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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/03
Managing Assets, Empowering Humans
Zohra Andi Baso
December 2000
Abstract
Concept of empowerment
Empowerment of women is a systematic endeavor to ensure the target prosperity of women, a prosperity that is measured not merely in its material aspects but also in its organizational aspects, particularly at the grassroots level. Here, empowerment focuses on women's groups that create the capacity to work efficiently to maintain social habitation, culture, and environment, and also to protect rights.
Experience gained in empowering women's group, particularly at the grassroots level, has illuminated two characteristics of the nature and interaction of women's groups. First, grassroots groups are characterized by an egalitarian approach that is expressed by close interactions and mutual aid among individual and families. Second, grassroots communities always keep their determination to expand knowledge for their own group. Individual knowledge in a group is easily transformed into communal knowledge.
At the grassroots level, there is little competition. Economical resources are shared, unlike the status competition seen in the middle or upper classes. In fact, assets are a means of maintaining the group together. Social scientists frequently contend that welfare building at the grassroots level is responsible intergenerational welfare.
In conducting an empowerment program, the South Sulawesi Consumer Organization (YLK Sulsel) applied three main principles. First, programs should be conducted in a sustainable manner. Second, programs should be managed on "equality" principles. Third, programs should provide a real impact to empower groups.
YLK Sulsel has carried out program advocacy for consumer protection, women rights, HIV/AIDS campaigns, gender and reproductive health, organic farming, political education for women, etc. Some of the programs were funded by donors and others were self-funded.
