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Abstract
This paper advances a new approach to conceptualise, define and systematically measure women's empowerment. A review of literature identified that empowerment is multidimensional, and that women empowered in one dimension are not necessarily empowered in the other. It was also established that women need both resources and a sense of agency to independently achieve their livelihood outcomes. Therefore, it was concluded that both agency and resources are the best indicators of women's level of empowerment. In view of the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment, this study proposed the use of principal component analysis (PCA) on women's level of agency and resources to generate factor scores (i.e., indicators of each woman's level of empowerment) at each dimension of empowerment (i.e., indicated by each PC) as the better approach to quantitatively measure women's empowerment. Data to test this approach was taken from rural women in Msinga Local Municipality of South Africa. Application of PCA, showed the dominant dimensions in which women in the study area were empowered while the PC factor loadings quantitatively measured the level of empowerment along each dimension. It was concluded that women's empowerment is best conceptualised as increases in women's capabilities and hence, application of PCA to the indicators of women's indicators of resources and agency is the most suitable approach to capture their empowerment levels across different dimensions.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the Water Research Commission (South Africa) for initiating, managing and funding this paper which was part of their project (K5/2176) entitled, “Empowerment of women in rural areas through water use security and agricultural skills training for gender equity and poverty reduction in KwaZulu-Natal and North West Province”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
About the Authors
Dr Stanley Sharaunga holds an MSc in Agribusiness and a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has also published a number of papers targeting issues ranging from profitability of agricultural enterprises to developmental issues such as disincentive effects of food aid, food security, women empowerment, poverty alleviation, self-reliance, improvement of water-use security, agricultural intensification vs diversification, community-management of common pool resources and ways reducing household vulnerability. He has worked as a research fellow at WaterNet focussing on ways to improve water-use security levels among smallholder irrigating farmers in KwaZulu-Natal Province and he is currently working as a District Agribusiness Development Officer for the uMhkhanyakude District in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Dr Maxwell Mudhara holds a PhD degree in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. He lectures at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa. Dr Mudhara is the director of the Farmer Support Group (FSG), a community development, outreach and research centre at UKZN. His experience is in small-scale farming, research and extension, participatory approaches, and economics of smallholder farming systems and project impact assessment and food security analysis. He has been a leader in many teams involved in project formulation, monitoring and evaluation. Dr Mudhara has published many peer-reviewed papers in international journals and book chapters. In 2016, he co-authored a book titled “Community innovations in Sustainable land management: Lessons from the field in Africa”.
Ayalneh Bogale is Adviser in Climate Change and Agriculture for the Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union Commission (AUC) seconded by GIZ and honorary Associate Professor at UKZN. Before joining the AUC, he worked as Associate Professor of Food Security and Director of the African Centre for Food Security (ACFS) at the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. He has a wide range of experience in academics, research and policy advice. He had received various research and fellowship awards including Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and Agriculture for Peace Research Fellowship from the International Foundation for Science and the Institute for Advanced Studies of the United Nations University. He has published more than 40 refereed articles in international journals. His professional/research interests are economics of resource degradation, poverty and food security, climate change, property rights, and adoption of technologies. Prof. Bogale holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Humboldt University of Berlin and BSc and MSc in Agricultural Economics from Haramaya University, Ethiopia.