Afghan Women Empowerment

Economically empowering Afghan women to lead and bring about change

Women make up 50 percent of the global population, 40 percent of the global workforce, and yet only own about 1 percent of the world’s wealth. Sixty-five percent of the world’s poor and two thirds of the world’s illiterate are women. While there has been a great deal of progress in the fight against poverty, particularly since the adoption of the U.S. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2001, women remain disproportionately represented among the world’s poorest nations, and the gender gap continues to persist in economic, social, and political spheres.

When it comes to Afghan Women it is even worse. Currently Afghanistan and particularly Afghan women are at the lowest

categories of global poverty indices with a Human Development Index (HDI) value of 0.346 and a Gender Development Index (GDI) value index of 0.300. This ranks Afghanistan as the fourth and third lowest in terms of standards of living and gender disparity.

In this article, we are highlighting the economic empowerment of Afghan women by providing an overview of the current situation of women in work force and women as entrepreneurs and some affirmative steps to ease their contribution in the economy and then, we will have a look at a number of constraints women face from cultural barriers to social norms; from limited financial access to the scarcity of property ownership; from lack of skills and capacity to lower productivity, and so forth.

Importance of women economic empowerment:

From the financial perspective, for a woman, having economic power not only impacts her decision-making, mobility and lowers their financial dependency but is also a very good source of supporting their families.

Enabling them experience the outside world with paid employment can help raise women’s awareness. It also causes them to be respected, valued and take some responsibility in the family. Beyond that, having independent identity in the society as an active human being is counted as a very important factor to having psychological security.

The poverty in post conflict countries places women in poverty trap, which in turn causes poor health, violence, illiteracy, discrimination and low living standards. Afghanistan being one of the post conflict-countries is not an exception and, compared to men, women suffer more from the above-mentioned problems. A measure of disparity in women and men‘s economic status in Afghanistan is provided through the comparison of the female-male Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculated based on the Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted per capita GDP. This was estimated at $402 for Afghan women and at $1,182 for men. Men are approximately 3 times economically in better position compared to

women.