Women empowerment: An overview

Empowerment denotes a process of acquiring, providing, bestowing the resources and the means or enabling the access to and control over such means and resources. Empowerment could be a self propelled and self-propelling process. If by some gift of God, it dawns on a woman that her life could become better if she tried to act upon such thoughts, link up with the source of resources, then she is facilitating her own empowerment. Empowerment enables the person to gain insight and have awareness of what is undesirable and unfavorable about her current situation, perceive a better situation, the possibilities of attaining it and realizing what is within her reach and what she could do to get to a better situation. There should be a better and fuller understanding of the problems peculiar to woman, to make a solution of those problems possible. As these problems centre round the basic problem of inequality, steps should be taken to promote equality of treatment and full integration of woman in the total development effort of the country.