined as other countries within an income range of +/- 25 percent. For more on this calculation, see the technical appendix.

What else is at work? In short, inequality (the way that national income and wealth are distributed) and affordability (how far it goes, especially for those at the bottom). Inequality of wealth and income leaves the poorest segments without the means to fully meet their needs, even in countries where the average income is high. 13 Note that the data underlying our analysis measure individual private consumption and how it is distributed across population deciles. In addition to inequality, other factors, such as the propensity to spend, may be at work. For broader research on inequality, see Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the twenty-first century , Belknap Press, 2014; and Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “The rise of income and wealth inequality in America: Evidence from distributional macroeconomic accounts,” Journal of Economic Perspectives , volume 34, number 4, fall 2020. Beyond whether people have spending power, we also have to look at how much they need to pay out. We use the term “affordability” to describe whether the household expenditures needed to obtain the goods and services in the empowerment basket are relatively high or low for a given country’s income level.

For higher-income economies, affordability and inequality together explain an additional 80 percentage points of the variation in empowerment outcomes. Both of these factors individually have greater explanatory power then GDP per capita alone. While it's important to focus on what people at the bottom earn, what households need to spend to acquire the basics merits attention, too. In lower- and middle-income economies, growth still matters above all—but the cost of the basics is even more important to empowerment outcomes than distributional effects. 14 For more on the methodology behind this finding, see the technical appendix.

Estimating the empowerment line across countries

We acknowledge the difficulty of making precise comparisons across countries when looking at issues related to poverty and consumption. For example, economic empowerment implies spending $41 per person per day in the Netherlands and $24 in Japan. Part of this difference comes down to varying general price levels. Accounting for this, however, explains less than 40 percent of the difference between these two countries. In PPP terms, the cost of empowerment would be $47 PPP in the Netherlands and only $29 PPP In Japan. 1 Using World Bank International Comparison Program PPPs for households’ final consumption expenditures. More broadly, a similar trend is observed for national extreme poverty lines expressed in 2017 PPP, which also rise in line with GDP per capita. See Assessing the impact of the 2017 PPPs on the International Poverty Line and global poverty , policy research working paper number 9941, World Bank, 2022. PPP is meant to provide a common benchmark, but it has limitations in the context of this research.

This is explained by several factors, as follows:

• First, essential goods and services in the empowerment basket vary based on local contexts and the extent of public support (see sidebar “What is the empowerment line?”). For example, Japan has nearly universal public healthcare, whereas individuals in the Netherlands are required to contribute to their own standard health insurance premiums. 2 Basic insurance in the Netherlands covers, for example, prescription medication and consulting a general practitioner. Long-term treatments are covered by the state. See, for example, “Health insurance,” Government of the Netherlands, March 2024.
• Second, PPP does not reflect the composition of the consumption basket at the empowerment line. Consider, for example, the PPP factor for housing, which includes rental and owned units of all sizes. 3 Purchasing power parities and the size of world economies: Results from the 2017 International Comparison Program , World Bank, 2020. By contrast, the housing component of the empowerment basket only considers renting a two-bedroom apartment in an average urban area and costs borne by the individual.
• Third, the same essential item can vary in quality and characteristics. The average home in Canada has 2.6 rooms per person, while in South Korea, the average home contains 1.5 rooms per person. Quality—not only in housing but also in healthcare, education, food, and other areas—can also vary because some countries have more stringent or extensive regulations than others (for example, more detailed building codes or product safety requirements). 4 For rooms per person, see the OECD’s Better Life Index on Housing at www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/housing/.
• Fourth, the precise composition of the empowerment basket itself differs slightly across countries. Housing tends to represent a larger share of the basket in higher-income economies than in lower-income economies, and even among higher-income economies, some countries have higher costs of individual items and therefore have a different distribution of items built into the empowerment cost.

The upward shifts in the empowerment line go hand in hand with higher income levels, even in PPP terms. This mirrors a phenomenon described in development literature of national poverty lines rising with income levels. In the case of poverty lines, changing bundles of consumption and higher standards are cited as reasons for an uptick as countries develop. 5 See, for example, Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen, “A proposal for truly global poverty measures,” Global Policy , volume 4, issue 3, September 2013.

Separately, we note measurement challenges that affect 20 of the lowest-income countries. As noted earlier, we apply a global empowerment line floor of $12 PPP per person, per day. Costs in these countries may actually be lower, but we chose to make an upward adjustment to account for quality improvements. Applying the $12 PPP floor implies that 23 percent of all lower-income countries’ populations on average are above the empowerment line. If we were to use a bottom-up calculation of local costs, that average would go up to 26 percent. When we apply the floor, economic growth becomes an even more important factor in lifting people above the empowerment line; the variation in empowerment outcomes explained by GDP per capita levels (as shown in Exhibit 2) is 12 percentage points higher compared with results based only on local costs. In nearly all of these countries, GDP per capita is less than $2,500, and the primary challenge is raising this level. As we consider affordability opportunities in the remainder of this research, we exclude these countries to avoid conflating affordability with lowering standards in places where they need to rise.

Two countries at the same income level may have different empowerment costs for a variety of reasons, starting with policy choices about which services are publicly funded and to what extent, and how effectively those services reach the intended recipients. Some of it comes down to local context. In some places, people may need their own cars to get around, for instance; in others, two-wheelers or public transit might suffice. Additionally, the same item might have different quality standards from place to place—for example, apartments in cold climates need extra insulation and glazed windows. Finally, costs can vary for identical items due to issues such as trade restrictions (see sidebar “Estimating the empowerment line across countries”).

For the bottom 20 percent of households, high costs for the essentials prevent living standards from rising

Economic growth lifts household incomes—even for those at the bottom. Our point-in-time view of countries across the income ladder shows that an incremental $100 of GDP per capita is associated with an additional $18 to $22 of consumption by households at the 20th percentile of income. If this static view holds over time, income growth should translate into higher spending power across a population.

But higher income levels are also associated with higher costs for life’s necessities, including food, rent, energy, and transportation. 15 Quality improvements and shifting relative costs and compositions of empowerment baskets drive these cost increases. However, they can be somewhat offset by growth in public support. Between 2009 and 2019, in-kind transfers as a share of GDP fell slightly in the United States and the European Union and increased slightly in Japan. See “Social benefits to households,” OECD, March 2024. As a country adds that incremental $100 in GDP per capita, affording the basics takes an additional $18 (Exhibit 3). Income gains for a household in the bottom quintile are almost fully eaten up by higher costs. This effect is most pronounced in wealthier economies, where many households on the margins simply don’t see their living standards improve. 16 Previous MGI research found that between 2000 and 2017, increased spending on housing, healthcare, and education absorbed income gains to varying degrees in ten of 22 countries, with the largest erosion in the United Kingdom. In countries where incomes declined (including Italy, Japan, and Spain), increased spending on the basics further eroded incomes by 6 to 29 percent. See The social contract in the 21st century , McKinsey Global Institute, February 2020. More prosperous households feel these cost increases, too. But their income gains are large enough to absorb them while still coming out ahead.

A vertical bar chart plots the dollar increase in household spending that corresponds with a $100 increase in GDP per capita across 120 countries, with bars for three representative household spending percentiles across the three income categories, for a total of nine bars. At the 20th percentile, the income groups each increase by about $20, but an annotation notes that $18 goes toward the increased cost of the empowerment basket. At the 50th percentile, the increases range from about $30 to $40. And at the 80th percentile, the increases range from about $45 to $85.

Postpandemic inflation has greatly exacerbated the squeeze on household budgets worldwide; the past few years have brought supply chain disruptions as well as global spikes in food and energy prices stemming from the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, climate change, and blockages of shipping routes.

But it’s important to emphasize that the rising cost of living is not only a recent or transitory development. The prices of certain essential goods and services, such as housing, healthcare, and education, tend to increase much faster than overall consumer price indexes. 17 See, for example, Jakub Caisl et al., The uneven impact of high inflation , OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalities, working paper number 18, October 2023. The average consumer benefits from lower relative prices for items such as communication technologies and clothing, while facing higher relative prices for housing, healthcare, and education. For low-income households, this issue is magnified, since essential items account for a disproportionate share of their expenditures.

There are structural forces at play in this phenomenon. Labor-intensive sectors, such as healthcare and education, and other low-productivity-growth sectors, such as construction, compete for labor with much higher-productivity sectors; they thus must raise wages at a higher rate than their productivity growth. Although high-productivity sectors such as technology may pay higher wages while lowering prices, low-productivity, labor-intensive sectors tend to pass higher production costs on to consumers. 18 This is the central thesis of “Baumol’s cost disease.” As mentioned earlier, our analysis is based on cross-sectional data across 120 economies as of 2022. While Baumol’s cost disease refers to growth in wages and productivity over time in an economy, it can help to explain why costs of empowerment tend to increase with income. In higher-productivity economies, wages across sectors increase, even in sectors with relatively low productivity. See William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, “On the performing arts: The anatomy of their economic problems,” American Economic Review , volume 55, number 2, 1965; William J. Baumol, The cost disease: Why computers get cheaper and health care doesn’t , Yale University Press, 2012; and William D. Nordhaus, Baumol’s diseases: A macroeconomic perspective , NBER working paper number 12218, May 2006.

Beyond productivity and wage dynamics, inefficient markets often drive up the cost of the basics. This could be related to the extent of competition (and trade openness) in a given sector, regulation, or potential supply constraints. Most important is that housing supply is often restricted (by zoning laws, for example) and thus not able to respond to increasing demand related to population growth, migration, or changing preferences.

These types of issues add up to daily stress and missed opportunities for billions of people worldwide. Many are unable to save or to exercise choice about where and how they’d like to live. For example, more young adults in higher-income economies are living with their parents, delaying their independence by years; others are not having children because they feel they can’t afford it. 19 See, for example, “More adults living with their parents,” UK Office for National Statistics, May 10, 2023; Daniel de Visé, “More adult children are living with their parents. Parents are not pleased,” Hill , December 16, 2022; and Claire Cain Miller, “Americans are having fewer babies. They told us why,” New York Times , July 5, 2018.

If all countries could bring down the costs of the essentials to match the best-performing countries at their income level, we estimate that some 230 million additional people worldwide would reach full economic empowerment (Exhibit 4). 20 See the technical appendix for full details on the methodology behind this estimate. This figure is larger than the entire population of Nigeria—and it would boost the share of the global population above the empowerment line by three percentage points (and by five percentage points in our sample countries with GDP per capita above $2,500). Individuals would be relieved of pressure and better able to secure the economic foothold they need to thrive.

A data visualization table shows the distribution of 230 million people across five income categories who could reach full economic empowerment if their countries lowered the empowerment basket cost to match that of top performers, ranging from 20 million in countries with income between $20,000 and $40,000 to 90 million in countries with income between $5,000 and $10,000. A scatterplot with 93 dots shows countries’ daily empowerment basket cost on the vertical axis and GDP per capita on the horizontal axis, illustrating costs in each of the five income categories. The dots begin at the bottom left, around $5–$10 in countries below $5,000 GDP per capita and trend upward and to the right, to a range of about $25–$70 in countries above $40,000 GDP per capita.

Housing and food are the biggest affordability issues globally

Four basic items are most significant to the overall cost of the empowerment basket: housing, food, transportation, and healthcare (Exhibit 5). Together these items account for 80 percent of the consumption required to be empowered.

Housing costs are the biggest affordability challenge in high- and middle-income economies, explaining at least a third of the difference in the cost of a fully empowered life across those countries. Housing interventions can be transformative; conversely, inaction can have a dramatic impact on individuals and families in places where housing markets are distorted. Countries that have prioritized affordable housing are able to lift living standards for a wider swath of the population—and in countries with worsening housing affordability, the issue is becoming untenable.

The swings that could be possible with an emphasis on affordable housing are significant. For example, our estimates imply that if housing costs in Germany were hypothetically 26 percent lower, matching the level of its most affordable peer economy, 3.7 million more people would be lifted above its empowerment line. 21 In 2022, almost 12 percent of the German population lived in households that were overburdened by housing costs (that is, total housing costs, net of housing allowances, represented more than 40 percent of the total disposable household income, net of housing allowances). The comparable shares were 7.4 percent in Austria and 7.7 percent in Belgium. See “Housing cost overburden rate by age, sex and poverty status,” Eurostat, March 2024. In Mexico, if housing costs were hypothetically 18 percent lower (again, matching its most affordable peer economy), 2.4 million more people could reach empowerment.

In lower-income economies, food costs are also a significant cost-of-living factor with a major effect on empowerment. In countries with GDP per capita between $2,500 and $5,000, food costs 2.5 times more in some places than in others.

The housing squeeze has an imbalance of supply and demand at its core

Previous MGI research has found that rising incomes have historically gone together with increasing housing prices. 22 The social contract in the 21st century , McKinsey Global Institute, February 2020. From 2002 to 2018, well before the pandemic, individuals across European Union countries faced an average housing rental cost growth 16 percentage points higher than overall inflation. 23 Based on a weighted average by population across 27 EU countries, using Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) from Eurostat. The HICP measures the change over time in the prices of consumer goods and services acquired, used, or paid for by euro area households. Now the issue has become even more acute in the pandemic’s wake, notably in the major cities of high-income economies, including Australia, Canada, the United States, and multiple countries in Europe. 24 See, for example, “Australian houses are less affordable than they have been in decades,” Economist , January 2024; “Canada turns to a post-war strategy to battle housing crisis,” Reuters, December 12, 2023; and Housing affordability remains stretched amid higher interest rate environment , International Monetary Fund, January 2024.

What helps to explain these rising costs? In short, an imbalance in demand and supply.

On the demand side, a number of factors push costs up. Population growth, particularly among the middle class, is one. In addition, better housing is typically the first thing individuals spend on when they have an upward bump in disposable income, and then, as households build wealth, homes are often their primary store of value. 25 Greg Howard and Jack Liebersohn, “Why is the rent so darn high? The role of growing demand to live in housing-supply-inelastic cities,” Journal of Urban Economics , volume 124, 2021. Previous MGI research has found that household real estate is the largest form of wealth globally, and for many households, their home is their largest asset. Rising home values were also associated with low-interest-rate environments in the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, though that relationship is not in the scope of this analysis. See The rise and rise of the global balance sheet: How productively are we using our wealth? , McKinsey Global Institute, November 2021. Furthermore, as economies grow, people expect higher-quality living environments and household sizes get smaller, leading to greater costs per person. 26 The quality of housing for populations in the bottom quintile of the income distribution improves as economies get richer. At the same time, the average household size decreases, and the number of rooms per household member increases. See, for example, “Housing conditions,” OECD, March 2024; Total population living in a dwelling with a leaking roof, damp walls, floors or foundation, or rot in window frames or floor , Eurostat, August 2024; and “Household size and composition,” United Nations, 2022. In “superstar” cities with better job opportunities, demand for housing is especially strong and prices are inelastic. 27 Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar cities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy , volume 5, number 4, November 2013. Demand for housing also comes from investors who seek attractive investment opportunities in real estate, particularly in major cities. 28 See, for example, Nick Gallent, Dan Durrant, and Neil May, “Housing supply, investment demand and money creation—a comment on the drivers of London’s housing crisis,” Urban Studies , volume 54, issue 10, May 2017; and Mi Zhou, Yurong Qiao, and Jiahong Guo, “Separating the consumption and investment demands for housing: Evidence from urban China,” Heliyon , volume 9, issue 10, October 2023.

On the supply side, years of underinvestment, zoning restrictions, and regulations—as well as local resistance to new builds—have produced housing shortages that have compounded over time. 29 Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, The economic implications of housing supply , 2021. In some locations, vacation rentals are reducing supply and pricing out locals. 30 Agustin Cocola-Gant, “Holiday rentals: The new gentrification battlefront,” Sociological Research Online , volume 21, issue 3, August 2016. Increasing interest rates in the past two years have further limited housing supply. 31 Turbulence for interest—sensitive sectors in eye of rate hike storm , Oxford Economics Research Briefing, November 2023. New builds have become more expensive because of the price of scarce land in dense cities and because of construction costs that have outpaced inflation.

Both public and private actors could accelerate economic inclusion by putting more weight on affordability

The empowerment line could be a useful tool for galvanizing both public and private efforts to expand inclusion, with a greater emphasis on affordability.

The public sector plays a major role

Much of the debate about how the public sector can improve the well-being of lower-income households revolves around income, inflation, and potential responses such as tax policies, cash transfers, and labor regulation. But the public sector also affects affordability. Most governments deliver public goods and services such as housing, education, and healthcare. Most intervene in markets to a certain extent, perhaps by subsidizing priority goods (such as food or energy), preventing price gouging, ensuring competition, or regulating trade.

One of the roles of government could be to maximize the efficiency of end-to-end value chains (such as food or energy delivery); this could take the form of streamlining regulatory burdens or building modern infrastructure. Boosting the reach of existing in-kind transfer programs could help further bring down households’ spending on essential goods. In some cases, policies focused on cost reduction may have a larger impact than those focused on supplementing incomes. In two-thirds of OECD countries, for example, housing rental costs are a greater share of lower-income households’ income than total tax and social contribution payments. 32 Approximate calculation based on median rent burden among the bottom quintile of the income distribution, compared with the “all in” average tax rates and wedges for individuals earning 67 percent of the average wage. See “Average personal income tax and social security contribution rates on gross labor income,” OECD, 2022; Affordable Housing Database, OECD, 2024. Whatever strategy governments pursue, it is important to monitor the impact of interventions over time, keeping in mind the potential for unintended consequences. 33 Such consequences include inefficiencies and market distortions resulting from subsidies and price controls. For example, rent control policies might reduce the supply of rental housing. See, for example, Elizabeth Van Heuvelen, “Back to basics: Subsidy wars,” Finance & Development , IMF, June 2023; and Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade, and Franklin Qian, “The effects of rent control expansion on tenants, landlords, and inequality: Evidence from San Francisco,” American Economic Review , volume 109, number 9, September 2019.

The private sector could also do more

There’s a strong case for companies to care about empowerment. Internally, empowered employees are better able to contribute productively and have less incentive to leave. 34 Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, The payoffs of higher pay: Elasticities of productivity and labor supply with respect to wages , October 2020. Moreover, helping employees save on living costs can produce a labor cost advantage, especially for companies that are internalizing those costs by adopting “living wages.” Externally, some consumers make purchasing decisions based on a company’s reputation as an employer and as a corporate citizen. 35 Enrique Bianchi, Juan Manuel Bruno, and Francisco J. Sarabia-Sanchez, “The impact of perceived CSR on corporate reputation and purchase intention,” European Journal of Management and Business Economics , 2019. Empowerment initiatives can enhance brands, and having a reputation for delivering value inspires loyalty. More broadly, helping more families achieve higher living standards creates a virtuous cycle in which more consumers can afford a broader set of products and services. It also contributes to more stable societies and better business environments.

The private sector’s role in providing jobs—ideally jobs with stability, benefits, and decent working conditions that pay a living wage—is one of the biggest drivers of empowerment. Establishing these job might involve taking a long-term view of the potential for higher productivity through investing in skills, rethinking job roles, and recruiting in ways that expand opportunity for people who might otherwise be stuck in low-wage work. 36 See, for example, Rewriting the script: LA’s opportunity for inclusive economic growth , McKinsey & Company, December 2023; The future of work after COVID-19 , McKinsey Global Institute, February 2021; Reskilling China: Transforming the world’s largest workforce into lifelong learners , McKinsey Global Institute, January 2021; and Tanya Milberg, “The Reskilling Revolution is upon us—by 2030, 1 billion people will be equipped with the skills of the future,” World Economic Forum, April 2023. Large multinationals could influence wages and working conditions—for instance, trying to reduce the precariousness of nonstandard employment (such as temporary, part-time, and on-call work) across their broader value chains.

Through innovation, companies can address unmet demand in the lower-cost end of the markets for housing, energy, food, healthcare, and communication. They could develop new affordable offerings and expand low-cost business models into underserved regions and customer segments. There may be opportunities to pass on productivity-driven savings to consumers, particularly in labor-intensive service sectors such as healthcare that have seen high relative price growth and in other low-productivity sectors such as construction. 37 Previous MGI research has found that improving productivity in construction, healthcare, and education, and keeping food prices in line with best-performing peer countries, could lower empowerment costs by 9 percent globally, on average. See From poverty to empowerment: Raising the bar for sustainable and inclusive growth , McKinsey Global Institute, August 2023, and Reinventing construction through a productivity revolution , McKinsey Global Institute, February 2017.

Indeed, many forward-thinking companies are already embarking on initiatives like these. Further progress starts with identifying profitable ways to deliver positive impact—and the empowerment line could be a useful tool that helps companies prioritize the initiatives with the greatest return on investment.

Economic growth is a prerequisite for empowering households, especially in lower- and middle-income economies. But it’s not enough to solve the last piece of the equation. When costs of essentials rise faster than household incomes, people are priced out; this strains individuals, families, communities, and eventually the social fabric. Ensuring that housing, food, education, healthcare, and other essentials are within reach is part of building more balanced economies where everyone has a measure of security and the opportunity to realize their full potential.

This research was led by Kweilin Ellingrud , a McKinsey senior partner and director of MGI in Minneapolis; Marco Piccitto , a McKinsey senior partner in Milan; Tilman Tacke , an MGI partner in Madrid; Rebecca J. Anderson , an MGI senior fellow in Washington, DC; and Kevin Russell , an MGI senior fellow in Charlotte. Ishaa Sandhu led the working team, which included Nina Chen , Kendyll Hicks , Marty Kang , Elodie Muchembled , Venassa Omoruna , Jali Packer , Munirah Dasu Patel , Marina Salimgareeva , Daniel Tracey , Noah Welgross , and Minéa Wuori .

The article was edited by MGI executive editor Lisa Renaud, with data visualizations by Chuck Burke.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

From poverty to empowerment: Raising the bar for sustainable and inclusive growth

The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring

Financial inclusion and sustainable, inclusive growth in action

5 ways to accelerate women’s economic empowerment

Facebook Twitter Print Email

At the current rate of investment, more than 340 million women and girls will still live in extreme poverty by 2030, according to UN Women. As the world celebrates  International Women’s Day   on 8 March by investing in women, we look at what needs to be done to improve the economic situation of women around the world.

“This year’s theme – invest in women – reminds us that ending the patriarchy requires money on the table,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement for the International Day.

 “This all depends on unlocking finance for sustainable development so that countries have funds available to invest in women and girls,” he said, calling for action to support programmes to end violence against women and to drive women’s inclusion and leadership in economies, digital technologies, peacebuilding and climate action.

Right now, the world needs an additional $360 billion per year for developing countries to address gender equality under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development .

While increasing women’s share of assets and finance is vital for their economic empowerment, equally important is building institutions that promote public investment in social goods and sustainable development. 

Here are five things guaranteed to accelerate women’s economic empowerment:

1. Resources: Ramp it up

Connecting women with financial resources can help them meet their basic needs and start or grow businesses, but micro, small, and medium-sized female-owned businesses are underfunded by $1.7 trillion. Closing the credit gap for women owned small and medium enterprises would result in a 12 per cent increase in annual incomes on average by 2030.

In addition, women need access to land, information, technology and natural resources. In 2022, 2.7 billion people still lacked internet access, which is fundamental for getting a job or starting a business.

Despite the fact that more than one third of working women are employed in agricultural industries, they are also less likely than men to own or have secure rights for agricultural land in 87 per cent of countries where data is available.

When women do have equal rights to access, own and use resources, they can invest in themselves by improving their wellbeing, education, starting a business or exercising agency over their income to build a society that works for them.

For example, in many contexts women’s economic empowerment reduces gender-based violence, increases political and social participation and leadership and facilitates disaster risk reduction.

2. Wanted: Jobs

When women thrive in the world of work, they are better positioned to exercise their agency and realize their rights, but not just any job will do. Work must be productive and in conditions of freedom, equity, security and dignity.

Nearly 60 per cent of women’s employment globally is in the informal economy, and in low-income countries, it is more than 90 per cent. Even when women do have jobs, they are paid on average 80 cents for every dollar earned by men and even less for some, including women of colour and mothers.

Gender inequality in earnings alone costs the world more than twice the value of global GDP in terms of human capital wealth.

Measures such as pay transparency, equal pay for work of equal value and access to care services can help close the gender pay gaps in pay leading to gender equality in the workplace. When women entrepreneurs are successful, they can create jobs and drive innovation.

The world could see a 20 per cent increase in GDP by closing gender gaps in employment.

3. Time: Finding work-life balances

Everyone requires care in their lifetime. The existing social organization of care reflects profound inequalities of status and power and often exploits the labour of women and girls. On average, women spend around three times more time on unpaid care and domestic work than men. 

The gendered disparities in unpaid care work are a profound driver of inequality, restricting women’s and girls’ time and opportunities for education, decent paid work, public life, rest and leisure.

Care work remains undervalued and underpaid. The monetary value of women’s unpaid care work globally is at least $10.8 trillion annually, three times the size of the world’s tech industry.

Investing to transform care systems is a triple win: it allows women to reclaim their time while creating jobs in the care sector and increasing access to care services for those that need them.

It is estimated that closing existing gaps in care services and expanding decent work programmes would create almost 300 million jobs by 2035.

4. Calling for security

Women face numerous threats to their security, including gender-based violence, conflict, food insecurity and a lack of social protection. Violence at home or in the workplace is a violation of women’s rights and impedes their economic participation.

The global cost of violence against women is estimated to be at least $1.5 trillion or approximately two per cent of global gross domestic product. 

The number of women and girls living in conflict-affected countries reached 614 million in 2022, 50 per cent higher than the number in 2017. Such crises can exacerbate pre-existing economic disparities, such as women’s disproportionate share of unpaid care work. Crises also deepen inequalities among women; for example, migrant women are twice as likely to experience violence than non-migrants.

Research suggests gender-responsive social protection systems like cash transfers can reduce mortality rates among women, demonstrating the links between economic empowerment and security.

No matter what form it takes, insecurity hinders women’s economic empowerment, traps them in poverty, and prevents them from realizing their rights and potential. It is critical to bring together diverse stakeholders, including in the private sector, and challenge social norms that value women as inferior to men as economic actors.

5. Protecting rights

Human rights are at the core of women’s economic empowerment. Unjust, patriarchal economic systems perpetuate gender inequality, and discriminatory social norms stand in the way of women’s access to information, networks, jobs and assets.

Globally, on average, women have only 64 per cent of the legal rights enjoyed by men. Key strategies to promote women’s rights in the context of economic empowerment include adoption of laws and policies that support women’s economic empowerment and repeal of discriminatory laws and legal frameworks. 

While acknowledging the intrinsic value of women’s economic empowerment, which has human rights at its core, it is also important to account for the great costs of constraints on women’s economic empowerment on societies and economies.

The protection and support for women human rights defenders and accountability for human rights abuses are needed. This requires documenting women’s rights abuses, collecting sex disaggregated data and developing partnerships for joint advocacy programmes. 

It is necessary to develop and implement accountability mechanisms to protect women’s rights and ensure that women’s voices are amplified in all spaces of decision making.

Learn more about how the UN is helping women around the world  here .

• International Women’s Day

Economic Empowerment : A Potential Pathway for Women and Girls to Gain Control Over Their Sexual and Reproductive Health

Download Brief:

Economic empowerment is the ability to make and act on decisions that involve the control over and allocation of financial resources (Golla et al., 2011). Women’s influence over financial decisions is associated with increased use of preventive health services by children and women (Lagarde et al., 2009; Ahmed et al., 2010), including use of modern contraceptive methods (Ahmed et al., 2010; Do and Kurimoto, 2012). Thus, interventions that aim to increase the economic power of women and girls may improve reproductive health behaviors, including sustained use of modern contraception (see Figure 1), particularly when linked with investments that directly address reproductive health and family planning and/or gender norms. The barriers included in the illustrative theory of change shown in Figure 1 focus on those that are thought to be directly addressed through economic empowerment interventions. Although the theory of change is organized in a linear format, the mechanisms of action are likely bi-directional and more complex.

These potential relationships motivate the family planning community to find ways and opportunities to accelerate the transition toward greater economic equality between the sexes by increasing women’s access to and control over financial resources. Although our current toolbox of interventions is limited, the international community has learned a great deal over the last three decades from implementing these types of programs.

• Agency , which is an individual’s ability to make and act on her (or his) own choices.
• Resources to make the decision, including authority to make decisions.
• Achievements , which are the outcomes from decision making.

 Source: Kabeer, 2005.

This brief summarizes the current evidence on interventions used by family planning programs that sought to improve women’s or girls’ economic empowerment and that measured key family planning outcomes. The interventions cluster in three primary focus areas:

• Vocational training includes training in the use of new technologies (e.g., computers), business processes, management of assets (e.g., care and use of livestock), and entrepreneurial skills. Such training may also address behaviors valued in the labor market, such as coming to work on time, which help people gain or maintain employment or build a small business. These activities are sometimes linked to broader health and education programs that focus on “life skills” education for adolescents to improve self-efficacy, decision-making, and risk perception.
• Microfinance provides financial services for low-income and poor women and girls, such as access to savings groups, savings and loans groups, insurance, and microcredit for their income-generating activities or micro-enterprises.
• Cash transfers involve the transfer of cash or other assets and are a form of social protection typically targeted to the poor. These transfers can be contingent on specific behaviors or provided without condition.

This brief does not cover employment or agricultural programs or address investments in literacy and numeracy without a specific focus on economic empowerment of women or girls as a primary outcome. In 2016, the Technical Advisory Group for High Impact Practices (HIPs) concluded at that time that “evidence on the relationship between economic empowerment interventions and improved contraceptive use or fertility behaviors is insufficient to meet the standards of a High Impact Practice for Family Planning.” However, the HIP initiative is making this brief available to share the evidence obtained thus far on the effect of economic empowerment initiatives on family planning outcomes and to share key research questions for identifying whether and under what conditions economic empowerment interventions contribute to more positive family planning outcomes. For more information about HIPs, see https://www.fphighimpactpractices.org/overview .

Why is economic empowerment important?

Women have limited economic opportunities in many countries. In many countries, women lag substantially behind men in their access to market opportunities, choice of occupation, and pay (World Economic Forum, 2015). Restrictive gender norms, enforced by both men and women, prescribe that women are primarily responsible for childrearing and household chores and are subordinate to men (e.g., women have less decision-making authority and fewer legal protections concerning marriage, inheritance, and property ownership than men) (Duflo, 2012). Economic exclusion and restrictive views about women’s roles, in turn, contribute to women’s limited mobility, bargaining power, and participation in household decision-making, including decisions about fertility and contraceptive use (Gupta, 2013). Women’s limited mobility and literacy may lead to reduced levels of information and knowledge about family planning as well as restricted access to services (Gupta, 2013).

Adolescent girls face limited educational and economic opportunities. Girls face pressure to marry early and begin childbearing with few alternatives such as continued and higher education and employment (Clark, 2004; Pettifor et al., 2004). Like women, girls lag behind boys in the formal labor market. Boys are more likely to have employment opportunities compared with girls, and when girls do work they tend to give most of their earnings to their families (Katz, 2013).

Economically empowered women are more likely to use contraception in some settings. Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, Do and Kurimoto (2012) attempted to quantify the relationship between economic empowerment and contraceptive use in four African countries (see Box). After controlling for individual and community characteristics, they found a positive and statistically significant relationship between economic empowerment and contraceptive use in Namibia and Uganda but no or marginal relationship in Ghana and Zambia. A meta-analysis examining the association between women’s empowerment and maternal health care using data from 31 countries found “the most pronounced association for women’s empowerment with modern contraceptive use. Women with the highest empowerment score has an 82% higher odds of using modern contraception than women with a zero empowerment score” (Ahmed et al., 2010).

Do and Kurimoto (2012) constructed an index using DHS data from five questions related to:

• A woman’s income contribution relative to her husband’s (1=less; 2=about the same; 3=more).
• Decisions about how each partner’s income would be used (1=woman alone or joint decision; 0=other).
• Decisions about major and daily household purchases (1=woman alone or joint decision; 0=other).

What is the impact?

The programs included in this synthesis aimed to improve economic empowerment and included a research component that measured key family planning outcomes. Although some of these programs did not aim to increase contraceptive use directly, they were included in the synthesis if they measured other key family planning outcomes including improvements in unintended pregnancy, fertility, delay of marriage, birth spacing, or breast feeding. Most of the studies did not include complete implementation details, such as duration and content of the intervention.

Vocational Training Programs in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Malawi, and Uganda assessed the effect of vocational training on family planning outcomes, including contraceptive use, teenage pregnancy, and age at marriage (Population Council, 2016; Bandiera et al., 2012; Ibarraran et al., 2012; Cho et al., 2015; Rotheram-Borus et al., 2012). All these programs targeted youth, ages 10–24 years old, and were designed to provide skills needed to enter the workforce. Two programs, in Bangladesh and Uganda, targeted adolescent girls only (Population Council, 2016; Bandiera et al., 2012), whereas others included both boys and girls (Ibarraran et al., 2012; Cho et al., 2015; Rotheram-Borus et al., 2012).

The intensity of training varied. In Bangladesh, girls received 44 hours of life-skills training plus 100 hours of either education, gender-rights awareness, and/or livelihoods training over 18 months, whereas the program in the Dominican Republic consisted of 225 hours of training (Population Council, 2016). Sample sizes ranged from 100 to 10,000 among the five studies. Only two programs included health components; one focused on increasing knowledge (for example, about HIV and pregnancy) and reducing risky behaviors such as sex without condoms and forced sex (Bandiera et al., 2012) and the other included an HIV prevention component (Rotheram-Borus et al., 2012). Three of the five studies measured condom use. The two programs in Uganda, which included a health component, documented an increase in condom use (Bandiera et al., 2012; Rotheram-Borus et al., 2012) as well as other positive effects. The program in Malawi found no significant effects on condom use (Cho et al., 2015).

A program in the Dominican Republic that focused on professional training documented a 5 percentage-point reduction in the pregnancy rate among participants ages 16–19. The authors attributed the difference to the program’s positive impact on youth’s expectations for their future (Ibarraran et al., 2012).

The Bangladesh program aimed to increase the age at marriage. In communities where girls received livelihoods training in entrepreneurship, mobile phone repair, photography, and basic first aid, girls were 23% less likely to be married as children at endline than girls in the control communities. Girls in intervention arms that focused on education or gender-rights awareness were 31% less likely than girls in the control communities to be married as children (Population Council, 2016).

Conclusion: Although youth programs commonly invest in vocational training, few programs measure the effects of these investments on contraceptive or fertility outcomes. Inclusion of sexual and reproductive education appears to be critical to improving contraceptive use. Future employment expectations may also play an important role in influencing the sexual behavior of adolescents.

Microfinance Two randomized controlled trials of multi-component programs that included microfinance and other activities, such as reproductive health education and life skills, found limited effects on use of condoms or other contraceptives (Dunbar et al., 2014; Desai and Tarozzi, 2011).

In Zimbabwe, at 24 months post-intervention, contraceptive use was the same among female orphans ages 16–19 who were randomized to participate in a combined microcredit, HIV education, life skills education, and social support program and those in the comparison group who received HIV education and life skills only. Within-group changes in condom use (from baseline to endline) were statistically significant for the intervention group (odds ratio [OR]=1.79, confidence interval [CI]=1.23 to 2.62) but not for the comparison group (OR=1.29, CI=0.86 to 1.95) (Dunbar et al., 2014).

In Ethiopia, communities were randomly assigned to receive a microcredit program only, a reproductive health program only, both programs, or no program. Differences in contraceptive use by women in each community group were not statistically significant in models that adjusted for demographic and family characteristics (Desai and Tarozzi, 2011).

Randomized evaluations of village savings and loan programs in Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda found no impact on utilization of health services among beneficiaries (Karlan et al., 2012).

Two recent studies documented a positive effect of microfinance on contraceptive use. A study in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, assessed the impact of integrating family planning information and referrals within a microfinance program. Post-intervention, the study documented a 5 percentage-point increase in modern contraceptive use and an additional 24 percentage-point increase in periodic abstinence among members of the microfinance program (FHI 360, 2013). In Nigeria, researchers found a significant difference in modern contraceptive use among women living in communities with access to microfinance compared with those in comparison communities (30% vs. 21%, respectively) (Abdu-Aguye et al., 2015). A number of important methodological considerations are of note in both studies. For example, in the Nigeria study there were a number of important differences between the intervention and control samples, and the intervention included improvements in service delivery and demand generation activities that were not available to the control sites.

Conclusion:  Current research is limited and does not support a direct link between microfinance programs and contraceptive use as measured in existing studies. However, these groups might offer a platform to reach key beneficiaries with family planning and reproductive health messaging.

Cash Transfers Conditional and unconditional cash transfers generally improve girls’ access to school as well as their retention and progression in school, as summarized in the Educating Girls HIP Brief . Identifying the appropriate beneficiaries—the populations most in need and grade levels where dropouts are most likely to occur—is a critical factor in the effectiveness of these interventions. Some theorize that benefit programs which pay cash incentives may have the unintended consequence of increasing birth rates. A review of social safety net programs by the World Bank concluded that there is little or no evidence of increased fertility rates as a consequence of social safety net transfers, and the transfers do not appear to influence the ability of the woman to decide on using contraception (World Bank, 2014).

Conditional cash transfers often include features meant to discourage fertility such as the inability to add more children to the beneficiary roster and information workshops. These findings are consistent with evaluations of a large-scale conditional cash transfer program in Mexico: of the four evaluations of this program, three demonstrated no effect on fertility or pregnancy rates (Darney et al., 2013; Feldman et al., 2009; Stecklov et al., 2007), while one found modest effects on contraceptive use among young adult women but not among youth (Lamadrid-Figueroa et al., 2008). The young adult women were required to attend promotional talks whereas youth were not.

A conditional cash transfer program in India encouraging facility delivery documented an increase in postpartum contraceptive use among beneficiaries (OR= 1.31) (Zavier and Santhya, 2013). In Kenya, an unconditional cash transfer program for female orphans ages 15–24 demonstrated a reduction in pregnancy, even after controlling for schooling, but not early marriage (Handa et al., 2015). Interviews with beneficiaries indicate the girls used cash for food, health, and clothing. In the absence on the cash transfer, beneficiaries may have resorted to transactional sex to obtain these goods.

Conclusion: Cash transfers may be particularly important for youth who have limited access to financial resources. However, cash transfers focused more generally on social protection (i.e., welfare safety net for poor) without a specific link to reproductive health information are unlikely to have an effect on fertility rates or reproductive behavior.

Multi-Component Economic Empowerment plus Health Activities Some programs incorporate multiple economic empowerment approaches combined with health education and promotion activities. We found three studies that examined the effects of these combined programs on family planning outcomes. The programs combined savings and credit (microfinance), vocational and/or business training, and sexual and reproductive health education.

In Ethiopia, married adolescents in all four study arms of an economic empowerment and reproductive health program reported increased contraceptive use:

• Those who received economic empowerment information and guidance only (9 percentage-point increase);
• Those who received sexual and reproductive health education only (27 percentage-point increase);
• Those who received both economic empowerment and sexual and reproductive health education (15 percentage-point increase); and
• The control group (no intervention) (5 percentage-point increase).

Although differences between each intervention group and the control group were statistically significant, the sexual and reproductive health content may have been the critical component for improving contraceptive use among the married adolescent girls. The evaluation attributed the increase in contraceptive use to the improvement in the attitudes about contraception among husbands of enrolled girls (Edmeades and Hayes, 2014).

In Kenya, unmarried adolescents exposed to an intervention combining microfinance, vocational training, sexual and reproductive health education, and mentoring were somewhat more likely to use condoms than non-participants (52.1% vs 44.3%, respectively), but the difference was not statistically significant (Erulkar and Chong, 2005).

Another program in Ethiopia sought to increase the age at marriage among adolescent girls by providing access to literacy, numeracy, and livelihood training; financial support for school; and a goat for the girl and her family if her parents did not arrange for her to marry. The program also worked with community leaders around child marriage norms. An endline comparison of participants and non-participants showed that, compared with their counterparts in the comparison communities, 10–14-year olds in the intervention community were less likely to be married, 15–19-year olds in the intervention community were more likely to be married, and girls in the intervention community were more likely to use condoms (Erulkar and Muthengi, 2009). Conclusion : Interventions with multiple economic empowerment approaches combined with sexual and reproductive health education may have modest effects on family planning-related outcomes. One evaluation, in particular, highlights the importance of sexual and reproductive health education to contraceptive use.

Economic Empowerment and Gender-Based Violence Experts raise concerns about the potential that women’s empowerment programs, particularly economic empowerment programs, may increase intimate partner violence if men respond negatively when family roles are first challenged. Two literature reviews attempt to describe the relationship between women’s empowerment programs, including economic empowerment programs that specifically address gender-based violence (GBV) and those that do not, and risk for domestic violence (Heise 2011; Mejia et al., 2014). Mejia and colleagues (2014) identified 19 economic empowerment interventions, of which 15 specifically addressed gender norms and/or gender-based violence. Of the 15 programs that addressed gender, 8 reported a GBV outcome (i.e., attitudes about or experience with GBV): 3 of the 8 reported a decrease in experience of GBV, 5 reported no change in experience, and none reported an increase. Rigorous evaluations of economic empowerment programs, whether they specifically address GBV or not, should assess women’s experience of GBV as an unintended consequence among program participants.

Given the limited research on the impact of economic empowerment on family planning, these key research questions might shed light on whether and under what conditions economic empowerment interventions contribute to improved family planning outcomes.

• What is the added value of investing in economic empowerment on effecting contraceptive use or other proximate determinants of fertility?
• In what context do investments in economic empowerment have the most impact on sexual and reproductive health?
• What types of economic empowerment programs are most appropriate or effective for improving the sexual and reproductive health of different population groups?

Tools and Resources

A Review of Approaches and Methods to Measure Economic Empowerment of Women and Girls aims to inform agencies commissioning evaluations on how to ensure women’s economic empowerment dimensions are captured and to help those designing interventions to ensure these support positive transformation in the lives of women and girls. Available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13552074.2014.920976

Understanding and Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment: Definition, Framework and Indicators lays out a fundamental concepts measurement framework and illustrative indicators to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of women’s economic empowerment programs. Available from:  http://www.icrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Understanding-measuring-womens-economic-empowerment.pdf

Economic Empowerment Strategies for Adolescent Girls: A Research Study Conducted for the Adolescent Girls’ Advocacy and Leadership Initiative identifies key findings on economic empowerment strategies for adolescent girls and provides recommendations to inform future program development. Available from: http://agaliprogram.org/eng/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/AGALI-Economic-Empowerment-Report-2013-.pdf

Helpdesk Research Report: Impact Evaluations of Programmes to Increase Girls’ Access to and Use of Economic Assets provides a review of evaluations conducted to assess the impact of programs to increase girls’ access to and use of economic assets. Available from: http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/hdq749.pdf

Abdu-Aguye, S, Akiode A, Oginni A, Iriaye D, Oyebade M. Evaluating the impact of integrated microfinance and reproductive (MF/RH) services on household wellbeing and reproductive health behaviors of women in Nigera. New York: Population Council; 2015. Available from: http://www.popcouncil.org/uploads/pdfs/2016RH_MicrofinanceRH-Nigeria.pdf

Ahmed S, Creanga A, Gillespie DG, Tsui AO. Economic status, education and empowerment: implications for maternal health service utilization in developing countries. PLoS One. 2010;5(6):e11190. Available from: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0011190

Amin R, Li Y, Ahmed AU. Women’s credit programs and family planning in rural Bangladesh. International Family Planning Perspectives. 1996;22(4):158-162. Available from: https://live.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/2215896.pdf

Bandiera O, Buehren N, Burgess R, Goldstein M, Gulesci S, Rasul I, et al. Empowering adolescent girls: evidence from a randomized trial in Uganda. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2012. Available from: http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/rburgess/wp/ELA.pdf

Buttenheim A. Microfinance programs and contraceptive use: evidence from Indonesia. Los Angeles (CA): California Center for Population Research; 2006. Available from: http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-CCPR-2006-020/PWP-CCPR-2006-020.pdf

Cho Y, Kalomba D, Mobarak AM, Orozco V. Gender differences in the effects of vocational training: constraints on women and drop-out behavior. Policy Research Working Paper 6545. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2015. Available from: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/882971468272376091/pdf/WPS6545.pdf

Clark S. Early marriage and HIV risks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Studies in Family Planning. 2004;35(3):149–160.

Darney B, Weaver M, Sosa-Rubi S, Walker D, Servan-Mori E, Prager S, et al. The Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program: effects on pregnancy and contraceptive use among young rural women in Mexico. International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. 2013;39(4):205–214. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1363/3920513

Desai J, Tarozzi A. Microcredit, family planning programs, and contraceptive behavior: evidence from a field experiment in Ethiopia. Demography. 2011;48(2):749–782.

Do M, Kurimoto N. Women’s empowerment and choice of contraceptive methods in selected African countries. International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. 2012;38(1):23–33. Available from: http://doi.org/10.1363/3802312

Duflo E. Women empowerment and economic development. Journal of Economic Literature 2012;50(4):1051-1079. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.4.1051

Dunbar M, Kang Dufour M, Lambdin B, Mudekunye-Mahaka I, Nhamo D, Padian NS. The SHAZ! Project: results from a pilot randomized trial of a structural intervention to prevent HIV among adolescent women in Zimbabwe. PLoS One. 2014;9(11):e113621. Available from: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113621

Duvendack M, Palmer-Jones R, Copestake JG, Hooper L, Loke Y, Rao N. What is the evidence of the impact of microfinance on the well-being of poor people? London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London: 2011. Available from: http://opus.bath.ac.uk/26940/

Edmeades J, Hayes R. Improving the lives of married adolescent girls in Amhara, Ethiopia: a summary of the evidence. Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women; 2014. Available from: http://www.care.org/sites/default/files/documents/TESFA%20Final%20Evaluation.pdf

Erulkar AS, Chong E. Evaluation of a savings and micro-credit program for vulnerable young women in Nairobi. New York: Population Council; 2005. Available from: http://www.issuelab.org/resources/21090/21090.pdf

Erulkar AS, Muthengi E. Evaluation of Berhane Hewan: a program to delay child marriage in rural Ethiopia. International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. 2009;35(1):6-14. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1363/ifpp.35.006.09

Feldman B, Zaslavsky AM, Ezzat M, Peterson KE, Mitchell M. Contraceptive use, birth spacing, and autonomy: an analysis of the Oportunidades program in rural Mexico. Studies in Family Planning. 2009;40(1):51–62. Available from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4465.2009.00186.x/epdf

FHI 360. Delivering family planning information and services through a microfinance program: lessons from Uttar Pradesh, India. Research Triangle Park (NC): FHI 360; 2013. Available from: https://www.fhi360.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/india-need-microfinance-family-planning.pdf

Golla AM, Malhotra A, Nanda P, Mehra R. Understanding and measuring women’s economic empowerment: definition, framework and indicators. Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women; 2011. Available from https://www.icrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Understanding-measuring-womens-economic-empowerment.pdf

Gupta MD. Women’s empowerment and fertility: policy lessons. Expert Paper No. 2013/2. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division; 2013. Available from: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/expert/2013-2_DasGupta_Expert-Paper.pdf

Handa S, Peterman A, Huang C, Halpern C, Pettifor A, Thirumurthy H. Impact of the Kenya cash transfer for orphans and vulnerable children on early pregnancy and marriage of adolescent girls. Social Science and Medicine. 2015;141:36-45. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4659857/

Heise LL. What works to prevent partner violence? An evidence overview. London: STRIVE Research Consortium; 2011. Available from: http://strive.lshtm.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/What%20works%20to%20prevent%20partner%20violence.pdf

High Impact Practices in Family Planning (HIPs). High impact practices in family planning list. Washington, DC: US Agency for International Development; 2015. Available from: https://www.fphighimpactpractices.org/resources/high-impact-practices-in-family-planning-list

Ibarraran P, Ripani L, Taboada B, Villa J, Garcia B. Life skills, employability and training for disadvantaged youth: evidence from a randomized evaluation design. IBD Working Paper Series, No. IDB-WP-342. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank; 2012. Available from: https://publications.iadb.org/bitstream/handle/11319/4070/lifeskills,employabilityandtrainingfordisadvantagedyouth:evidencefromarandomizedevaluationdesign.pdf?sequence=1

Kabeer N.  Gender equality and women’s empowerment: a critical analysis of the third Millennium Development Goal. Gender and Development. 2005;13(1):13-24.

Karlan D, Thuysbaert B, Udry C, Cupito E, Naimpally R, Salgado E, et al. Impact assessment of savings groups: findings from three randomized evaluations of CARE village savings and loans associations programs in Ghana, Malawi and Uganda. New Haven (CT): Innovations for Poverty Action; 2012. Available from: http://www.seepnetwork.org/filebin/pdf/savings_led_working_group/library/VSLA_Impact_Final_Report_September_2012.pdf

Katz E. Identifying research gaps and priorities for women’s economic empowerment: gender and youth employment. San Francisco (CA): University of San Francisco; 2013. Available from: http://www.womeneconroadmap.org/sites/default/files/Katz_Youth_Employment.pdf

Lagarde M, Haines A, Palmer N. The impact of conditional cash transfers on health outcomes and use of health services in low and middle income countries. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2009;(4):1–45. Available from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008137/full

Lamadrid-Figueroa H, Ángeles G, Mroz T, Urquieta-Salomón J, Hernández-Prado B, Cruz-Valdez A, et al. Impact of Oportunidades on contraceptive methods use in adolescent and young adult women living in rural areas, 1997-2000. Chapel Hill (NC): Measure Evaluation; 2008. Available from: https://www.measureevaluation.org/resources/publications/wp-08-109

Mejia C, Cannon A, Zietz S, Arcara J, Abdur-Rahman A. Perspectives on gender-based violence and women’s economic empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa: challenges and opportunities. Chapel Hill, NC: Measure Evaluation; 2014. Available from: https://www.measureevaluation.org/resources/publications/sr-14-111

Pettifor A, Measham D, Rees H, Padian N. Sexual power and HIV risk, South Africa. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 2004;10(11):1996-2004. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3328992/

Population Council. BALIKA: empowering girls to delay child marriage in Bangladesh. New York: Population Council; 2016.

Rotheram-Borus M J, Lightfoot M, Kasirye R, Desmond K. Vocational training with HIV prevention for Ugandan youth. AIDS and Behavior. 2012;16(5):1133–1137. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3947885/

Schuler SR, Hashemi SM. Credit programs, women’s empowerment, and contraceptive use in Rural Bangladesh. Studies in Family Planning. 1994;25(2):65-76.

Stecklov G, Winters P, Todd J, Regalia F. Unintended effects of poverty programmes on childbearing in less developed countries: experimental evidence from Latin America. Population Studies. 2007;61(2):125-140.

Steele F, Amin S, Naved R. Savings/credit group formation and change in contraception. Demography. 2001;38(2):267-282.

World Bank. Social safety nets and gender: learning from impact evaluations and World Bank projects. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2014. Available from: https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/Data/Evaluation/files/ssn-gender-ie-full-report.pdf

World Economic Forum. The global gender gap index 2015. Geneva: World Economic Forum; 2015. Available from: http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2015/the-global-gender-gap-index-2015/

Zavier AJF, Santhya KG. How conditional cash transfers to promote institutional delivery can also influence postpartum contraception: evidence from Rajasthan, India. International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics. 2013;123 Suppl 1:e43–e46. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgo.2013.08.003

Suggested Citation

High Impact Practices in Family Planning (HIPs). Economic empowerment: a pathway for women and girls to gain control over their sexual and reproductive health. Evidence Summary. Washington, DC: USAID; 2017 Jan. Available from: https://www.fphighimpactpractices.org/briefs/economic-empowerment/

Acknowledgements

This document was originally drafted by Kimberly Ashburn, Joan Kraft, Shefa Sikder, Reena Shukla, and Shawn Malarcher. Critical review and helpful comments were provided by Afeefa Abdur-Rahman, Gifty Addico, Moazzam Ali, Michal Avni, Myra Betron, Vicky Boydell, Clarissa Lord Brundage, Venkatraman Chandra-Mouli, Wade Channell, Peggy D’Adamo, Rani Deshpande, Ellen Eiseman, Madeleine Short Fabic, Mychelle Farmer, Mario Philip Festin, Allison Annette Foster, Kate Gray, Rehana Gubin, Gwyn Hainsworth, Jane Hutchings, Sandra Jordan, Niranjala Kanesathasan, Eugene Kongnyuy, Camille Collins Lovell, Erin Mielke, Dani Murphy, Constance Newman, Saiqa Panjsheri, May Post, Shannon Pryor, Heidi Quinn, Minal Rahimtoola, Suzy Sacher, Nisha Sarpal, Amy Setig, Ritu Shroff, Preethi Sundaram, Linda Sussman, Caitlin Thistle, and Caroll Vasquez.

This brief is endorsed by : Abt Associates, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CARE, Chemonics International, EngenderHealth, FHI 360,  FP2020, Georgetown University/Institute for Reproductive Health, International Planned Parenthood Federation, IntraHealth International, Jhpiego, John Snow, Inc., Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, Management Sciences for Health, Marie Stopes International, Options, Palladium, Pathfinder International, Population Council, Population Reference Bureau, Population Services International, Save the Children, United Nations Population Fund, University Research Co., LLC, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For more information about HIPs, please contact the HIP team at USAID .

Submit a Comment

Women and Finance: Enabling Women’s Economic Empowerment

This post is also available in Arabic  and French  and Spanish on the FinDev Gateway.

“There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.” - Malala Yousafzai

In early 2020, CGAP moved beyond the access and usage paradigm in financial inclusion and set its sights on understanding how poor people could use financial services to improve their lives in three ways: generating income, accessing essential services and protecting basic standards of living. At the same time, we updated our vision statement by adding two small words: “A world where poor people, especially women , are empowered to capture opportunities and build resilience through financial services.” Many readers may not have even noticed this change. But it will make a profound difference to how CGAP approaches its work going forward.

Why did we take this step? It was to put women’s financial inclusion at the center of everything we do at CGAP. In the past, gender sat off to the side, either as a project on its own or a “cross-cutting issue” that was everyone's and therefore no one’s responsibility. These outdated approaches will not halve (and eventually eliminate) the persistent 9 percent gender gap in financial inclusion, which CGAP committed to help close in its latest five-year strategy. Reducing the gender gap requires that we put a gender lens on everything we do. Without fully including women, we won’t solve financial inclusion — or, for that matter, end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity.

So how can the financial inclusion community contribute to this very ambitious goal?

Connecting the dots between women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment

In her book, “The Moment of Lift,” Melinda Gates reflects on how long it took her to realize that empowering women was the single most powerful lever for improving the lives of all human beings. But eventually, she writes, she came to see that, “…the primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do – and think they can do – for themselves and their children.”

The challenge Melinda Gates describes seems like a pretty daunting one for financial services to solve. Even if we take away tangible barriers to women’s empowerment, what women and the men around them believe to be a woman’s proper role in society is a very real barrier. To create real change in women’s lives, we also have to change the barriers in people’s minds, and that is a more complex undertaking. After all, what good is a bank account or mobile wallet if a woman can’t own a mobile phone or leave the house? The complicated reality is that social norms exert a powerful influence over the roles women are expected to play in society. Women’s economic empowerment is just as entangled in social norms around health, education, family planning and childcare responsibilities as it is around issues of how women earn a living and maintain control over resources.

“Women’s economic empowerment is going to take more than bank accounts. But bank accounts can be powerful tools in the hands of women who are determined to take more control over their lives.”

How can the financial inclusion community use technology and financial services to help solve such complex problems? The not-so-simple answer is that we must connect our work to a wider theory of change that speaks to women’s economic empowerment. We must be clear about the many constraints that hold women back. But we must also be clear about the levers we can pull, both tangible and intangible, to help women find pathways to greater empowerment through financial services that meet their needs. And we must build partnerships with players outside our core areas of expertise who can help shift the levers that don’t directly relate to finance. Women’s economic empowerment is going to take more than bank accounts. But bank accounts can be powerful tools in the hands of women who are determined to take more control over their lives.

Even the most technical aspects of financial inclusion have implications for women’s economic empowerment

In preparation for writing this essay, I looked through a number of theories of change for women’s economic empowerment. The first thing that struck me was how divergent they are. Different organizations have very different visions for how to create change, although most are linked by common themes. The second thing that really struck me was the many ways financial services and digital access can support women’s economic empowerment, even in places that may not seem obvious. Like many technical specialists, I like nothing more than diving into the technical arcana of digital finance. Hard technology questions on topics like interoperability, open banking and open APIs would seem on their face to be gender-neutral, but on digging, it is clear they all have relevant gender aspects that ultimately relate to women’s economic empowerment.

For example, one technical topic that’s captured my attention of late is central bank digital currencies. The debate around how to implement digital currency gets to the heart of the role money plays in our society. In standard economic discourse, money has three main functions: it is a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of exchange. But the role of money goes far beyond this. It influences our relationships with each other, particularly within family units. It can define power dynamics in a household and an economy. And it can define how much agency we have over our own lives and personal choices. Often, these relationships and dynamics play out in gendered ways. As such, in addition to figuring out the macroeconomic implications or how digital currencies will be distributed, the architects of these new schemes must think about the potential exclusionary effects of replacing cash with digital currency. Otherwise, they could end up reinforcing existing social norms that disempower women. And the evidence base is quite clear that if a woman has no control over resources, she really has very little control over her life and choices — a core aspect of women’s economic empowerment. That is why everyone in the financial inclusion community needs to pay attention to gender, no matter their area of expertise or focus.

While there are many different theories of change for women’s economic empowerment, most of them involve three broad elements: access to income and assets, control of and benefit from economic gains, and the power to make decisions. These themes link in many ways to financial inclusion and to CGAP’s own theory of change, which is framed around opportunities and resilience . If women are empowered to take chances, aspire to greater opportunities, and manage downside risk for themselves and their families, then they can take more control over their lives. And if they can access essential services that help increase their capabilities or make better use of their time, then they are better able to invest in productive, income-generating activities that can benefit the entire family and community. But there is also a cultural aspect. If women have been conditioned their entire lives to believe they have no agency, then how can they seize opportunities and build resilience? Only when women can see these pathways for themselves — and have the material and legal supports in place to walk down them — are they able to take control over their own fates.

At a basic level, the way I think about all this is that to overcome barriers and reach for new opportunities, it is helpful to have metaphorical ladders to climb. The rungs of the ladder might be resources, skills or networks — things that help us seize opportunities. But we also need a firm floor to stand that ladder on, which is where resilience tools like social safety nets, savings and insurance come in. They help us keep our balance when we hit obstacles and bolster our confidence as we climb toward opportunity. But knowing that the ladder is steady also helps us climb. In this respect, social solidarity groups and role models can play an important role. If you’ve been told your entire life that you can’t do certain things, it can be very powerful to see someone like you achieving goals that seem out of reach.

Four areas where the financial inclusion community can contribute to women’s economic empowerment

So how can financial services level the playing field for women and lead to equitable impact ? There are a number of areas where financial services strengthen the floor, ladder and social support that assist women in achieving economic empowerment. I think of these in four broad areas:

1. Digital access and data. The digital economy is becoming a bigger part of all our lives. To take advantage of economic opportunities in the digital economy, women need to be able to make and receive payments. At the most basic level, women require access to a simple trinity of factors to engage in the digital economy: an account, a phone and a cash-in cash-out (CICO) network. The financial inclusion community tends to focus on the gender gap for accounts, but there is also a significant gap around phone ownership. In lower- and middle-income countries, women are 8 percent less likely to own a phone than men and 20 percent less likely to own a smartphone , the primary gateway to the internet for most poor people.

The digital economy presents many opportunities for women. In a growing number of markets, digital platforms enable women to generate income by matching supply and demand — as in social commerce or gig work — or getting timely market information into their hands — as is the case with an emerging group of agricultural platforms. Providers are now embedding financial services like credit and insurance into these platforms. The online data trails women are generating can reveal the extent to which women are equally participating in the digital economy and how they might use digital tools and finance to capture new opportunities. Sex-disaggregated data on women can help inform policies and products that facilitate greater empowerment.

But we also need to understand the risks that the digital economy and its underlying financial services pose to women. For example, digital platforms and credit raise new risks around algorithm bias, over-indebtedness and fair treatment. Additionally, social norms in many contexts mean that women are likely to have distinct privacy needs in their digital interactions and dealings with CICO agents.

2. Laws and social norms. Laws and social norms deeply affect women’s ability to use financial services to improve their lives. I worked with Finca a number of years ago to help set up agency banking in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We learned that women made very effective banking agents , but that their ability to play this role was limited because, at the time, it was illegal for a woman to have a bank account in her own name or own a business without her husband’s permission. A lack of property rights prevents women from obtaining loans in many markets. And a lack of ID makes it difficult for women to access accounts; in a number of markets , women still face legal barriers to obtaining an ID. According to the World Bank’s Women, Business And The Law index, on average, women have only three quarters of the legal rights afforded to men, despite recent progress in closing the gender gap.

Supporters of financial inclusion need to make common cause with market facilitators and advocacy groups to remove legal barriers in the markets where they work, while providers of both public and financial services need to design carefully around prevailing social norms . In an ideal world, financial inclusion successes would eventually help to change social norms by demonstrating the benefits to households and societies of empowering women. Let’s not forget that it was only in 1974 , with the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, that it became legal for a woman in the United States to apply for a credit card in her own name.

3. Capabilities and essential services. Education and skills are foundational to building a better future for women and families. According to the Global Partnership for Education at the World Bank, an additional year of school for women can result in a 20 percent increase in income and a child whose mother can read is 50 percent more likely to live past the age of five. The return on investment from educating women is high and financial services like payments, savings and credit can make it easier for poor households to pay for school fees and other essential services.

In addition to helping women acquire knowledge and skills, financial services can help women spend more time in the workforce. Off-grid electric helps extend the day past darkness, and digitally enabled access to clean water or clean cookstoves can save women long trips to fetch water or cooking fuel every day. These savings have can real payoffs in terms of workforce participation and productivity. In the United States, the average household in 1900 spent 58 hours a week on housework, including meal preparation, laundry and cleaning. This figure dropped to 18 hours by 1975. At the same time, women entered the workforce in droves. In 1900, only 5 percent of married women worked. By 2020, this figure was 61 percent. There were other factors driving this change, but I have to believe that labor-saving devices played a role in enabling women to participate in the workforce.

Financial services also help women access essential services. Early innovators like M-Kopa are increasingly taking asset financing models pioneered in the off-grid energy space and applying them to other products, offering poor families access to lighting, electricity, efficient cook stoves, smartphones and refrigerators. And yet, the effects of these new business models on women’s empowerment remain relatively underexplored. There is evidence, however, that when financial services help women to save time and increase their access to useful products, they can help create virtuous circles in which women invest resources in enhancing household capabilities. CGAP research with Engie Energy Access (formerly Fenix Intl) in Uganda suggests that solar home systems , once paid off, can be used as collateral to obtain credit for other opportunity-enhancing services like school fees. A recent impact evaluation of the company’s school fee loan program found that the loans led to a 50 percent reduction in the share of children out of school among borrower households.

4. Social safety nets and networks. Safety nets give women the security they need to take advantage of opportunities that come their way. As Jack and Suri’s work in Kenya demonstrated, having access to a distributed social network through proximity to an agent network meant that women could more productively deploy their time, thereby increasing household welfare. Formal safety nets are an important part of ensuring that poor households can cope with adversity: making sure that government-to-person (G2P) payments get into women’s accounts and that women are able to access the funds at an outlet of their choice have been important factors in ensuring households have the resources to get through the COVID-19 crisis. Work in Bangladesh by my colleague Leora Klapper has demonstrated how empowering it is for women to receive wages via mobile accounts that are readily accessible . And there is extensive evidence that savings accounts help create resilience.

At the same time, I am struck by the very real barriers that social norms create for women that go well beyond simply gaining access to the tools of financial inclusion, and that is why analogue social networks are also important. In “The Moment of Lift,” Melinda Gates speaks very personally about how support from other professional women helped her to build her career. Why should it be any different for poor women, who face barriers far beyond what most professional women have had to face? Social networks like savings groups in Africa and self-help groups in India can be important channels for helping women gain access to opportunities, both analogue and digital. Microfinance has long been a female friendly industry: 80 percent of microfinance clients are female, and many microfinance institutions provide social support and training in their programs.

But we also need to create more examples of successful female role models so that girls can see where the opportunity horizon lies. Female fintech founders are few and far between, and women-led start-ups receive a tiny fraction of venture capital funding . Why don’t we see accelerators and other entrepreneurship support mechanisms that focus on women? Why don’t we see more initiatives in emerging markets that support girls who want to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)? And let’s not forget that men also have a critical role to play in advancing equality and women’s rights.

Of course, these are not the only factors in women’s economic empowerment. But they are topics that relate directly to financial inclusion, so it is imperative that the financial inclusion community incorporate them into its work. The fact of the matter is that women still lag behind men in their access to financial services by a huge margin. We have the tools to create ladders of opportunity for women to enter the digital economy, enhance their capabilities and find more time to work. We can create floors through social safety nets, savings accounts and digital access to social networks. And through the wider microfinance industry, we have a long history of engaging with social support groups that provide both role models and peer support that can steady the ladder for women as they climb higher.

“By shifting all the levers within our reach, we can improve the chances that we will collectively level the playing field in ways that improve the lives of women.”

But we need to think in market systems terms about how to bring these factors together in a way that unlocks change for women, where the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. By moving the needle in these four areas, the financial inclusion community could make an immense contribution to women’s economic empowerment, while the larger development community contends with related challenges in health care, family planning, affordable childcare and girls’ access to education. By shifting all the levers within our reach, we can improve the chances that we will collectively level the playing field in ways that improve the lives of women.

CGAPs work on women’s financial inclusion

All of this brings me back to how CGAP can help advance women’s economic empowerment through women’s financial inclusion. We clearly have many levers at our disposal, but we don’t have all of them. For that reason, we need to work closely with the many other organizations active in women’s economic empowerment. We can contribute based on our deep knowledge of finance and technology, but we will have to work together. Here is how CGAP plans to contribute in the coming years:

Sharing insights. For several years, we have been sharing insights on specific segments of people living in poverty and how they interact with financial services and the digital economy. In 2020, we decided to focus our segments work more fully on women. To that end, we are creating diagnostic tools that help funders understand social norms in specific contexts to inform program design. We are also researching the ways poor women interact with the platform economy and are working to better understand how financial services meet women’s needs by analyzing the Findex data through a gender lens . We will continue to share gender-specific insights that can inform our work and the work of the financial inclusion community.

Mainstreaming. In addition to ramping up our gender insight work, we are mainstreaming gender across CGAP’s existing work program in a more systematic way. Our work on off-grid energy and other essential services, CICO, fintech, livelihoods, data and protecting basic standards of living all have important gender aspects. We are now building a gender lens into all our new project work, generating gender insights that sit squarely within CGAP’s broader work agenda. This is, in part, a response to strong demand from CGAP’s members. In a survey of 30 funder organizations conducted in the summer of 2020, all but one indicated they are prioritizing women's financial inclusion. Their most commonly reported needs are for richer sex-disaggregated data and a clearer impact narrative that connects financial services to women’s financial inclusion. Look out for more outputs from us on these topics in the coming year.

Building community and partnership. Our biggest foray into the gender space in the last four years has been hosting the FinEquity community of practice. At the latest count, FinEquity has over 1,500 members from 450 organizations, operating in 75 countries around the world. It is focused on three learning themes: gender transformative solutions , digitally enabled financial inclusion and impact pathways . More importantly, FinEquity links us to a wide network of partners who are interested in both women’s financial inclusion and women’s economic empowerment, helping us to connect the dots between these two distinct but overlapping communities. These connections have been important for informing our own learning and enabling us to connect with the work of many other development partners. We will be collaborating more proactively with the FinEquity team as we explore ways to mainstream gender in CGAP’s own work.

As you can see, adding those two small words – especially women – at the top of our theory of change has changed the way CGAP looks at gender across its work. We are excited at the possibilities of seriously exploring how to improve women’s financial inclusion and, through that, making a positive contribution to the broader goal of women’s economic empowerment. As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn observed in their book “Half the Sky,” “Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.” Let it be an opportunity for us all.

Also in this Series

Open Finance Can Reduce Financial Inclusion Gaps: Here’s How

The Future of Financial Inclusion

Friend or Foe to the World’s Poor? Settling the Microfinance Debate

Add new comment.

© 2024 CGAP

• Privacy Notice

What we Do: Economic Empowerment

This essay will discuss initiatives and strategies focused on economic empowerment, particularly for marginalized communities, and how these efforts contribute to overall social progress. Additionally, PapersOwl presents more free essays samples linked to Child Marriage.

How it works

• 1 Abstract :
• 2 Introduction:
• 3 Status of women
• 4 Importance of women education in India
• 5 Obstacles to women empowerment
• 6 WOMEN EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EDUCATION

Education is widely understood as an indicator of women status and even more importantly as a factor for the empowerment of women. Women have such unexplored potential which has never been tapped. For centuries women were not treated equal to men in many ways. Today we can see that women occupies respectable positions in all walks of life. Yet, they are not absolutely free, due to discriminations and harassments of the society. A few number of women have been able to establish their potentialities.

Education is milestone of women empowerment because it enables them to responds to the challenges, to confront their traditional role and change their life. So that we can’t neglect the importance of education in reference to women empowerment in India.

Introduction:

Education is considered as a basic requirement and a fundamental right for the citizens of any nation. It is a powerful tool for reducing inequality as it can give people the ability to become independent. Women, who come across discrimination in many spheres, have a particular need for this. Still large womenfolk of our country are illiterate, backward, weak, and exploited education also reduces inequalities and functions as a means of improving their status within the family. Empowerment and capacity building provides women an avenue to acquire practical information and learning for their improved livelihoods. India can become a developed nation only if women contribute to the best of her capacity and ability which is possible when she is educated and empowered.

Status of women

The women in India enjoy a unique status of equality with the men as per constitutional and legal provision. But the Indian women have come a long way to achieve these positions. Gender inequality is the main problem, a female was always dependent on male members of the family. Female was not allow to speak aloud in front of the elder members of her family. In the family, every faults had gone to her. In many social activities she is not permitted to mingle with others. She has very little share in political, social, and economic life of the society. Now the status of women changed alot. She has brought the property rights, Voting rights, an equality in civil rights, matters of marriage, employment etc. In this male dominating society, the education of women has been neglected for a long period of time. Insufficiency of education in women can adversely affect the health and living condition of children. For to achieve economic empowerment of women we should eradicate poverty, give chance for micro credit – Women’s access to credit for consumption and production, women and economy, globalization, women and agriculture, women and industry support services etc., should be promoted.

Importance of women education in India

Women education in India plays a very important role in the overall development of the country. It not only helps in the development of half of the human resources, but in improving the quality of life at home and outside. Educated women not only tend to promote education of their girl children, but also can provide better guidance to all their children. Moreover educated women can also help in the reduction of infant mortality rate and growth of the population. Women empowerment is the importance part in any society, state or country. It is a woman who plays a dominant role in the basic life of a child. Women’s are the important section of our society. Women’s participation may be used both for the support by an agency and as a control device by law makers. Women plays an imperative role in making a nations progressive & guide it towards development at the social level male dominance in parliament, bureaucracy, judiciary all point focus towards gender inequality that is often argued that women political leadership would bring about a more cooperative and less conflict prone era. Higher education is important for everyone but it is especially important for girls and women. Higher education achievements help to have ripple effects within the family and across generations. Girl’s education helps to reduce poverty. Educated women can recognize the importance of health for themselves as well as other family members too. we should give chance to woman in every level then in all walks of life she can make her own foot prints. Providing proper counseling to parents in proper time will ensure the educational opportunity of a girl. Government also take initiative to give basic infrastructure and financial aid in the right time. Education has to provide girls with the capacity to analyze their situation, expose them to a new role, build up aspiration and see a different future.

Obstacles to women empowerment

• Violence: Violence is the prime factor which opposes women’s empowerment. Physical, emotional, mental torture and agony are deep rooted in the society from ancient times which are responsible for decline in female sex ratio.
• Gender inequality: Women empowerment is not only limited to economic independence of women; gender equality is the other side.
• Family restrictions: Illiterate guardians who are not willing to send their female children’s to educational institutions.
• Early marriages: Early marriages results in dropouts from school. Lack of awareness on female education is also one of its causes.

Women’s own perception of themselves and on their empowerment must be changed. They should also strive to change their image as weak, dependent, passive and try to become independent, active, strong and determined human beings

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EDUCATION

Women Empowerment is a global issue and discussion on women political right are at the fore front of many formal and informal campaigns worldwide. The concept of women empowerment was introduced at the international women conference at NAROIBI in 1985. Education is milestone of women empowerment because it enables them to responds to the challenges, to confront their traditional role and change their life. So that we can’t neglect the importance of education in reference to women empowerment India is poised to becoming superpower, a developed country by 2020. The year 2020 is fast approaching; it is just 13 year away. This can became reality only when the women of this nation became empowerment. India presently account for the largest number no of illiterates in the world. Literacy rate in India have risen sharply from 18.3% in 1951 to 64.8% in 2001 in which enrolment of women in education have also risen sharply 7% to 54.16%. Despite the importance of women education unfortunately only 39% of women are literate among 64% of the man. Within the framework of a democratic polity, our laws, development policies, plan and programmes have aimed at women’s advancement in difference spheres. From the fifth five year plan (1974 – 78) onwards has been a marked shift in the approach to women’s issues from welfare to development. In recent years, the empowerment of women has been recognized as the central issue in determining the status of women. The National Commission of Women was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1990 to safeguard the right and legal entitlements of women. The 73rd and 74th Amendments (1993) to the constitution of India have provided for reservation of seats in the local bodies of panchayats and Municipalities for women, laying a strong foundation for their participation in decision making at the local level.

This paper examined the trends in women education, the investments on education and infrastructural supports in India. The study revealed that there had been significant progress in the performance of women education revealed from female literacy levels and its change over time. It was also observed that the gaps between rural and urban female literacy rates are narrowing down. To explore the influence of certain variables of interest such as rural poverty, urbanization and drop-out rate on the educational attainment of women, a multiple regression equation was estimated. It was observed that rural poverty acts as a push factors for women’s education rather than as an obstacle to women’s education. The significant influence of urbanization on women’s education implied that urbanization had been playing a beneficial role in the attainment of women’s education in India. At the same time, the drop-out rate had a negative effect on women’s education. It revealed that that reduction of girl’s drop-out rates is necessary for achieving women’s education. The initiatives of the government through investment and infrastructure in developing education in India were examined. With regard to facilities in schools, it had improved significantly, but a lot more need to be done. In sum, the study revealed that there have been concerted efforts to encourage girls to attend schools, which would lead to higher literacy in future. The study also revealed that there are several infrastructural barriers to women education in India. The study calls for focused approach towards increasing women centre educational infrastructure so as to reduce the women drop-out rates and to improve female literacy levels in India.

Cite this page

What We Do: Economic Empowerment. (2021, Mar 09). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/what-we-do-economic-empowerment/

"What We Do: Economic Empowerment." PapersOwl.com , 9 Mar 2021, https://papersowl.com/examples/what-we-do-economic-empowerment/

PapersOwl.com. (2021). What We Do: Economic Empowerment . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/what-we-do-economic-empowerment/ [Accessed: 4 Jul. 2024]

"What We Do: Economic Empowerment." PapersOwl.com, Mar 09, 2021. Accessed July 4, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/what-we-do-economic-empowerment/

"What We Do: Economic Empowerment," PapersOwl.com , 09-Mar-2021. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/what-we-do-economic-empowerment/. [Accessed: 4-Jul-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2021). What We Do: Economic Empowerment . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/what-we-do-economic-empowerment/ [Accessed: 4-Jul-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

Economic Empowerment Essays

The role of youths in shaping the future of the world, revitalizing the central avenue corridor: community development and empowerment, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• Women Empowerment Essay

Be the Heroine of Your Life, Not the Victim.- Nora Ephron

The word ‘Women Empowerment’ itself implies that women are not powerful enough - they need to be empowered. This painful truth has been in existence for a long long time. It is in recent years that noticeable work started beginning to lift women out of the abyss of insignificance and powerlessness. The patriarchal society suppressed women’s freedom across the world. Women were not allowed to vote or even put forward any opinion. Women were confined to their homes. As time progressed, they realised that their life meant much more than just serving in the household. As more and more women started crossing the man-made barriers, the world began to witness the rise of women. Unlike men, women never try to stifle the voice of their opposite gender. They hold the hands of all the downtrodden people - men and women both - and they pull them out of misfortune as they try to improve their lives.

The History of Women Empowerment 

The history of women empowerment does not start from an exact date, It is a cumulative process. However, there are certain movements, protests, revolutions that furthered the cause of women empowerment much more speedily.

In the ancient days and even in the recent past, women, in hundreds of countries, were not allowed to vote. As time passed, more and more women came together and made their voices heard. Gaining voting rights significantly lifted the position of women in society. Many suffrage movements campaigned daily in support of women's voting rights. In the US, individuals like Elizabeth Stanton and organisations like National American Woman Suffrage Association, National Woman’s Party played a key role in securing the voting rights for women. In the UK, the Women's Social and Political Union aggressively campaigned for women’s suffrage. It is a shame for society at large when we consider that many countries granted women the right to vote after a very long time. Kuwait, Qatar, Zaire, Bahrain, Andorra, Central African Republic etc granted women the right to vote after the second half of the 20th century.

No woman can be empowered if she is not financially independent. Gone are the days when women had to depend on their fathers or husbands to get things that they wanted. From the 20th century onwards women got more opportunities to join the workforce. However, at the same time, many women in England were forced to work both in the workplace and in the household to support the family. After the Second World War women, on their own, chose to join the workforce. Today more and more jobs are opening up for women. Women are proving to be worthy of the designations assigned to them.

In the household, too, women have gained significant decision-making powers. The decision to have a baby or not is now decided by both men and women. The use of contraceptive pills empowered women further. Women can now enjoy unhindered work life and education.

Women empowerment cannot be successful if the women in the lower rung of the society are not empowered. After the onset of the 21st century, women belonging to the grassroots level have found many vocational works, labours that were only reserved for men. Today there are many female masons, bus drivers, petrol pump attendants, farmers etc. And all these women are doing their job extremely well.

Women Empowerment in India

Women empowerment in India cannot be compared with that in other countries. Women were highly respected in the Vedic ages. The focus on women’s education was never absent. The word ‘sahadharmini’ was known from the Vedic days. Sahadharmini means - equal partner. It is thus very clear that women in India in ancient days enjoyed respect, education and reverence.

As time passed the Indian culture was contaminated with the conservative Middle Eastern and British culture. As a result, the power and respect that women enjoyed were lost.

Gradually after independence, women started regaining the lost power. Today women are everywhere. The country saw its female Prime Minister and President, the country has many eminent female sportspeople like Saina Nehwal or P.T Usha, the country has been blessed with talented women scientists like A. Chatterjee or B Vijayalakshmi. Women are joining the combat forces in India without any hesitation. 

However, many women in India are still finding it hard to come out of the clutches of patriarchy - particularly in the rural sector. The empowered women must urge these women to raise voices, protest and seek help from the authorities.

Inequality and the Way Forward

Today, more than ever, women are enjoying freedom. They can decide on their own. However, there is a long way to go. Women must protest against the use of religion to suppress them. Not all military positions are open to females. There is a wage gap in the film industry, in sports and normal jobs. The women need to use their hard-earned power to banish all the injustices that they have been facing for time immemorial.

The term women empowerment refers to gender equality. It especially favours women rights. 

Women empowerment all refer to the empowerment of women to take all decisions from their choice. So that she can take all of the decisions for her social and economic development. Empowerment of women will surely encourage all of the women to stand for their education and the life of their own choice. The women empowerment mission encourages women to be self-reliant. So that she can have positive self-esteem and generate potential in herself to compete with the world and to make the position of her choice. This is only possible if equal opportunities in society will also be available for women. Empowering women would mean encouraging them for their socio-economic development. From ancient times women have suffered a lot in society. They were not given the equal right to education and to be self-reliant. They were only restricted to household works. They were kept away from education and development. Women constitute half of the population however her contribution to the economy of India is very low. This depicts that there are not equal opportunities available for women in society and the responsibilities which are given to them do not have any contribution to the GDP of the country.

To develop India as a superpower the development of women is equally important and it should be a priority to give her a chance to develop herself. To achieve it we should focus mainly on the education of girls. Moreover, they also get equal pay to the men for equal work.  To empower the women our goals also should be to remove child marriage and the dowry system from the whole nation. The Indian government is also working to make India more suitable for women so they can also get equal opportunities and can grow themselves. In this regard, the supreme court of India also made it mandatory to provide admission to the National defence academy for women. The Indian government also declared that Military schools also will be available for women from now onwards.  A common approach to handle this problem can be a remarkable solution for it.

FAQs on Women Empowerment Essay

1. How can we empower Women?

Boost their self-esteem: Encourage them to achieve something that they want. 

Do not spread negativity: from hundreds of years ago, women empowerment has been a challenge in society due to the negative perception of the public about women empowerment.

Support her independence: It is seen that in society women want to become self-dependent while society does not give its permission to them

 Your support may change the scenario.

2. What is Women Empowerment and what are its methods?

Women empowerment is an ideology on behalf of which we are talking about empowering women.

It can include various methods. We can achieve this goal by:

Economic Empowerment: Economic empowerment involves the empowerment of women using enough resources.

Social Empowerment: Social empowerment involves the empowerment of women providing certain freedom in society.

Political empowerment: Political empowerment involves the empowerment of women by providing them with certain reservations in politics. It will help to speak to them for themselves.

3. What are barriers to Women Empowerment? 

1) cultural norms: As many women consider women empowerment essential. Meanwhile, some of them have also considered discrimination as a cultural norm. Sometimes men also feel hesitant to speak against their culture for her.

2) Dowry:   Dowry is also one of the biggest barriers in the society of women empowerment. Dowry custom had made women a weight on the family. It is also one of the main factors of violence against women.

3) Sexual Harassment: Harassment is a big obstacle in achieving the goal of women empowerment. As it affects the women mentally and physically.

4. Why is Women Empowerment necessary in India?

In India, women constitute 48.5% of the total population of India According to the 2011 census. However, its contribution to the national GDP is very low.  The percentage of women labour in rural areas has decreased from 26% to 25%. The literacy rate of women in 2011 became 65% which was 57% in 2001. Indian govt. Is also working for it continuously. The distribution of bicycles for girls and reservations to them in various fields is making them more self-dependent.

Recently, India has also accepted girls in the defence forces.

5. Name some of the Government schemes for women empowerment in India?

The women empowerment Schemes in India are :

Beti Bachao , Beti Padhao

One-stop centre scheme

Women Helpline scheme

Working women hostel

Swadhar Greh

Nari Shakti Puraskar

Mahila Shakti kendras( MSKk)

Mahila Police Volunteers

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

Essay on Women Empowerment in English

• Updated on  
• May 3, 2024

Women empowerment is one of the most debated social topics. It means recognising the importance of gender equality, and women’s participation in decision-making and offering them equal opportunities in education, employment, others. Women empowerment talks about making women strong so that they can lead a healthy and prosperous life and contribute to the development of society. Today we will be discussing some sample essay on women empowerment, which will cover details like how can eliminate discrimination against women, challenge traditional gender roles, and promote equal opportunities for women in various aspects of life.

This Blog Includes:

What is women’s empowerment, essay on women empowerment in 300 words, most popular women in the world, need for women empowerment, how to empower women, essay on women empowerment in 150 words, useful tips to ace essay writing, essay on gender equality and women empowerment, role of education in women’s empowerment essay, women empowerment essays pdf, article on women empowerment in 100 words (bonus), article on women empowerment in 200 words (bonus).

Quick Read: Speech About Dreams

Long Essay on Women’s Empowerment

“A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Women empowerment refers to the practice of making women independent so that they can make their own decisions and take decisions without any familial or societal restrictions. In simple terms, it entitles women to take charge of their personal development. The patriarchal society has always deprived women of their rights.

The main motive of women’s empowerment is to help them stand equally with men. It is a foundational step to ensure the prosperous growth of a family as well as the country. By empowering women, the world would witness gender equality and help women from every stratum of society stand on their own and steer their lives as per their wishes.

Also Read: Essay on Yoga Day

Also Read: Speech on Yoga Day

Women empowerment is the process of giving women the ability to live a happy and respected life in society. Women are empowered when they have unrestricted access to chances in a range of domains, such as education, profession, and lifestyle, among others. It involves things like education, awareness, literacy, and training to help them improve their position. It also involves decision-making authority. A woman feels powerful when she makes a significant decision. Empowering women is the most important factor in a country’s overall growth. If a household has just one earning member, while another family has both men and women earning, who will have a better standard of living? The solution is straightforward: a household in which both men and women work. As a result, a country where men and women work together grows more quickly.

‘Feminism does not aim to make women powerful. Women are already powerful. It is about influencing the way the rest of the world views your strength.” Women have always had fewer opportunities and possibilities to develop their talents and knowledge since ancient times. Although the world is made up of both men and women. But men were regarded as the family’s most powerful members. They were the family’s decision-makers and were in charge of making a living. Women, on the other hand, were believed to be responsible person for all home chores and child-rearing, and they were not engaged in making any important family decisions. The roles were assigned depending on gender. If we look at the whole picture, research shows that women’s subjects are either centred on their reproductive role and their body, or their economic position as workers. However, none of them is aimed at empowering women. Women’s Empowerment is a progressive technique of putting power in the hands of women for them to have a happy and respectable existence in society. Women are empowered when they have access to opportunities in several sectors, such as the right to an education, gender equality, a professional (equal wage) lifestyle, and others. However, there are no constraints or limitations. It involves training, awareness, and increasing their position via education, literacy, and decision-making authority. For the total growth of each country, women’s empowerment is the most essential sector. Previously, the men were the sole breadwinners in the household. Assume the household has one earning person; on the other side, suppose the family has both male and women earning members. Who will have a better way of life? The answer is simple: a household in which both the man and the woman work. As a result, when gender equality is prioritized, a country’s growth rate accelerates. Standing up for equality, women have empowered and spoken up for other women.’

Essay on Women Empowerment in 200 Words

‘Women’s empowerment encompasses more than just ensuring that women get their basic rights. In its truest form, women’s empowerment comprises the aspects of independence, equality as well as freedom of expression. Through this, the real strive lies in ensuring that we bring gender equality.

When given the right support, women have shone brilliantly in every field. Even in India, we have seen women handle diverse roles, be it a Prime Minister, Astronaut , Entrepreneur, Banker and much more. Further, women are also considered the backbone of a family. From domestic chores to nurturing children, they handle multiple responsibilities. This is why they are great at multitasking and often many working women efficiently juggle between professional and personal responsibilities. While the urban cities have working women, the rural areas have still restrained them to household chores. How can we aspire to prosper as a nation where every girl does not get access to education or make their own choices? India is a country where we worship goddesses while we don’t bother thinking about gender equality. 

Hence, for all our mothers, sisters and daughters we must aim at creating an environment of integrity. We must boost their confidence to make them capable enough to make their decisions in every phase of life and this is how we can strive towards bringing women empowerment.’

Recommended Read: Essay on Sustainable Development: Format & Examples

Popular women can play an important role when it comes to empowering other women. These influential women are aware of the difficulties faced by women in our society and can see their problems from their perspectives, as they have experienced similar situations. Nadia Murad Basee, a German human rights activist once said, “I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.” Some other popular and influential women in the world are:

• Gloria Marie Steinem
• Malala Yousafzai
• Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Jane Seymour Fonda
• Betty Friedan
• Halima Aden

Quick Read: Speech About Life

Almost all countries, regardless of how progressive, have a history of mistreating women. To put it another way, women from all over the world have been defiant to achieve their current standing. While Western nations continue to make progress, third-world countries such as India continue to lag in terms of women’s empowerment. Women’s empowerment is more important than ever in India. India is one of the countries where women are not safe. This is due to a variety of factors.

Not only that, but horrific crimes against women such as rape, acid attacks, the dowry system, honour killings, domestic violence, and other forms of violence against women continue to occur throughout India. Women should account for 50% of the entire population. However, due to female foeticide practises, which are still prevailing in the rural and underprivileged sections of Indian societies, the girl-child population is rapidly declining, affecting the country’s sex ratio. Furthermore, the education and freedom scenario is extremely regressive in this situation.

Women are not permitted to continue their education and are married off at a young age. In certain areas, men continue to dominate women, as though it is the woman’s responsibility to labour for him indefinitely. They don’t let them go out or have any form of freedom and personal life. As a result, we can see how women’s empowerment is a pressing issue. We must equip these women with the tools they need to stand up for themselves and never be victims of injustice.

Also Read: Women’s Equality Day

Also Read: 2-Minute Speech on Holi

There is a wide range of approaches and methods to empower women. Individuals and the government must work together to achieve this. Girls’ education should be made obligatory so that they do not become illiterate and unable to support themselves.

Women, regardless of gender, must be given equal chances in all fields. Women empowerment may also be achieved through government-sponsored programmes as well as on an individual level.

On a personal level, we should begin to appreciate women and provide them with chances equal to males. We should promote and encourage them to pursue jobs, further education, and entrepreneurial endeavours, among other things.

To empower women, the government has implemented programmes such as the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Yojana, Mahila Shakti Kendra, Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana , and others. Apart from these programmes, we can all help women by eradicating societal problems such as the dowry system and child marriage. These simple actions will improve women’s status in society and help them feel more powerful.

Find Out How Falguni Nayar Made Nykaa a Beautiful Success

“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful, and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” Hillary Clinton

Writing an essay on women empowerment? Check Out Top Women Entrepreneurs !

“It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.” Madeleine Albright

Before we begin with the essay samples on Women’s Empowerment, take a look at the following tips you must keep in mind while drafting an essay: 

• Analyse the different topics carefully and pick according to your knowledge and familiarisation with the topic.  
• Plan your time wisely and bifurcate it for outlining, writing and revision. 
• Highlight/underline your key sentences for each paragraph.
• Emphasise your introduction and conclusion while also keeping the main body of the content as concise as possible. 
• Thoroughly revise it after completion.

Must Read: How to Write an Essay on Disaster Management?

“Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong, it’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.” G.D. Anderson

Women are taught to mould themselves based on others’ preferences and men are taught to lead because, at the end of the day, women have to manage household chores whereas men are the heroes saving their families and providing them financial support. This is the stereotype that has existed for centuries in India and one of the reasons women are denied basic human rights in society. A woman is denied the right to raise her opinions even in her household matters, political or financial viewpoints are far behind.  Women are born leaders and if given the opportunity can excel in every field. We live in a male-dominated society where a male has every right to do whatever he desires however thought in women’s minds is sacred. For centuries, women were not allowed to eat before men or sit in front of other men. Gender equality and women empowerment is a major concern globally. Gender equality starts with providing the same and equal resources of education to both genders. Education of girl child should also be a priority and not just an option. An educated woman will be able to build a better life for herself and the ones surrounding her. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are essential for the growth of women in society. Women empowerment ensures that every female gets an opportunity to get an education, seek professional training, and spread awareness. However, gender quality will ensure that access to resources is provided equally to both genders and ensure equal participation. Even at the professional level women face gender inequality because a male candidate is promoted way before a female candidate. The mindset should be changed and only deserving candidates should be promoted. Gender quality is a key step towards sustainable development and ensures basic human rights for everyone.

Must Read: Essay on Scientific Discoveries

“A woman with a voice is, by definition, a strong woman.” Melinda Gates

‘Education is the biggest tool in women’s empowerment and also a factor that helps in the overall development of the country. Education can bring a change in women’s life. As the first prime minister of India once said “If you educate a man you educate an individual, however, if you educate a woman you educate a whole family.

Women empowered means mother India empowered” An educated woman will promote the education of other females around her, mentor them and also be a better guide to her children. Education helps women gain self-confidence, esteem, ability to provide financial support. Education will also help to reduce the infant mortality rate because an educated woman is aware of health care, laws, and her rights.

Educating a woman will benefit her and also the development of society. With proper education, women can achieve more socially, and economically and build their careers. Women are still being denied their right to education in rural parts of India. Education will also reduce child marriage which is still practised in some parts of India also help in controlling overpopulation.

The government has launched various schemes over the years to create awareness around women’s education such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan , Operation Black-Board , Beti Padhaoo Beti Bachao , and many more. Education helps women to identify the good and bad and change their outlook, way of thinking, and way of handling things. Education helps women to become independent. Indian women have the lowest literacy rate as compared to other countries.

Education is a fundamental right of all and no one should be denied the right to education. Education helps to meet the necessities of life, and confidence to raise a voice against domestic violence or sexual harassment. Be a part of a change and empower a woman with the help of education.’

Here is an Essay on Education System

“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.” Michelle Obama

Women have been facing issues since the day they were born. Fighting for their rights, society’s stereotypes, and their freedom. Women’s Empowerment means encouraging women through education, at a professional level, accepting their opinions, and providing them with the right they desire. Women should not stay behind someone’s shadow and not be able to express themselves. The main motive of women’s empowerment is to give women a chance to outshine others and get equal rights in society. The first step of women’s empowerment is literacy. A well-educated woman is confident, outspoken, and able to make decisions. Especially in a country like India, If women get a chance to study they can be a prime minister like Indira Gandhi, IPS like Kiran Bedi , or become a famous CEO like Indira Nooyi .

The need for women’s empowerment has existed for a long time but only in the last few years, it has become popular. Women’s empowerment is not just a fight for equal rights. Women empowerment is the upliftment of women from a society constantly pulling them down. In a country like India where female goddesses are worshipped at the same time a woman faces sexual harassment, is denied the right to education, her voice is suppressed and becomes the next case of domestic violence. Indian society will only be able to evolve when they stop putting constant pressure on women and allow them to share their thoughts with others. A woman in India is restricted to household chores and taking care of family members. Women’s Empowerment is the need of the hour in India because awareness among women is important for them to understand their rights. If they are aware of their basic rights only then women will be able to fight for it. The first step towards women’s empowerment starts with supporting their opinions. Don’t mock them or bury their opinions. Boost their confidence and build their self-esteem. Encourage them to pursue their dreams, provide resources for help and be their mentor. Women have the ability not only to shape their lives but also to shape the world. Equal opportunities and the right to make their own decisions are the basics to start with women’s empowerment.

Women’s empowerment is desperately required in today’s cultures. It is critical for women’s self-esteem as well as for society. Women have the right to participate equally in education, society, the economy, and politics. Women may participate in society because they have the freedom to select their religion, language, employment, and other activities.

Women’s Empowerment is the process of providing women with all of the rights and amenities available in society so that they can live freely and without fear or limitation. Women should be granted the same rights as men in society, with no gender discrimination.

Female or women empowerment, according to Keshab Chandra Mandal, may be classified into five categories: social, educational, economic, political, and psychological.

The Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) are a collection of Principles that provide businesses with direction on how to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace, and community.

Improved female education leads to higher levels of economic growth because women spend 90%of their earnings back on their families, whereas males only invest 30-40% of their earnings. This is only one example of how women’s empowerment has a beneficial impact. Like this, there are several other benefits and positive sides of women’s empowerment

Gender Discrimination, Sexual Abuse and Harassment, Education, Child Marriage, etc.

Great social reformers in the past like  Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Acharya Vinobha Bhave and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar  etc abolished ghastly practices like sati and child marriage and worked relentlessly in the past for the upliftment of women in India.

Equal pay, financial independence etc are some examples of women empowerment.

In the Indian constitution, many provisions include women empowerment such as Article 15 which enables the state to make special provisions for women.

Related Essay Topics

This was all about an essay on women empowerment. We hope the above-listed essays will help you understand all dimensions of this important essay topic. For more information on such creative essay articles, visit our essay writing page and make sure to follow Leverage Edu .

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Women empowerment is a required demand for a better future of the country and the best picture.

Leaving already?

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Women Empowerment- Economic Political and Social- Explained Pointwise

ForumIAS announcing GS Foundation Program for UPSC CSE 2025-26 from 26th June. Click Here for more information.

8th march of each year is celebrated as International Women’s Day . This day is to celebrate women power and remind us the crucial role women play in every domain of human life. However, women have been marginalised as a community , and they have been engaged in a long-drawn battle for equal women’s rights. ‘ Women empowerment ‘ is the only way forward to improve the status of women in the society.

What is Women Empowerment? What are the different components?

Women Empowerment- Women empowerment is the promotion of women’s sense of self-worth , their ability to determine their own choices and their right to influence social change for themselves and others . It is rightly said that empowering a man leads to empowering an individual but empowering a woman empowers an entire generation.

Types of Women Empowerment

1. Economic Empowerment- Economic empowerment means having equal access to work opportunities and ensuring their participation in all kinds of markets. This will help women break down all the barriers of inequality and defy traditional roles.

2. Political Empowerment- Political empowerment means women having equal access to leadership role in the political sphere. It also gives increased strength to women’s right voices and issues in the political sphere.

3. Social Empowerment- Social empowerment aims to uplift the social status of women . Social empowerment aims to provide women equal say in the health, family decisions, marriage decisions, childbirth.

What are the advantages of Women Empowerment?

Economic Empowerment

1. When more women work, economies grow- Women’s economic empowerment increases economic diversification and income equality for shared prosperity . According to UN Women, it is estimated that closing the gender gap could give the global economy a USD 7 trillion boost .

2. Growth of businesses- Business companies greatly benefit from increasing employment and leadership opportunities for women , which is shown to increase organizational effectiveness and growth. For ex- According to estimates, Companies with three or more women in senior management functions score higher in all dimensions of organizational performance

Political Empowerment

1. Proper functioning of Democracy- Women’s political participation is a fundamental prerequisite for gender equality and genuine democracy . It facilitates women’s direct engagement in public decision-making and is a means of ensuring better accountability to women. For ex- Women led SHGs and women rights movement .

2. Gender-sensitive policies- Political empowerment leads to gender-sensitive governance reforms. It makes the elected officials more effective at promoting gender equality in public policy and ensuring their implementation. For ex- Law to protect Sexual harassment at workplace

Social Empowerment

1. Social Justice- Women’s Social empowerment is essential for achieving social justice. It helps in ending gender based discrimination , violence , and other forms of oppression . It also helps to create a more just and equitable society .

2. Sustainable Development Goals- Promotion of social empowerment of women will help in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in accordance with 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

What are the Challenges with empowerment of Women?

Economic empowerment

1. Unequal employment opportunities- Globally, the gender gap in labour force participation has been around 30% since 1990 , with men’s participation at around 80% and women’s at 50%. Women also experience ‘ motherhood penalty ‘ with reduction in employment opportunities for women having babies.

2. Employment in informal and vulnerable sectors- According to research by UN Women, nearly 60% of women’s employment globally is in the informal economy . In low income countries it is as high as 90%.

3. Lack of pay parity- Women are paid less than men. The gender wage gap is estimated to be 20% . Women face the challenges of motherhood wage penalty and unpaid care works .

1. Low Representation of Women in Legislature- The representation of women in different legislative bodies remains low across India. For ex- According to the report of Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN Women, India ranks 148 out of 193 countries in the number of elected female representatives in parliament.

2. Lack of intra party democracy- The political parties lack intra party democracy, which prevents the development of top women leaders. The patriarchal nature of politics is a major challenge to women political empowerment.

Social Empowerment Challenges

1. Gaps in Male Female Literacy Rate- Lack of good girls schools with proper toilets , female infanticide , early child marriage and dowry have led to the educational disenfranchisement of women.

2. Health care Burden- Lack of access to sanitary products , menstrual hygiene and high incidence of cervical and breast cancers have increased the health burden on women in India.

3. Social Safety Concerns- Women are threatened by various acts such as feticides , domestic violence , rape , trafficking , forced prostitution, honour killings, sexual harassment at workplace. These have led to the marginalisation of women in the social sphere.

What have the achievements of Indian Women?

1. Avani Chaturvedi – Sky Warrior

Avani Chaturvedi became the first Indian proud woman to fly solo a fighter aircraft. She flew a MiG-21 ‘Bison’, an aircraft known for its highest landing and take-off speed in the world.

2. Mithali Raj – Lady Tendulkar of Indian Women’s cricket

During India’s series against New Zealand Women – Mithali Raj became the first Indian woman who made India proud by playing in 200 ODI match.

3. Mary Kom – Ms. Knock-out

Mary Kom is the woman who made india proud by becoming World Amateur Boxing champion for a record six times, and the first woman from the country to win a medal in boxing at the Olympics.

4. Gita Gopinath – The Fiscal Scholar

An Indian-American economist, Gita Gopinath became the First Woman Chief Economist at the IMF (International Monetary Fund).

5. Arunima Sinha – The Mount Everest Girl

Arunima Sinha became the world’s first woman amputee to climb Mount Everest in 2013.

6. Usha Kiran – Youngest Female CRPF Officer

Usha Kiran became CRPF’s first woman officer to be posted in the insurgency-affected Bastar region of Chhattisgarh.

7. Tessy Thomas – Missile Woman of India

Tessy Thomas is the first woman who made india proud to head an Indian missile project. Adding to it, with the successful launch of the Agni-V missile project, she also achieved a career milestone.

What are the government initiatives?

What should be the way Forward?

1. Better Education Opportunities- Better implementation of New Education Policy to ensure the protection of girls right to education and their right to be free from discrimination within educational institutions.

2. Skilling and Micro Financing- Training women in non-traditional skills in accordance with the market demand, like machine textiles. Also, we need to focus on creating more public and private sector jobs for women.

3. Women’s Safety- There must be strict implementation of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act , 2013 to ensure safe working spaces for women. Also Panic Button , Nirbhaya Police Squad are some good steps in the direction of women’s safety.

5. Improvement in Basic Amenities at Rural Level- The improvement in the health and education standards of women in rural areas will lead to all round development of women and a productive women workforce .

5. From Women Development to Women Led Development- Women should be reimagined as architects of India’s progress and development , rather than being passive recipients of the fruits of development.

Type your email…

Search Articles

Latest articles.

• 10 PM UPSC Current Affairs Quiz 4 July, 2024
• 9 PM UPSC Current Affairs Articles 4th July, 2024
• Ethical issues and violations in medical trials in India
• UPSC Prelims Marathon 4th July – The Gandhian Era – II – 2024
• [Answered] UPSC Mains Answer Writing 3rd July 2024 I Mains Marathon
• 10 PM UPSC Current Affairs Quiz 3 July, 2024
• 9 PM UPSC Current Affairs Articles 3rd July, 2024
• Impacts of Heatwaves on India’s Core Industrial Sectors
• Importance of Sleep
• [Answered] UPSC Mains Answer Writing 2nd July 2024 I Mains Marathon

Prelims 2024 Current Affairs

• Art and Culture
• Indian Economy
• Science and Technology
• Environment  & Ecology
• International Relations
• Polity &  Nation
• Important Bills and Acts
• International Organizations
• Index, Reports and Summits
• Government Schemes and Programs
• Miscellaneous
• Species in news

All India Open Test(Simulator X)

• DOI: 10.21608/jes.2024.273015.1746
• Corpus ID: 270785089

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN IN IMPLEMENTING VARIOUS ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVITIES IN YOUTH CENTERS –A STUDY APPLIED TO SOME YOUTH CENTERS IN CAIRO GOVERNORATE

• Fatma A. Abd alazez , Mustafa I. Awad , Wael F. Abdel Basit
• Published in Journal of Environmental… 24 June 2024
• Environmental Science, Sociology, Economics

5 References

Role of youth centers in developing social responsibility, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Development co-operation

The OECD designs international standards and guidelines for development co-operation, based on best practices, and monitors their implementation by its members. It works closely with member and partner countries, and other stakeholders (such as the United Nations and other multilateral entities) to help them implement their development commitments. It also invites developing country governments to take an active part in policy dialogue.

• Development Co-operation Report
• Official development assistance (ODA)

Select a language

Key messages, charting development co-operation trends and challenges.

The OECD keeps track of key trends and challenges for development co-operation providers and offers practical guidance. It draws from the knowledge and experience of Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members and partners, as well as from independent expertise, with the ultimate goal of advancing reforms in the sector, and achieving impact. Using data, evidence, and peer learning, this work is captured in publications and online tools that are made publicly available.

Making development co-operation more effective and impactful

The OECD works with governments, civil society organisations, multilateral organisations, and others to improve the quality of development co-operation. Through peer reviews and evaluations, it periodically assesses aid programmes and co-operation policies, and offers recommendations to improve their efficiency. The OECD also brings together multiple stakeholders to share good and innovative practices and discuss progress.

Strengthening development co-operation evaluation practices and systems

The OECD helps development co-operation providers evaluate their actions both to better learn from experience and to improve transparency and accountability. Innovative approaches, such as using smart and big data, digital technology and remote sensing, help gather evidence and inform policy decisions. With in-depth analysis and guidance, the Organisation helps providers manage for results by building multi-stakeholder partnerships and adapting to changing contexts and crisis situations. 

Civil society engagement in development co-operation

National and international civil society organisations (CSOs) are key partners in monitoring development co-operation policies and programmes. Development co-operation can also be channelled to or through CSOs: 

Aid is characterized as going to CSOs when it is in the form of core contributions and contributions to programmes, with the funds programmed by the CSOs. 

Aid is characterized as going through CSOs when funds are channeled through these organisations to implement donor-initiated projects. This is also known as earmarked funding.

Development co-operation TIPs - Tools, Insights, Practices

TIPs is a searchable peer learning platform that offers insights into making policies, systems and partnerships more effective. 

Related data

Related publications.

Related policy issues

• Development co-operation evaluation and effectiveness
• Development co-operation in practice
• Development co-operation peer reviews and learning
• Innovation in development co-operation

Explainer: Sustainable Development Goal 5

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to E-mail

In 2015, recognizing the global nature of challenges  like poverty, inequality and climate change, UN Member states universally adopted the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda . Resolving to meet these matters head on, the international community set forth an ambitious vision for the future.

The Agenda encompasses three core elements: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection. Together, these interconnected principles form the basis of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide a blueprint for progress across all areas of life.

Gender is woven throughout the SDGs as it sits at the intersection of economic, social and environmental issues. It has its own Goal, SDG 5—with the ambition of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls—and is mentioned explicitly in 10 of the other Goals.

Each SDG contains specific objectives that can be measured and tracked over time. Like a global checklist, these objectives allow us to check our progress as we approach the 2030 deadline. There are nine objectives within SDG 5, which UN Women and UNDESA take annual stock of in our Gender Snapshot report .

Learn more about these nine objectives, and find out how near—or far—we are from reaching them in 2022. 

End discrimination

Gender-based discrimination has long kept women and girls subordinate to men in the workplace, in politics and at home. In some countries such discrimination persists in the law—legally barring women, for example, from certain professions—while in others economic barriers like the gender pay gap prevent women from experiencing full equality. Ending gender-based discrimination will require laws and frameworks that promote, enforce and monitor gender equality across all areas of life .

This means equal access to employment and economic benefits, including both laws against workplace discrimination and systems in place to address violations. It means laws on violence against women—legislation specifically addressing sexual harassment, for example, or criminalizing rape within marriage. It encompasses equal rights and protections within marriage and the family, such as the right to initiate a divorce or be recognized as head of household, as well as dedicated family courts to protect such rights. And it includes equality in overarching legal frameworks like constitutions, as well as the equal right to run for and hold public office.

Though there has been notable progress in this area, the pace of legal reform is far too slow. At current rates of change, the report estimates we are 21 years from universal laws banning violence against women and a whopping 286 years from gender equality in legal frameworks.

End violence

Violence against women and girls, already a pervasive problem before 2020, surged in the wake of COVID-19. Many women report feeling more unsafe since the start of the pandemic: nearly 7 in 10 women (68 per cent) say that verbal or physical abuse by a partner has become more common, and 1 in 4 women describes more frequent household conflicts.

Over the past year, nearly 1 in 10 women aged 15+ (9.9 per cent) have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by a partner; for women between the ages of 15 and 49 , that figure jumps to 12.5 per cent. On global average, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family every 11 minutes.

In total, it’s estimated that 736 million women have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime. And given limitations in data collection, the scope of the problem is likely even larger.

End harmful practices

Practices like child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) deprive women and girls of their agency, both reflecting and cementing their subordinate status. Marriage robs girls of their childhood, forcing them to take on the responsibilities of adult womanhood too early. It limits their futures, often preventing them from completing school. And it harms their health, putting them at heightened risk of adolescent pregnancy and its accompanying complications, as well as of domestic violence. Female genital mutilation, most often performed on children, also has serious health consequences in both the short and long term.

Child marriage remains a pervasive practice which COVID-19 threatens to exacerbate . As of 2021, nearly 1 in 5 women (19.5 per cent) aged 20-24 was married before turning 18—down from more than 1 in 4 (25.8 per cent) in 2001 but still alarmingly high. To end child marriage by 2030, the rate of change must increase by 17 times.

Progress on FGM, already too slow, also risks reversal in the face of the pandemic . Encouragingly, however, opposition to the practice appears to be gaining momentum. 2021 saw 4,475 communities make public commitments to its elimination—a 48 per cent increase from the year before.

Recognize and value unpaid work

From laundry to cooking to caring for children or the elderly, maintaining a household requires an exhaustive list of daily tasks and chores—labour that’s typically done free of charge by women and girls. This work, though essential to day-to-day life as well as to the global economy, remains largely unrecognized and unvalued.

Before 2020, women did roughly three times as much unpaid work as men on global average. Then came COVID-19, during which lockdowns drove a massive increase in the daily load of household chores and care work. School and preschool closures created an additional 672 billion hours of unpaid childcare in 2020—512 billion of which would have been shouldered by women, assuming the same division of household labour. Governments offered little support: 60 per cent of countries and territories did not take any action to ameliorate this strain.

Lightening the unpaid burden on women and girls will require two kinds of change. Traditional gender roles must give way to a redistribution of household labour, with men and boys taking responsibility for an equal share. At the same time, it’s on governments to provide better public services and social protections—such as expanded care systems and requirements for paid parental leave—that help to reduce the load on individuals. 

Ensure full participation in public life

Women’s equal representation in leadership matters—not only for achieving gender equality, but for making sound decisions in politics, the workplace, and every area of public life. Equal leadership ensures that diverse perspectives and voices make it to decision-making forums, a need recently underscored by COVID-19 task forces, where women’s vast underrepresentation led to crucial gaps in response and recovery plans.

This was not an aberration: women’s representation across political and economic leadership remains far from equal. At the national level, women hold just 26.4 per cent of parliamentary seats globally—and under 10 per cent of seats in 23 countries. In the economic sector, as of 2020, they hold 28.3 per cent of managerial positions, up only 0.3 per cent from 2019.

Without an increase in the rate of progress, gender parity in national parliamentary bodies won’t be reached until 2062. In the workplace things are even worse, with gender parity in management remaining 140 years away.

The outlook is better in local politics, where women hold a little over one third of seats (34.3 per cent) in local decision-making bodies. Parity here is within reach, but it will depend on the widespread implementation of gender quotas to meet the 2030 deadline.

Ensure access to sexual and reproductive health and rights

Restricting women’s bodily autonomy is a pervasive form of patriarchal control, both at the government level and within the family. Women’s empowerment depends on the protection of their sexual and reproductive health and rights, including access to health care and education and the right to make their own informed decisions about their bodies.

As of 2022, 76 per cent of laws needed to guarantee access to sexual and reproductive health care—including maternity care, abortion, contraception, sexual education, HPV vaccination, and HIV testing, counseling and treatment—are in place across 115 countries.

As of 2021, just over half (57 per cent) of the world’s women were able to make their own informed decisions about sex and reproduction. This means the freedom to make choices about health care and the use of contraceptives as well as to say no to sex with a husband or partner.  The backslide on women’s rights currently underway threatens to reduce this number further. 

Ensure equal economic resources

Control over economic resources is a crucial driver of women’s empowerment, providing increased security and independence and improving standards of living. Land ownership in particular helps to reduce women’s reliance on male partners or relatives and increases their access to credit.

Ensuring equal land rights, including equal inheritance rights and shared land rights within couples, is essential for the realization of the 2030 Agenda. But despite women’s relatively equal representation in agriculture—they make up roughly half of the agricultural labour force in developing countries—their equal right to land ownership is guaranteed in only four of 52 countries with data for 2019–2021.

Promote women’s empowerment through technology

Technology plays an ever-increasing role in the ways we learn, work and communicate, and cellphones have gone from a luxury to an essential means of connecting with the world. But for many of the world’s women, such technology—as well as the access and independence it confers—remain out of reach: based on data for 2017-2021, women are less likely than men to own a phone in 50 of 82 countries.

Sound policies and legislation

Gender equality is not going to happen on its own. We need enforceable policies and legislation at all levels of government to promote the empowerment of women and girls. Particularly in the wake of COVID-19, whose socioeconomic impacts overwhelmingly hit women harder than men, gender-sensitive policies are essential for narrowing persistent gender gaps.

This requires dedicated resources. By tracking—and making public—budget allocations toward gender equality, governments can ensure adequate financing, as well as increasing transparency and accountability. But according to data from 2018–2021, only 26 per cent of countries have comprehensive systems in place to track such allocations, and 15 per cent have no system at all.

The time to act is now

Across its nine objectives, the latest data on SDG 5 underscores just how far we are from achieving it. Despite progress on some issues, recent backslide in other areas—such as on reproductive rights and women’s economic empowerment—has put gender equality further out of reach.

Without seriously increased investments and commitments, including to gender data availability and use, SDG 5 will not be achieved by 2030 and may not be achieved at all. The time to come together as a global community and demand better—better laws and protections, better access to resources and services, and better funding—is now.

Women and girls can’t afford to wait any longer.

• 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
• Gender data gaps
• Gender discrimination
• Gender equality and inequality
• Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Unpaid work
• Gender-responsive budgeting
• Sexual and reproductive health and rights
• Economic empowerment
• Ending violence against women and girls
• Gender equality and women’s empowerment
• Innovation and technology
• Leadership and political participation

Related content

‘You have the power to change’ – Young women in South Africa break through stigma and poverty and inspire others

In the biggest electoral year in history, 113 countries have never had a woman Head of State, new UN Women data shows

‘Refugee women’s voices matter’ – Meet Grace Neima Khemis, the first woman Chairperson of her Refugee Welfare Committee