Achieving Women Empowerment Through ICT: Case of a Government Initiative in India

Introduction

Women empowerment is elemental to development- it is one standalone objective which assists the realization of various vital objectives of growth and development. The significance of women empowerment and gender equality has been recognized across the world. One of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Agenda 2030 laid down by United Nations has been women empowerment which proves its significance in the process of sustainable transformation (UN, 2015). Often, a set of terms such as choice, control and power are used to define empowerment. These terms usually relate to the women’s ability to make decisions and affect the outcomes of activities that concerns them and their families. Hence, women empowerment has been linked with women’s ability to have influence over external actions that concern their wellbeing and welfare (Batliwala, 1994; Sen,1993). Further, “self-agency “is an important aspect of women empowerment, whereby women should be the agent of change for herself. Simply put, women should be able to define herself and take appropriate decisions. She should consider herself able and entitled to make choices and decisions. Empowerment, thus, implies control and ability to have choices. It includes freedom, aims at increasing potential and focuses on capacity building. According to World Bank (2012), empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.

In addition, women empowerment should be seen, discussed and measured with the understanding of socio-cultural, political and economic context with in which it is shaped. It is important to note that, many a time gender inequality at different levels, in different social contexts is typically experienced as “natural” and “normal”. For example, in a patriarchal set up, women internalize their subordinate status and consider themselves as individuals of lesser value. Due to such internalization their sense and entitlement towards their rights and choices gets diminished. These socio-cultural contexts are important while understanding gender inequality and nuances of women empowerment. Primarily, women can be empowered on economic, psychological, interpersonal, legal, political and socio-cultural dimensions (please see appendix 1). However, it is interesting to note that women empowerment on these dimensions vary in the scope and includes different levels of aggregation. For example, the economic empowerment of women may vary from the household level to the macro level with women’s control over her income to women’s participation in economic policy formulation of the country. While having women empowered at the top positions with more power to impact larger group looks paramount, the household empowerment is equally critical due to its cumulative value, ie. women empowered in each household will eventually result in an empowered society/ nation. Research evidence that empowerment on any one dimension does not guarantee women empowerment in the real sense. For example, having a job at hand ensures economic empowerment of women, however in many cases women are denied control over the money earned by them. Furthermore, it has also been observed that in conservative societies, women with paid income are viewed as less submissive and hence husbands/families may resort to violence to restrict women from being economically independent (Mason, 2005).