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Gender Relations And Women Empowerment

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the importance of considering gender relations for development ‘Gender relations’ refer to the hierarchical relations of power that exist between men and women which have historically tended to disadvantage women (EIGE, 2018). Emphasis is applied on the interconnectedness of the lives of men and women as well as to the imbalances of power which underpin male-female relations. Concern with these imbalances of power have led to girls and women increasingly becoming the focus of international economic development projects. Using the region of Sub-Saharan Africa, I draw attention to some of the contradictions of the ‘Girl Effect’ project – the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is essential to stimulating economic growth …show more content…

Notably, ‘empowerment’ has been conceptualised in a number of ways but for the purposes of this essay empowerment concerns participation. The Human Development Report (1995) stresses that: “Investing in women’s capabilities and empowering them to exercise their choices is not only valuable in itself but is also the surest way to contribute to economic growth and overall development” (UNDP, 1995: iii). However, whilst ‘empowerment’ discourses like the ‘Girl Effect’ may seem attractive and revolutionary, they are underpinned by a ‘western’ ontological standpoint which relies on colonial stereotypes of girls as sexually and culturally constrained. Postcolonial feminist scholars emphasise how these stereotypes have been manipulated through discourses of neoliberal development to construct girls and women as ‘good investments’ (Shain, 2013: 1; Koffman and Gill, 2013: 84; Banet-Weiser, 2015: 182). This has led to the creation of a dominant narrative which emphasises the cultural and gendered causes of poverty whilst simultaneously obscuring the structural one’s. Women and girls are unfairly “made to bear the responsibility for bootstrapping themselves out of poverty that is caused by external institutions - and often the ones that purport to save them” (Hickel, 2014: 1355). Chant (2006) has referred to this phenomenon as the “feminisation of responsibility” (Chant, 2006:

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