APRIL 2007

What Do We Mean by Empowerment?

The Hunger Project provides a woman leader in India her first opportunity to ride a bicycle.

“I’ve read your Web site, but I still don’t really understand what you do.”

What The Hunger Project does is empower hungry people — particularly women — to be the authors of their own development. But what does that mean?

For many years, people advised us, “Don’t use the word ‘empowerment’ — it’s too radical.” Today, there is a World Bank Web site devoted to empowerment. The World Bank defines empowerment as “the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.”

Not bad! But easier said than done. Hungry people live in deeply entrenched social conditions that deny their most basic human rights and sense of self-worth.

Over the past 15 years, The Hunger Project has pioneered methodologies that systematically and reliably empower hungry people to reclaim their selfhood, learn about and assert their basic rights, work together to overcome enormous obstacles, and succeed in building lives of health and productivity in harmony with nature.

This process takes years. The Hunger Project sustains its committed partnership with hungry people on every step of this path. Each step is strategically developed to break the shackles that hold people back — to build on what people have achieved, allowing them to grow in confidence, leadership and effectiveness.

Ending hunger and poverty is not simply obtaining better incomes and nutrition — it is a profound transformation in who people are. The Hunger Project is a radical commitment to people’s success in that journey.

A woman leader speaks at a Vision, Commitment and Action    Participants develop plans for their villages at a Women's
Workshop in Ghana.                                                              Leadership Workshop in Rajasthan, India. Photo: Paul          
                                                                                            Voorthuis.

Social Empowerment — Reclaiming Selfhood

Impoverished people — and particularly women — live their entire lives in a culture that treats them as worthless and powerless to change things. These attitudes are internalized. Poor people live in a state of deep resignation, with no hope of a better future. They are raised to believe that poverty is their fate.

In India, the first day of our Women’s Leadership Workshop, led by local trainers, is devoted to women discovering and claiming their selfhood — that they have rights, and that social conditions, not God, have held them back.

In Africa, Bangladesh and Mexico, in our one-day Vision, Commitment and Action Workshop, led by local volunteer animators — people break through their resignation. They awaken to a new possibility. They discover that they are able to create a vision of their village free from hunger, commit to it, and take self-reliant actions to achieve it.

These initial awakenings run the risk of being short-lived. If people fail in their first actions, it is more evidence for even deeper resignation. Our trainers and volunteer animators ensure that people succeed at their first actions — transforming a new awareness into real self-confidence.

Empowering Local Leadership The most high-leverage step in social empowerment is leadership development. Some have described The Hunger Project as the largest leadership development organization in the world. In every group of villagers, there are women and men who are natural leaders — and it is astonishing to see this leadership emerge with only a few days of training, despite a lifetime of subjugation. The Hunger Project has trained and empowered more than 150,000 village-level leaders who take responsibility for inspiring the women and men around them to strive and achieve. Leadership can be dicey. In a social context of prevailing patriarchy, even the most inspired women and men can fall into patterns of hierarchy and “boss-ism.” The Hunger Project has discovered that the way through is local democracy — our volunteers work in partnership with the leadership that is elected by, and is accountable to, local people. This reinforces newly trained leaders’ self-confidence and assertiveness against familiar patterns of dependency and submissiveness, and toward self-reliance.

These women were among more than 200 elected women at a panchayat federation meeting in Jaipur, India. The federation supports women's leadership at the grass roots. Photo: Paul Voorthuis.

Organizational Empowerment — Unity Is Strength!

Impoverished rural people are often isolated — either by geography, or by traditions that say women cannot go outside the home. A vital step is for impoverished people to form their own organizations for self-help and mutual empowerment. The Hunger Project trains women and men to form and lead groups through which people can articulate priorities, take collective action, and exert pressure for change.

People need to work together at the level at which they have enough organizational strength to manage activities such as schools and health centers. Many rural villages are just too small — with a few hundred people — to achieve this. All of our strategies are based on empowering people to learn to work together in clusters of villages of roughly 10,000 people. Overcoming traditional village rivalries is not easy, but when people discover what they can achieve by joining forces, they are willing to rise above their differences.

A girl proudly displays the artwork she entered in a                  A woman washes vegetables during a nutrition training in
competition in honor of National Girl Child Day in                     Mexico.
Bangladesh, celebrated each September 30 to focus
on ending discrimination against girls.

Information Empowerment — Knowledge Is Power!

Fifty years ago, the Brazilian activist Paolo Freire discovered that literacy is not about “decoding text”; it’s a process of discovery and creation — about awakening to one’s power to change one’s world.

The Hunger Project promotes adult functional literacy; it is a prerequisite, for example, for receiving a loan in our African Woman Food Farmer Initiative. And we organize mass campaigns to ensure that girls are kept in school. There is now almost universal recognition that the highest-leverage investment a developing country can make is the education of girls — yet it still takes concerted efforts to make that a reality.

People not only need access to information — they must also be empowered as the source of knowledge. In Bangladesh, we train some of the poorest of the poor as “barefoot researchers” to empower impoverished people to investigate — and create solutions to — their own poverty.

Political Empowerment — Securing Rights People can only get so far through self-reliant action. They need roads, they need schools, they need medicines — they need access to the resources of government that are rightfully theirs. While some organizations avoid contact with local government, The Hunger Project empowers people to create local governments that are accountable, in which women are guaranteed a voice in decision-making, and in which power and decision-making move as close to the people as possible. For political empowerment, we work both from the bottom up, building the capacity of local governments to be effective and the capacity of local people to hold them to account, and from the top down, building massive alliances to press for needed reforms in areas in which government is corrupt or unresponsive.

A meeting of people's reporters in Bolivia, who encourage the participation of indigenous people in political processes.

Economic Empowerment — Money Talks!

Impoverished people need better incomes — and they need a level playing field. Desperately poor farmers often pay three times more than city dwellers for the basics of life, are forced to sell their crops at one-third of a fair price immediately after harvest, and are deeply mired in debt.

To increase incomes, The Hunger Project links mobilized villagers to training for better crops and better off-farm earning opportunities. In addition, we empower communities to establish food banks and cooperative buying and marketing arrangements to level the playing field.

A village leader in Bangladesh on his duck farm, an income-     The women-led bank at Nsondole epicenter in Malawi gains
generating activity using local resources.                                 official recognition by the government.

Unleashing the Human Spirit

For 15 years, we have said that The Hunger Project is not just about meeting basic needs — it’s about unleashing the human spirit for a world free from hunger. This is not simply a motto, it’s an accurate description of a disciplined methodology that is every bit as scientific as — and perhaps even more essential than — developing new crops or vaccines. We in The Hunger Project are privileged to make this possible.