Contours of Women's Development: A Synthesis of Thoughts, Efforts and Challenges

Over the last five decades, there has been considerable advancement in the realm of empowerment and development of women. The process has also led to many new areas of concern, the important among them being women's health (with increasing incidence of HIV/AIDS), feminisation of poverty, negative impact of globalisation and technological advancement, increasing role of the private sector, decentralised governance and the emergence of the 'market' as a source of finance and economic dynamism. Besides these, the 'international architecture' for development has also undergone considerable changes. Development is now addressed by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and country-specific poverty-reduction strategies. The MDGs have even set specific targets towards whose attainment the entire development community is geared up to work, while countries have also identified their own paths and strategies to meet this end. Gender equality and empowerment of women are specifically emphasised in the MDGs. These concepts, however, require a differential understanding, across different nations, which is certainly one of the interesting and analytically challenging tasks ahead for the MDGs. Gender equality is also central to poverty reduction. The women's movement, the world over, is intensely concerned with the issues relating to achieving such equality. The means of doing so merge at the level of creation of large-scale awareness among women as well as building their capacities to fight for their own uplift.