Reversed Realities: Care's Women Empowerment

Superior Essays
CARE is one of the worlds leading humanitarian organizations (CARE) fighting poverty, hunger and disease across the world. However despite their long history of aid CARE, like many other organizations, falls short of positive change when it pertains to women in the developing world. In reference to women and girls CARE 's Women Empowerment branch focuses on Education, lessening gender based violence, ending child marriage, and brining women out of poverty. By examining the organizations rhetoric and programing, and fundamental feminist development theory, this section will highlight the ways CARE (re)produces the exact women 's issues it attempts to fix. Depsite all the projects that CARE says it funds and creates, there is very little …show more content…
Lukes ' presents that there is the 'power to ', 'power over ' and 'power within ' (the third title is borrowed from feminist thinking, but the definition is his own). Understanding the framework of CARE 's women 's empowerment programs is easiest by understanding the ways women are subjected to initiatives that are based in the 'power to ' and 'power over ' instead of the 'power within '. Lukes states that the 'power to ' concerns the decision-making ability that people or organizations hold, it is the capacity to declare, for example, women 's empowerment a project worth investing in. The ' power over ' is explained most clearly as the power to make specific topics negotiable or have them be non-negotiable. The 'power over ' decides what is even brought to the decision making table, and then the 'power to ' choose from those options about what becomes a development program (Lukes 1974). In this way, the Women 's Empowerment initiatives created by CARE are already burdened with power structures, which limited what kind of work can be done and what factor are 'untouchable '. This is one way of understanding why so many of the major international humanitarian organizations work on the same issues, because they are confined to the safe topics that were pre-approved. This is considered a reproduction of patriarchal power structures, which continue to propagate unmonitored due to the accepted structure of what development 'should ' look

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