Womens health and womens empowerment: a locality perspective.

Within the past decade as concerns over womens health have increased it has become recognized that womens health problems are linked to their inferior social economic and political status. Thus longterm strategies to empower women have been proposed as mechanisms to improve womens health. However few examples of womens empowerment (a redistribution of power in womens favor resulting from a grassroots political process) are available. In order to assess the potential of the empowerment approach to improve womens health the context within which grassroots movements develop must be considered. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to analyze womens empowerment which attempts to provide a perspective which can accommodate local-level processes and the general cultural political and economic conditions which create a predisposition to activism. This framework is then applied to a case study of womens organizations in Visakhapatnam India where a complex mix of national regional and local factors is found to affect womens capacity for organization and political mobilization. Thus linking health improvements with the empowerment approach may be difficult to achieve until the numbers of grassroots organizations which act as change agents increases dramatically. Women may be better served by policies which are more concrete than the notion of empowerment which has allowed governments to skirt their responsibility to confront gender discrimination.