Women’s Empowerment as an Outcome of NGO Projects: Is the Current Approach Sustainable?

Abstract

The area of women’s empowerment has attracted increasing attention among a wide range of interest groups, from authors to researchers to feminist scholars and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This paper aims to identify the diverse understandings of women’s empowerment in the literature and to discuss empirical evidence from NGO projects in the field. A systematic literature review is employed that includes an analysis of relevant high-quality articles and research papers published in the Scopus database, as well as those produced by United Nations (UN) bodies and well-published authors. The findings highlighted four common understandings of women’s empowerment including granting women a voice, challenging existing power structures, the radical transformation of lives and livelihoods, and gender mainstreaming. The findings of these empirical studies on the role of NGOs in this field revealed understandings limited to granting women a voice and gender mainstreaming, thus reflecting the fact that limited knowledge of women’s empowerment hampers the ability of NGOs to serve women’s advancement and sustainable development. Furthermore, and given that these approaches and understandings still fall short of achieving social inclusion for women, it is recommended that these NGOs discharge their efforts toward initiating systemic change to actually sustain female empowerment in the communities in which they are active.

The role of strong ties in empowering women entrepreneurs in collectivist contexts

“…Currently, there is a strong trend to see women's entrepreneurship as a central catalyst for female empowerment via women's integration in labour markets and economy and as such enhance economic development (WEF, 2019; UN, 2018). Addressing the relationship between entrepreneurship and empowerment in our research risks promoting a similar vision of women's empowerment solely as means for development and economic empowerment as the main goal (Al Hakim et al. , 2022).…”

Modeling the Impact of Mentoring on Women’s Work-Life Balance: A Grounded Theory Approach

“…Due to the many benefits, it can have, the necessity of gender diversity in the workplace has been emphasized in the literature (Fine et al 2020, Mousa et al 2020. However, there is limited knowledge about the empowerment and development of women in organizations, which has prevented women from equal development opportunities (Al Hakim et al 2022). Especially when women have multiple, and sometimes contradictory, responsibilities in the work environment and the family environment, and creating a balance between work and life roles is very necessary.…”

“…However, men have more opportunities in organizations, and this has prevented women from learning a sort of skills (Gudjonsson et al 2022). In fact, there is limited knowledge about empowering women in organizations, which has hindered the development of women in the organization (Al Hakim et al 2022). The current study aims to investigate the role of mentoring in balancing women's work-life balance.…”

Modeling the Impact of Mentoring on Women’s Work-Life Bal-2 ance: A Grounded Theory Approach

“…Due to the many benefits, it can have, the necessity of gender diversity in the workplace has been emphasized in the literature (Fine et al 2020, Mousa et al 2020. However, there is limited knowledge about the empowerment and development of women in organizations, which has prevented women from equal development opportunities (Al Hakim et al 2022). Especially when women have multiple, and sometimes contradictory, responsibilities in the work environment and the family environment, and creating a balance between work and life roles is very necessary.…”

“…However, men have more opportunities in organizations, and this has prevented women from learning a sort of skills (Gudjonsson et al 2022). In fact, there is limited knowledge about empowering women in organizations, which has hindered the development of women in the organization (Al Hakim et al 2022). The current study aims to investigate the role of mentoring in balancing women's work-life balance.…”