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This paper aims to explore the factors for self-help groups (SHGs) women empowerment in the state of Uttar Pradesh using the primary data.

The primary data have been collected by a household survey in the four districts of Uttar Pradesh. Factor analysis is used to estimate the odd of improving women empowerment after participating in SHG.

Factor analysis extracted four factors which were economic development, improvement in family matters, decision to use public amenities and political empowerment. Also, analysis of variance and t-test was used employing SPSS. The results, therefore, show that education has a significant impact on all the aspects of SHGs people.

The findings of the study can help policymakers to adopt appropriate policies that integrate empowerment in development projects with women.

The results of this research could encourage more women to participate in SHG activities and development projects.

This research provides the most updated data from a primary survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

For the prosperity of both gender and for social justice, independence and empowerment of women is essential. Empowerment of women not only ensures her personal or household welfare but also spreads positivity throughout the community. This generation of positive externality by empowering women has actually attracted attention worldwide toward exploring the concept of women empowerment as well as analyzing their status. The present research focuses on comparative analysis of the status of women empowerment among the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries and side by side explores its relationship with the various macro-indicators related to growth and development. This study reveals that Maldives and Sri Lanka had a relatively better status of women empowerment as compared to other SAARC countries. Further, based on the panel data analysis, the authors have found that urbanization and globalization have a significant impact on women empowerment. Thus, this holistic approach of measuring women empowerment from a multidimensional perspective and detecting the influencing factors is inevitable for enhancing the status of women at the global level.

Women empowerment becomes an important policy discussion in development economics and modernization theory. The empowerment of women can lead to an increase in the quality viz-a-viz the capacity of human resources accessible for economic development. The purpose of this study is to evidence the impact of social and economic dimensions on women empowerment through financial inclusion in rural India.

To reveal the research objective, the study has utilized a primary survey of women respondents from the Gujarat state of India by a simple random sampling method and applied a logistic regression approach to identify the relationship between the need of a bank account (determinant of financial inclusion) as a dependent variable and social and economic dimensions of women empowerment such as earning status, participation in financial decision-making, recipient of social welfare schemes and perception towards the safety of saving as independent variables.

The results of this study show that earning status, participation in financial decision-making at household level and recipient of social welfare schemes by women have a significant impact on women empowerment through financial inclusion; however, safety of their savings is observed as an insignificant variable, yet the odd value is very high (2.437) in the present study.

The present study is the first of its kind to examine the social and economic status of women and its impact on their requirement of a formal bank account for the overall empowerment of women in rural India.

The importance of gender in inclusive economic growth has been a growing area of research. Finance is seen as an efficacious instrument for social inclusion, and sustainable women empowerment (SWE). The lack of credit access often constrains women to scale up. The objective of this study is to examine the attributes influencing the decision of women to access the credit at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) and the impact of this credit access on social, psychological and economic dimensions of SWE at the BoP in rural India.

The threshold theory of decision-making in the form of logistic regression (LR) is applied here to analyze the influence of four determinants, namely individual household level (IHLA), social attributes (SA), economic attributes (EA) and ownership of documents (OD) on women’s credit access. Likewise, the same method is applied to study the relationship between credit access and three dimensions of SWE.

The results have revealed a statistically significant relationship between credit access and studied four attributes. Subsequently, a positive relationship has been observed between credit access and dimensions of SWE.

The present study broadly addresses the concern of accessing credit by women at BoP level, which helps the government and policymakers to promote enabling an environment for women entrepreneurship and comprehensive financial policies for the BoP.

There is limited research examining community-based youth empowerment that addresses smoking prevention in the rural Indonesian context. This paper describes participatory action research (PAR) applied to develop a framework for empowering youth aged 17–25 years toward smoking prevention. This research conducted in the Indonesian rural community setting was divided into four stages: diagnosing, planning action, taking action and evaluating action.

PAR was chosen as the approach to developing a framework for youth empowerment in smoking prevention programs. In this study, the PAR cycle started with a prestep stage through interviews with village heads, community leaders, youth organization organizers, observations of target resources and observations of participation in youth activities as well as forming teamwork with target participants. The diagnosis stage consists of three activities, that is, focus group discussions with youth groups of male and female, youth assessment of empowerment domains through the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) with the Empowerment Assessment Rating Scale (EARS) and measuring individual and group involvement levels related to the smoking behavior prevention program by questionnaire. The EARS assessment results were presented in the action planning stage, followed by a discussion on youth empowerment plans and strategies. In the action stage, activities and programs are planned according to the planning discussion, that is: training in healthy life skills (outbound and training) and initiating youth health programs without smoking called “Remaja Berdaya Sehat Tanpa Rokok” (Empowered Youth Healthy Without Smoking) or the JayaStar Program. After these community participation activities, the evaluating action stage will assess the empowerment domain in the youth groups, conduct focus group discussions with parents, evaluate the impact of empowerment on individual and group changes with a questionnaire and facilitate self-reflection by the youth community called Madiska.

This protocol describes a doctoral research project on developing a youth empowerment framework in smoking prevention programs through PAR. The intended study will provide valuable information on the planning, implementation and evaluation of youth empowerment in the prevention of smoking behavior.

This research project is expected to contribute to the literature relating to PAR for rural settings and the use of empowerment strategies to prevent youth smoking behavior. The results can be replicated in the same settings, but the process of empowerment must still be adapted to the characteristics and local wisdom of the community.

This paper aims to assess the existing situation of psychological empowerment to employees and explore the relationship between psychological empowerment and competitive advantages in service sector of Nepal.

The study followed descriptive cum exploratory research design. Data collected through structured questionnaire based on Menon’s three-component model and Wright’s four-component model used to measure psychological employment and competitive advantages from employees of banking and hospital sector.

Psychological empowerment of employees in service sector is significantly different between public and private organizations. Even though the factors that are extracted are quite different than of Western practices, psychological empowerment has positive and significant impact on the competitive advantages.

This study is mainly based on service sector of Nepal: Banking and Hospital.

This paper is useful to academicians and practitioners seeking to develop psychological empowerment to achieve competitive advantages in their organizations and help to add values in people management areas particularly in South Asian corporations.

This is perhaps the very first investigation of its kind in the Nepalese context.

This chapter situates the South Pacific region’s engagement in progressing gender equality and women’s empowerment within broader gender and development (GAD) debates. It explores the international ‘gender agenda’ and how its associated frameworks, platforms, policies and metrics have diffused throughout the South Pacific. Limited progress in achieving gender equality and empowerment goals has been made, globally and regionally, with considerable challenges yet to be overcome. Complementing the book’s focus on the integration of gender into agricultural research and development projects, the chapter reviews rural women’s access to income and land in the South Pacific, and their contributions to agricultural production and marketing.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship of female participation in labor force with the cybersecurity maturity of nations and the enabling role of e-government development in moderating the same.

The authors have conducted fixed-effects regression using archival data for 149 countries taken from secondary sources. Furthermore, the authors have grouped the sample countries into four levels of cybersecurity maturity (unprepared, reactive, anticipatory and innovative) using clustering techniques, and studied the influence of their interest variables for individual groups.

Results show that female participation in labor force positively influences national cybersecurity maturity, and e-government development positively moderates the said relationship, thereby enabling the empowerment of women.

Encouraging broader participation of women in the labor force and prioritizing investments in e-government development are essential steps that organizations and governments may take to enhance a country’s cybersecurity maturity level.

This study empirically demonstrates the impact of the nuanced interplay between female participation in labor force and the e-government development of a nation on its cybersecurity maturity.

I begin my historical analysis of the co-evolution of reproductive norms and desires, approaches to fertility control, and the meaning assigned to contraceptives with an examination of the Grafenberg Ring, the first modern IUD. The Grafenberg ring, developed in the late 1920s by a German doctor, Ernst Gräfenberg, was a small ring made of silkworm gut and coiled silver that can be compressed to be inserted into the uterus. The Grafenberg ring appeared at a time when changes in social attitude towards sexuality had formed a favorable climate for a new contraceptive method. The device was greeted with much interest from the European birth control movement, and Gräfenberg was invited to speak at the Third Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform held in London in 1929 and at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference in Zurich in 1930 (Davis, 1971).

This study looks at how local grassroots organizations as well as international Women Non-Governmental Organizations (WNGOs) and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations utilize social media to empower women in Jamaica and Brazil. The researchers also evaluate how issues of socio-economic background as well as social media infrastructure influence the selection of entities with which the respective WNGOS connect.

This study uses NodeXL, a social media research tool, to analyze the information found on WNGO social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter. The authors also use content analysis to make sense of the data on WNGO Facebook pages. The study specifically uses summative content analysis, a method that translates the frequency of occurrence of certain symbols into summary judgments and comparisons.

Social media usage by WNGOs in Jamaica and Brazil show striking similarities regarding who gets reached or are connected to the networks. The study reveals that women of lower socio-economic backgrounds in both cases are not being reached via social media. Further, the outcomes of the observed current social media communication patterns on WNGO social media sites suggest the occurrence of what the authors refer to as the “noticeboard” effect, wherein communication patterns are top-down, exclusive, and non-reciprocal in nature.

While social media offer less centralized ways of engaging in communication with local communities, inherent in social media infrastructure are issues of race, gender, and social class that affect how these communication platforms are used, potentially another dimension of the “Mathew Effect” in the context of social media usage for purposes of achieving national development objectives.

With the rise in internet penetration in both countries, WNGOs are increasingly incorporating social media into their communication strategies to accomplish development goals. This study is the first to compare both countries in this respect and so adds new insights to this area of the communication field.