Empowerment of Women: A Comparative Analysis of Experiences from Rural Communities in Ethiopia

Abstract

Empowering women and reducing gender disparities are key challenges of 21st century. This is more pressing in rural areas of developing countries like Ethiopia. The problem is prevalent in intra-household relationships. However, most initiatives of women empowerment have been transitory and externally imposed without considering structural causes of gender inequality hence they have been less effective. We reviewed and compared rural women's empowerment under widely occurring traditional systems versus community-led initiative, specifically the case of the Awra Amba community in northwest Ethiopia. The comparison was made on the bases of key indicators including division of labor, access to information, and resources, leadership and decision-making and gender-based violence. There exist number of studies assessing gender relations in rural areas under traditional systems. The studies showed that rural women have more workload involving both household and farm activities compared to men who are tasked to mainly outside home activities. Moreover, limited accesses to information, services and control over resources, low decision-making power, lack of opportunities to self-development such as education and training are key challenges to rural women. However, the above observed gaps seem to have been relatively tackled in the case of the Awra Amba community. This community owns a unique self-organized system with the goal of addressing socio-economic problems through the principle of egalitarianism. Woman's inferior position in the community is believed to be eliminated by destroying the traditional gender roles and patriarchal gender ideology. As a result, some of the community values and principles have been replicated to other Ethiopian rural communities through own initiated exchange visits. But the actual implementation of the community-led initiative in Awara Amba is not immune to criticism. Therefore, in-depth scientific research, and upscaling of successful community-led empowerment practices should be encouraged to understand how locally organized collective actions help to realize inclusive development.