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Title: Assessment of Some Factors Associated With Empowerment and Development Gap of Women in Three East African Countries
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: An assessment of factors that explain more about women empowerment and measure the development gap between them in three East African countries namely Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda is presented using IPUMS 2002/2003 database. The data on responses from these surveys provided a set of representative population based estimates of social indicators by 2002/2003. The value of Kaiser Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett's test of sampling adequacy for these countries indicated factor analysis to be of good fit. Using Principal Component method, communalities which had extractions values greater than 0.5 were obtained indicating that the components represented significant variables. Factors formed with their corresponding variables and the total cumulative percentage of the variance which explained development of women empowerment in Tanzania was 72.299 percent followed by Uganda 68.735 percent and Rwanda 48.99 percent. The findings show there were no common variables to measure women's development gap in these countries. Introduction Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda being among the developing countries, are implementing several programs aimed at empowering women of which government and NGOs are implementing bodies. The past three decades have witnessed a steadily increasing awareness of the importance of women empowerment through different measures as economic, political participation, broader access to fundamental human rights, improvements in nutrition, basic health and education. The expectation of these programs is to give women new skills and extend their ability to make informed choices, and bring significant changes to the ways women perceive themselves and their responsibilities at large within home. However, on the other hand the empowerment will act like a catalyst on women's development. Woman empowerment is a multi-dimensional process which intersects the woman's personal, family, social, cultural, economic and political space. Moreover, it is a latent variable that along with its components cannot be directly observed or measured. Furthermore, many projects and programmes which advocate the empowerment of women show little if any evidence of attempts even to define what this means in their own context let alone evaluate whether and to what extent they have succeeded. To be empowered one must have been disempowered, also empowerment cannot be presented by the third party. What government and different NGOs do is to facilitate empowerment. All they can do is to create the preferred conditions for empowerment but not make it happen.
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Authors: Akarro Professor, Rocky RJ; Focus Kimario Senior Statistician, Diana; Msengwa, Amina S
Periodical (Full): Research Journal of Social Science and Management
Issue: 3
Volume: 3
Pages: 16
Data Collections: IPUMS International
Topics: Gender
Countries: Tanzania