Editorials

by Rajen Kumar

No Escaping Social Media

Running a magazine concentrating on issues of small and medium enterprises and managing with limited resources is a like living life on the edge. In this rush of meeting deadlines,...

Special Reports

Apr 2012

EMRC, Brussels Associates with SME WORLD as its New Media Partner

EMRC has promoted business partnerships with the developing world and has organised dozens of business forums in key decision-making cities, such as Amsterdam, Rome,...

Focus

Women Empowerment through SMEs

Oct 2009

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Women play a significant role in every country economies, and are highly represented in the micro and small enterprises sub-sector. The concept of promoting women's economic and political empowerment has gained greater attention over the last three decades.

]The articles examines the gender differentiated growth patterns and constraints to growth of women's and men's small scale enterprises. It also emphasizes the need to look at promoting women's economic empowerment from a multi-sectoral perspective and the need to integrate various economic, social and cultural elements in developing projects that seek to develop MSEs.

Gender and Poverty

Although there is an overall agreement on the notion that men and women experience poverty differently, linking gender and poverty is a complex matter that has increasingly become the focus of analysis. The growing literature on poverty has helped to broaden the definition of poverty and generated greater recognition on the multi-dimensionality of poverty. It called for better understanding of poverty not only in terms of income and expenditure, but in the broader sense of human poverty - a state of deprivation in capabilities (education, health, nutrition, etc) (Cagatay, 1998).

Experts (Klassen, 2005, Cagatay 1998, Quisumbing et al, 1995 and others) argue that the Household income/expenditure based measures, while they are important and provide comparative analysis of incidences of poverty between male headed and female headed households, they do not show the level of poverty experienced by women and men within the households. The gender dimension of poverty emerge more clearly through approaches of social indictors and those that capture the intra-household processes underlying resource allocation (DAI, 2005). The challenge of measurements methodology aside, there is ample empirical evidence that women are poorer in most societies.

There are fundamental gender inequalities in access to and control over productive assets such as land, labor and credits, earned income as well as gender biases in the labor market that form the ground for women's enhanced vulnerability to poverty.

Gender Inequalities

Women's high illiteracy rate, lack of decision making power over their fertility and early marriage of girls limit their chances of coming out of poverty. In addition, due to the disproportionate gender division of labor in the household and their increased responsibilities for domestic and productive work, women tend to be more time poor. Is gender equality good for economic growth? Although some argue that economic growth can lead to greater equality, there is sufficient analytical work that suggests that gender equality can contribute to poverty reduction and economic growth. Klasen (1999) pointed out that gender inequalities in education have direct impact on growth, and through distorting incentives and indirect impact on investment and population growth.

Gender is defined as socially constructed roles, relationships and learned behaviors of male or female. Men and women play different roles at home and in society. Based on the gendered social and cultural norms define the relationships between men and women; determine the rights, resources and decision-making power they have. Like race, ethnicity, and class, gender is a social category that determine one's life options, participation in the economy and the society. Studies have shown that in most societies, gender based norms and practices favor boys and men over women and girls in granting access to resources, opportunities, rights, voices, decision-making power at home and in the public spheres.

Women's empowerment is another term that needs clarification. Women's economic and political empowerment was adopted as one of the strategies for advancing the agenda of gender equality at the IV UN Conference on Women in 1995. The term empowerment has different meanings depending on the socio-economic, political and cultural context in which it is presented. Overall empowerment can be perceived as a process or as outcome/goal and can take place at different levels (individual and community).

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