SOCIAL MOBILIZATION AND ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN

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SOCIAL MOBILIZATION AND ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN
A STUDY IN SELECTED AREAS OF AJK (Page 4)

Written by Abid Ghafoor Chaudhry

Social change is an evolutionary process. People learn new ways of thinking and changed modes of behaviour when similar change takes place at a wide scale in society. Women contribute equally in the socio-economic development of a country but due to operating forces in the environment, their role remains limited. As explained earlier, in Pakistan at least the following forces have been operative to restrict the functioning of female section of population:

1. Social conservatism: it prohibits economic dependence upon women and thus to look inferior in the eyes of the community.

Social Conservatism also disallows mixing up of female with males in any form, which is a pre-requisite for women's participation in economic activities.

2. Security: Parents and other male members have doubts about the security of girl while sending them to school or for any training programme to make them productive members of society. Women themselves have reservations about their personal security while going on duty especially in rural areas.

3. Religion: It is a spiritual force to rectify all ills to society. By enforcing segregation and seclusion laws, it wants to establish a peaceful and prosperous society. But segregation and seclusion in no way are synonymous to ignorance and inaction.

Seeing the gravity of the issue, it is a "felt-need" that women who are almost one half of the population may be brought in development mainstream, so that women should also play their active role in national development. In this regard, a compaign of social mobilization may be successful in mobilizing the opinion of population, especially male section.

Chen (1995) discusses that if women could obtain a job for wages outside the home, or otherwise earn an independent income, they would be able to exercise control over the income they earned and thus to exercise increased bargaining power within their homes. This, in turn, would lead to improvements in their own and their family, well being, She also comments on the projects that aim at bringing economic empowerment to women. She also comments on the projects that aim at bringing economic empowerment to women. She says low income women in both the developing and the developed world want and need change. They need help to close the gap between North and South, between rich and poor, between different races, between men and women, and (most importantly for the future) between girls and boys. They and fighting for change at many levels: within their families and communities, within government and public services; within national political arenas; and so the global stage. There are three prerequisites to effective change; firstly that grassroots women themselves should be involved in defining and determining both the pace and the direction of change; secondly, that grassroots women should be organized to negotiate and demand change; and, thirdly, that it is difficult for grassroots, women to organize around the longer term issue that frame their lives and inevitably those of their daughters and sons, unless their day to day requirement for economic livelihoods are first addressed.