Women’s Empowerment as an Outcome of NGO Projects: Is the Current Approach Sustainable?

Ghenwa Al Hakim, Bettina Lynda Bastian, Poh Yen Ng and Bronwyn P. Wood
Additional contact information
Ghenwa Al Hakim: Department of Business Administration and Finance, Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK), Jounieh P.O. Box 446, Lebanon
Bettina Lynda Bastian: School of Business, Royal University for Women, Riffa P.O. Box 37400, Bahrain
Poh Yen Ng: Christ Church Business School, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury CT1 1QU, UK
Bronwyn P. Wood: Innovation Technology & Entrepreneurship Department, College of Business & Economics, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), Sheikh Zayed Road, Al Ain P.O. Box 15551, United Arab Emirates

Administrative Sciences, 2022, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-23

Abstract: The area of women’s empowerment has attracted increasing attention among a wide range of interest groups, from authors to researchers to feminist scholars and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This paper aims to identify the diverse understandings of women’s empowerment in the literature and to discuss empirical evidence from NGO projects in the field. A systematic literature review is employed that includes an analysis of relevant high-quality articles and research papers published in the Scopus database, as well as those produced by United Nations (UN) bodies and well-published authors. The findings highlighted four common understandings of women’s empowerment including granting women a voice, challenging existing power structures, the radical transformation of lives and livelihoods, and gender mainstreaming. The findings of these empirical studies on the role of NGOs in this field revealed understandings limited to granting women a voice and gender mainstreaming, thus reflecting the fact that limited knowledge of women’s empowerment hampers the ability of NGOs to serve women’s advancement and sustainable development. Furthermore, and given that these approaches and understandings still fall short of achieving social inclusion for women, it is recommended that these NGOs discharge their efforts toward initiating systemic change to actually sustain female empowerment in the communities in which they are active.

Keywords: empowerment; NGO; sustainability; women; development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/2/62/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/2/62/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:12:y:2022:i:2:p:62-:d:817556

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().