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The majority of poor women in Africa live in rural areas, and investigating their empowerment status and factors influencing their empowerment is therefore a tool for overcoming poverty. This paper investigated the dimensions and determinants of women's empowerment in rural Nigeria.

This study used data from the 2013 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS). Information on women's agencies, resource, income, leadership and time/workload was used to construct women empowerment index (WEI). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logit regression model.

Most of the decisions were made by the women's spouses, while decisions on how to spend her earnings were jointly made with her spouse. A majority of the women did not justify beating nor owned businesses. A larger percentage of rural women were disempowered than men; agency had the highest relative contribution to women's disempowerment; and women in the northern zones of Nigeria were less empowered than their southern counterparts. Husband's education and her age were inversely related to women's empowerments while her education, household size and being the household head were directly related to it.

There is a dearth of empirical studies on multidimensional women's empowerment in rural Nigeria. This study therefore provides a clear understanding of drivers of women's empowerment in rural Nigeria, and its findings are to serve as guiding documents for policymakers in designing gender-responsive interventions programs and implementation of a genuine gender mainstreaming in rural development policy in Nigeria. Further, the findings would contribute to the growing body of knowledge, especially empirical studies, on women's empowerment in Nigeria and the developing world.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-07-2019-0455

This study aims to investigate the connection between digital literacy and women’s empowerment in the rural Himachal Pradesh. It explores how improved digital skills contribute to increased empowerment among women with a specific focus on the role of education in enhancing digital literacy.

This study included 250 rural participants who completed structured questionnaires. Analytical tools, including independent-sample t-tests and partial least squares structural equation modeling, were applied to the data to gain insights into the relationship between digital literacy and women’s empowerment.

This study revealed a significant positive link between digital literacy and women’s empowerment in the rural Himachal Pradesh context. Education has emerged as a key factor that influences women’s digital skills and empowerment levels.

This research adds novelty by examining the digital literacy–women’s empowerment nexus in rural Himachal Pradesh and emphasizing the impact of education. The combination of statistical methods offers a robust approach to understanding this relationship and underscores the importance of digital inclusion and education for gender equality and women’s progress.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of Islamic microfinance services (IMFS) on women’s empowerment in rural Bangladesh.

The study is based on a multi-stage sampling technique. The primary data are collected through a face-to-face survey of 389 women respondents who have received IMFS from the Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited. Cronbach’s alpha test is conducted to test the reliability and internal consistency of collected data. Paired-sample tests, logit regression and proportion hypothesis tests are conducted to measure the impact of IMFS on women’s empowerment. Descriptive and inferential statistics are used to interpret the data.

The study reveals that IMFS have led to structural transformation in the occupation dynamics of the respondents’ families from agriculture to retail businesses. IMFS have had a significant positive impact on household income, savings and expenditure; have improved standard of living and human capital formation; and have enhanced all three dimensions of empowerment, namely, economic empowerment (ECEM), socio-cultural empowerment (SCEM) and familial empowerment (FLEM). Of them, ECEM and SCEM have positively contributed toward overall women’s empowerment, while FLEM has a negative but insignificant impact on overall empowerment. The respondents’ perception also supports the finding that IMFS have benefited rural women and empowered them.

The study is based on primary data. It leads to an inquiry as to whether women are dominant in familial affairs. If so, it may reduce the state of happiness and overall women’s empowerment. There is a clear gap in the existing literature about this inquiry.

This study aims to assess the impact of participation in self-help group (SHG) on the psychological empowerment of rural tribal women.

Primary data was collected using multistage random sampling from the rural women of Jharkhand, India. The propensity score matching method was adopted using the psmatch2 command in STATA.

The results show a significant positive change in women’s self-esteem, self-confidence, self-efficacy, autonomy, knowledge and skills, reduction in agony and quality of life after participation in SHG. This reveals that participation in SHG has a significant positive impact on the psychological empowerment of rural tribal women.

Despite the numerous studies on rural women’s empowerment, there is little evidence of literature focusing on the impact of participation in SHG on psychological empowerment, specifically in the tribal context. This study primarily focuses on women belonging to the scheduled tribe category of Jharkhand, one of the poorest states of India.

We explore how NGO’s local entrepreneurial initiatives to empower women entrepreneurs can compensate for weak state policies for women in a context of male-dominated socio-cultural norms.

We use the case of a local entrepreneurial initiative launched in the Atlas region of Morocco, the Empowering Women in the Atlas Initiative (EWA). We collected data through 51 semi-structured interviews of women entrepreneurs in three cooperatives which exploit the natural resources of their region to establish a social venture. Our data are longitudinal as they were collected at two time periods: before and after the initiative.

The findings of this study suggest that local entrepreneurial initiatives can have a significant impact on rural women entrepreneurs’ empowerment. The improved perception of empowerment has not only helped them develop capacities to leverage the business opportunities linked to the natural resources of their region, but it has also increased their status and role within their family and community.

We make recommendations for policymakers to encourage this type of initiative to compensate for the absence of supporting policies geared toward women.

Our study is one of the first to look at empowerment as a policy instrument to develop women entrepreneurial activities in rural areas of developing countries. Our paper uses a unique hierarchical perspective and a multidimensional framework for analyzing social cooperative ventures and rural women entrepreneurs’ empowerment. Our paper unravels interesting insights for women entrepreneurs’ narration strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of self-help groups (SHGs) in providing an environment for the empowerment of Indian rural women. The authors argue that the SHG empowerment strategy paves the way for the process of development of bottom-up empowerment of women. The authors argue that SHG is a systematic strategy and is not solely based on credit, but also incorporates many other dimensions necessarily required for developing an empowerment process.

A qualitative study was the choice of design due to the inherent inability of the structured surveys to understand women empowerment (Mayoux, 1998), as this study was basically interested in the women’s perception of their own empowerment. To explore their experience, a series of semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were conducted.

The authors stand by the application of SHG empowerment strategy in India and go against the rhetoric statements that “top to bottom” approach does not lead to a significant bottom-up empowerment.

The survey was conducted by the authors in the vicinity of rural Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. Moreover, during the survey, it was found out that participation in SHG facilitates women to know the current state of disempowerment and provides them strength, capacity to come out from the status of drudgery, poverty and seclusion.

The starting premise of this study is that women's empowerment is the goal for self-realization and that the support that comes from local tourism stakeholders represents an adequate base. In many rural areas, women have established self-help groups (SHGs), which facilitate the interaction with a wide range of stakeholders. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effects of SHGs on female entrepreneurship and self-employment in tourism.

To examine the research question, this study adopted a quantitative research that included a sample of 513 women in a less-advanced rural area in Serbia. For the data analysis, the generalized linear regression model (GLM) was used.

According to the results, self-employment is the leading goal of women's empowerment.

The main limitation in the research and the authors’ suggestion for future research is to increase the sample size of female respondents, so examination of their attitudes and role in the travel business in their local settings might reach higher significance. The second issue that the authors would like to point out is a highly local character of our study, so the future research should involve other rural areas in the country and from abroad (e.g. similar undeveloped countryside with noticeable, active women's role in local entrepreneurship).

The most important practical implications of this paper are twofold: (1) the results of the research have shown that the tourist potential of rural areas can be enhanced through local tourism stakeholders' support; (2) women without professional interest or jobs in rural areas, especially in the areas where the population is traditionally dominated by men (husband/brother/father), have a chance to earn and to be economically more independent. This research can affect future studies to investigate other aspects of empowerment depending on the difference of regions, from one side, and also alternative opportunities for tourism and local development in less-advanced rural areas, from another side.

The study analyzes the tourism potential of the rural areas (which are less advanced and mostly very poor in developing countries, such as Serbia). In this case, there are opportunities to increase employment, social inclusion of women, development of new tourism strategies, implementation of destination marketing, etc. Moreover, it contributes to future research in the field of stakeholders in tourism strategies.

The learning outcomes are as follows: educate the students about the challenges in the development sector in general and in work of organizations working for women empowerment in particular; understand the overall concept of women empowerment vis-à-vis social entrepreneurship; explain the importance of technology in entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and development sector especially in marginalized communities in developing countries; and learn operational-level resource management in a resource-constrained setting of a non-profit sector.

Kaarvan Crafts Foundation (referred to as Kaarvan henceforth) worked for women empowerment in Pakistan with a focus on creating economic opportunities for rural women entrepreneurs. The case shares different initiatives by Kaarvan for creating opportunities for economic empowerment of rural women entrepreneurs. The main focus of the case is a program “Digitize to Equalize” in which Kaarvan offered digital literacy training to rural women entrepreneurs. The program involved developing an ecommerce platform where rural women entrepreneurs could sell their handicrafts and other products. A comprehensive training activity was designed as part of the program to facilitate trainees to sell their products on a purpose-built website. The training covered different activities ranging from using smartphones, basic product photography to order handling. Even in the initial phase, the challenges were somewhat unexpected for the team as they grappled with diversity of learning among the trainees. Few trainee women were able to learn the skills quickly and requested their trainers from Kaarvan to train them on widely popular skills of social media marketing. At the same time, other trainees were struggling with basic skills and needed more time to get basics right. Because the program had limited resources, Kaarvan’s management found themselves in a fix. The mission-oriented organization wanted to ensure the best possible opportunities for the trainees but the resources did not permit to create separate cohorts for different training areas.

In terms of complexity, this case study is suited for business students enrolled in senior undergraduate, graduate programs and executive MBA programs.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management Science.

This study aims to find whether the micro-enterprises lead to women empowerment and entrepreneurship and make them to be wholly involved in income-generating activities by having them choose a business venture of their own.

Women empowerment is very important for the acceleration of economic growth. The economic empowerment of women is being regarded these days as a sine qua non of progress for a country; hence, the issue of economic empowerment of women is of paramount importance to political thinkers, social scientists and reformers. The self-help groups (SHGs) have paved the way for economic independence of rural women. The members of SHGs are involved in micro-entrepreneurships. Empowerment is intellectual capital. Capital is a life blood of any industry.

Without women development, economic development will not take place. Women should be imparted technical knowledge, skill training and marketing techniques in the process of establishing an enterprise by them for more sustainability.

Micro-enterprises add values to a country’s economy by creating jobs, enhancing income, strengthening purchasing power, lowering costs and adding business convenience.

This paper assesses the impact of this program on the rural women's employment opportunities using data from the 2015 round of the household's living standard survey (HLSS) of Côte d'Ivoire.

In 2013, in order to improve the living conditions of the rural population, the Ivorian government launched the National Program for rural electrification (PRONER) to electrify all localities with more than 500 inhabitants.

The results show that PRONER, while reducing the time allocated to performing household chores, increases women's employment through the reallocation of time to full-time paid work in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. The authors also find that the allocation of men's time is not affected by this programme. A possible mechanism that would explain such a pro-women effect is the labour-saving technology introduced to home production as an effect of the reform.

As a limitation, it is important to note that these results were obtained in the specific context of PRONER in Côte d’Ivoire and are not necessarily applicable to rural electrification programmes in other contexts. Furthermore, the choice of other indicators to measure women's empowerment is limited by the quality of the data available. It would be interesting for future research to extend this analysis to include other aspects of women's empowerment and household welfare.

This paper is the first to the author’s knowledge to apply a robust econometric method by combining an inverse probability weighted regression adjustment model with Heckman sample selection method to access a robust causal effect of the PRONER in Côte d'Ivoire.