‘Women economic empowerment’ has become the mantra of development practitioners and researchers as a strategy for poverty alleviation - the unquestioned ‘good’ aspired to by such diverse institutions as the World Bank, UN, IMF and the most radical non-government organizations. However, “women’s empowerment” is still a much contested issue, and there is no single generally agreed upon definition of what ‘women’s empowerment’ really means (Kabeer, 2000), which makes that task for ‘women economic empowerment’ even harder. It is likely that economic empowerment as proposed by the IMF, differs from what a rural women in Mozambique might tell us. Therefore it is important to take a closer look at how different actors, actually understands, use and implement the ‘women economic empowerment’ discourse. How do experiences and notions of development have been gendered and how the women economic development discourse is connected to that? What are the implications of all of this for the material lives of women currently subjected to “development”? How can we rethink this from an alternative framework?
Postcolonial thought helps us to critically assess these questions through discourse analysis by exploring the social, economic and political power that sustains colonialism and neo-colonialism as well as the knowledge systems they are embodied. In this research, I analyze development’s dominant cultural representations and institutional practices regarding women economic empowerment embedded in the current gender and development dominant discourse. By so doing, I also explore the possibilities for a transformatory postcolonial feminist economics.
