Voices of empowerment: women from the Global South re/negotiating empowerment and the global sports mentoring programme

Abstract

The topic of women's empowerment in the Global South not only dominates gender and development programming but continues to be at the forefront of political concerns about the status and position of women across the ‘developing world’. Increasingly, it is being championed as an essential ‘developmental goal’ of northern-led sport for development and peace and sport, gender and development initiatives. Using the US Department of State supported ‘Global Sports Mentoring Program’ (GSMP) as a case study, this paper centralizes the perceptions and experiences of empowerment, agency and voice as expressed by 27 women from 22 countries across the Global South before and during their participation in the 2012 and 2013 programmes. Findings illustrate the multiple ways in which women fought for, negotiated and asserted power within their lives, and the degree to which their pre-GSMP thoughts on female empowerment were broadened, challenged and positively or negatively impacted.

Acknowledgements

The authors of this manuscript would like to thank the US Department of State and espnW for providing the Center for Sport, Peace, and Society an opportunity to help shape the Empowering Women and Girls through Sports Initiative and more specifically, the Global Sports Mentoring Program (GSMP) and the women of the GSMP whose voices and insight are crucial to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. ELs [0] were selected through a nomination process initiated and led by the US DoS and respective US embassies, with CSPS educators conducting selection interviews. We fully understand the ‘inevitable tensions’ of working in partnership with state and corporate funders (Hayhurst and Frisby 2010), and the potential bias in sample recruitment through the process of official nomination. However, addressing these concerns is beyond the remit of this paper. Suffice to say, our commitment at CSPS has been and remains centred on privileging, not romanticizing, the voices of women from the GS who were actively involved with the 2012 and 2013 GSMP experience.

^2. The pervasive absence of accomplished women in representations of women from the GS stems in part from crude Eurocentric assumptions that condition ‘Us’ to believe that such females do not exist within the peripheries of the GS. It also evolves from the prevalence of neoliberalist economies that teach ‘Us’ to naively accept that when women succumb to a ‘girl power’ discourse in which they obtain all the things they are seen to be lacking (e.g. education, work), they have ‘saved’ themselves from their ‘Third-World’ status and become ‘empowered’.

^3. While it is beyond the remit of this paper to address it in full, it is important to recognize that significant parts of the African continent, Asia and South America were historically part of the colonial project in which the drive for capitalism and modernity enabled external colonizing powers from the GN to re/present lack of western knowledge among the ‘Other’ as ignorance. Indeed much of the GS continues to remain under the monopolizing influence of a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ and ‘forward thinking’ West, especially in terms of dictating the basis for gender-focused reform, and the development and empowerment of women. Under this premise, it is possible that the comments made by ELs here reflect not only something which they genuinely believe but also something which they have been taught to believe as a consequence of being exposed to and immersed in social, cultural, political, economic and educational systems influenced by GN-led gender-focused reform agendas.

Additional information

Funding

US Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs [grant number S-ECAPE-12-CA-0103].