Disclaimer:
i) The empowerment of some entails the dis-empowerment of others –usually the current holders of power.
ii) Empowering people can well trigger repressive actions by these current holders of power.
Empowerment is a continuous process; it provides people with choices and the ability to choose; it expands the ‘political-manouvering-space’ in and of a community.
1. In the delivery of services, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
• Making sure the provision of services is gender-sensitive and culture-sensitive.
• Using existing local human resources.
• De-facto incorporating community representatives in the decision- making process about the services to be or already being delivered.
• Basing the training of staff importantly on the Human Rights Framework; making training competence-based and in-service, and aiming it at behavioral change, as well as always following training up with regular support supervision.
• Making sure beneficiaries cease to be passive recipients of services and demand responsibility for themselves; for this, they need to get trained in human rights (HR) and to take an active role in both the decision-making process and in the delivery mechanisms (including management issues).
2. In capacity building, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
• Through the use of the HR Framework, enabling individuals/communities to continuously upgrade their ability to analyze and understand their situation, i.e., people themselves collecting, interpreting and using information for action.
• Also sharing with them the Conceptual Framework of the causes of their problems that categorizes these causes by level, i.e., immediate, underlying and basic/structural causes.
• Exposing people to relevant information, especially about the UN HR covenants that guarantee their rights, about international HR law and about the real causes behind their problems. (Includes warning people about the ‘misinformation’ they are exposed-to so as to replace it).
• Raising people’s social and political consciousness so that their claims are legitimized.
• Changing people’s perception of their potential to forge a new reality where HR become a way of life.
• Increasing people’s awareness of what in the prevailing social system is ‘unfair’ to them.
• Building growing networks and constituencies for the spread of people’s rights-based strategies.
• Emphasizing the provision of practical skills that lead to community ownership of the interventions undertaken.
• Giving high priority to overall literacy and to HR literacy, especially for women and girls.
• Boosting women’s negotiation capabilities and thus their self-confidence.
• Raising consciousness about the natural environment (i.e., “the rights of nature or Earth Rights”).
• Emphasizing the training of local leaders; teaching them to carry out HR impact assessments and social and political mappings that point to the current power structure in the control of resources; teaching them to carry out decision audits (about who currently makes what decisions). [For example, they need to find out who decides what training is given to community animators/’validators’ that are supposed to act as our local strategic allies to introduce the HR Framework in the community].
• Giving people a better income capacity by creating new employment opportunities and democratizing access to credit, as well as setting up income generation activities for women.
• Providing people with access to available support systems including the capacity to seek redress when denouncing HR violations to appropriate and relevant existing bodies.
• Building the ‘mental preparedness’ for social mobilization, i.e., preparing people to press-on with needed claiming, needed advocacy and effective lobbying.
3. In advocacy, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
• Using the appropriate persuading methods when dealing with duty-bearers at different levels.
• Increasing people’s de-facto claims to demand access to quality services.
• Emphasizing work on measures to eradicate poverty. (what we are really talking about here is ‘disparity reduction measures’).
• Going all-out to demand more economic justice and making every effort to decrease the skewedness in the distribution of income and wealth.
• Advancing actions that decrease the workload of women and give them options for birth spacing.
• Promoting the shifting of the explicit control of resources more to women.
• Promoting a more local control of resources.
• Addressing minority equity issues, including those of migrants.
• Demanding active people’s participation in informed decision-making.
• Raising people’s consciousness about what their HR are and translating them into specific claims.
4. In social mobilization, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
• Going from people’s felt needs to concrete demands and from these to making specific claims so they can actively struggle for their rights (i.e., mobilizing their social power).
• Mobilizing people’s own resources as needed.
• Organizing people to effectively use and progressively control external resources.
• Networking with others to achieve a critical mass of concerned people (locally and externally) and, in the process, building coalitions.
• Collectively identifying the problems at hand, placing them in the Conceptual Framework of Causality, and searching for the best solutions for implementation at the three (immediate, underlying and basic) levels. [Acting at one level or at one main cause only may be considered necessary, but is NOT sufficient].
• Giving people power over decisions thus increasing their self-esteem and self-confidence.
• Increasing local democracy, with people (especially women) participating more actively and vocally in local government.
• Decentralizing decision-making, including shifting control of finances to the local sphere, i.e., a genuine devolution of power.
5. Here, then, you have a non-exhaustive list of the challenges you face when you, sometimes lightly, speak about empowering the people and groups you work with. You can use it as a preliminary checklist…
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chhi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org