Role of NGOs in Women Empowerment

Participation of women in NGOs gave them an opportunity to foray into the social and political spheres which were not easily granted by the for-profit and public sectors. Many NGOs that work to alleviate poverty among women also focuses on advocating the women’s rights. These have brought important changes in the lives of women. NGOs play a major role in enforcing rights provided by legislation in India.

Promotion of self-employment

NGOs also play a significant and meaningful role towards promoting self-employment of women by the following ways:

Training & Skill Development

NGOs train poor women and provide them opportunities of self-employment to improve their social and economic status. They also cultivate he habit of thrift and credit among the poor women to improve their quality of life.

Legal Awareness and Property Rights

NGOs are working with women to generate awareness regarding their legal rights. They also provide loan facilities to buy land in groups.

Fair Trade

Fair trade is a relative term and is about giving poor people power. NGOs help to cut down on the middlemen and ensure producers get a fair price for their work. They act as facilitators in this process.

Credit / Micro Credit / Self-help groups

Provision of credit paves way for social justice and empowerment. NGOs target and help women by providing credits as they have a history of being better re-payers of loan.

Capacity building

Keeping in view of the present state of economic liberalization, NGOs are also involved in equipping self-employed women with information, knowledge, technology, training and managerial techniques.

NGOs and Women Empowerment

Women Self Help Groups (SHGs) have been recognized as an effective strategy for the empowerment of women in rural as well as urban areas as they bring together women from all walks of life to fight for their cause. SHGs work on a variety of issues like health, nutrition, agriculture, forestry, income generation activities, seeking micro credit and so on.

Since the overall empowerment of women is vitally dependent on economic empowerment, NGOs are involved in the following activities to empower women:

• Educating and creating awareness among women especially the rural women;
• Supplements efforts of government in women empowerment;
• Promotes the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for empowering women;
• Instils leadership qualities among women and ensures their participation in their empowerment.
• Represents the problems faced by rural women to the concerned authorities and carries out impact assessment of the policy decisions affecting women.
• Mobilizes optimum resources and plans and implements the projects that have bearing upon women empowerment.

Issues and Way Forward

Despite efforts of NGOs in the area of women empowerment the ground reality is still not encouraging as many women are not yet empowered and do not have any power or freedom to take decisions spend their own money in the way they wanted. Still lot more needs to be done on this front. In this respect, government’s contribution has to be significant. NGOs can only supplement the government’s efforts. Government must focus more on providing education and empower underdeveloped and vulnerable women especially in rural areas.

Furthermore, those involved in social work and in volunteering should be given publicly available resources like training programmes and mentoring services to support the establishment of NGOs. Establishment of more NGOs will help in effectively fight against the issues faced by women.

Overall, NGOs seem to have significant role in bringing drastic changes in the life style of women. They are quite successful in making women to become independent and self motivated and take their own decisions in matters concerning them. They have also contributed in increasing the literacy level and health of women.

In order to make gender equality a reality, NGOs should continue their work in furthering women’s cause in all walks of life like social, educational, economic, household etc. Unless meaningful changes are achieved in these fronts, holistic women empowerment will continue to remain elusive. NGOs have the necessary capacity to be the vehicle of change in these fronts.