By Florence Nakazi

Editor, the 2023 International Women's Day focus on technology to achieve gender equality is timely. However, in this piece, I put a spotlight on the need to empower women multi-dimensionally through economic, political, and legal spheres of their lives.

Economic empowerment entails women’s ability to participate fully in economic life across all sectors. This can be measured by literacy, employment, and ownership or use of the mobile phone.

Whereas political and social empowerment caters for active involvement and engagement by women in political and social processes. Legal empowerment covers awareness about the laws and legal rights that permit women to advocate for their rights, if they are abused.

The Government of Uganda has made extensive efforts to empower all women and girls through enacting legal frameworks like the National Gender Policy of 2007, the 2007 National Action Plan on women, and programs like the Uganda Women Entrepreneurs Programme, but more needs to be done.

A study conducted by EPRC in 2019 based on the National Governance, Peace and Security Survey revealed that women continue to face barriers in realising their rights in all three empowerment spheres.

Specifically, only about 37 percent of Ugandan women are empowered. The remaining 63 percent of Ugandan women are generally disempowered. This implies that at least every 6 in 10 women in Uganda are disempowered.

There are also regional imbalances in disempowerment, with the Northern region having the highest levels of disempowerment estimated at 76.3 percent, followed by the Eastern at 63.4 percent, Central at 62.8 percent, western region at 53.1 percent, and Kampala at 57.9percent percent. In addition, women in rural areas estimated at 65.3 percent are more likely to be disempowered compared to their urban counterparts at 56.8percent.

Of the three dimensions, Economic disempowerment was the most predominant at 39 percent, followed by social and political at 32 percent, and legal at 29 percent.  

The reasons given for economic disempowerment are inadequacies in decent employment, low literacy rates, limited ownership of productive assets such as land to engage in productive paid employment and low earnings. 

On the other hand, the low social political empowerment of women is attributed to the traditional solid and patriarchal value system that favors sexually segregated roles, low educational attainment, inferiority complex, unpaid care work to the family and time constraints.

The legal disempowerment levels are attributed to ignorance of existing laws that criminalize acts of violence, and lack of awareness of available services in their communities.

To address women economic empowerment, there is a need to expand access to existing programs and interventions with the aim of supporting women to engage in productive employment. A mix of financial and non-financial support has proven to be a key factor influencing the success and sustainability of targeted funds such as the Uganda Women’s Entrepreneurship fund. These could be leveraged on in the implementation of the parish development model.

For the political and social empowerment of women, debunking and demystifying perceptions on women’s participation in politics and social spheres is necessary to foster social cohesion. This can be realized by strengthening women’s networks and campaigns tailored to sensitize and encourage women to go beyond their traditional roles are a step in the right direction.

Finally, partnerships with civil society organizations to bolster community sensitization on legal frameworks that protect the rights of women including violence against women, rape, and defilement should be promoted.  

The writer is a research analyst at EPRC, Makerere University