Women’s Empowerment in Pakistan

On a recent trip to Pakistan on behalf of the Trust, I met a variety of partners to develop a women’s economic empowerment programme in the country. There I began thinking about how we can try to create opportunities for societies to actively question gender norms and deliver sustainable and real empowerment for women.

Currently Pakistan ranks bottom of the gender gap index, an index designed to measure gender equality globally. Women in Pakistan are paid 23% less than men for similar work, and only 0.3% of women are employed as managers, 6.4% as professionals and 0.9% as technical workers.

There is obviously a lot to do. Working in this challenging context, people often assume that it’s only possible to deliver basic programmes and the impact will be difficult to measure.  However on this trip, I was struck by some of the organisations and women who are doing just the opposite.

The organisations are thinking of innovative and effective ways to deliver support to women. More importantly, women are resilient and challenging the barriers and assumptions made about them; what they can do and what they should do. These are women who despite these barriers, find ways in which to be empowered, to think about themselves differently, to use the resources available to them and to improve their lives.

One of our partners, Kaarvan, is an organisation that works with rural women to develop their skills in sewing and crafting and developing small micro-enterprises that connect them to often, urban markets.