The term empowerment, despite its impending nosedive into the sea of meaningless jargon as it rapidly becomes the buzzword of the development and gender set, is a valuable, highly integrative concept that brings together many of the desirable goals of social and economic development. It signifies activities that help the people who are most marginalised in society – particularly women, but also the poor and the handicapped – to gain a reasonable degree of control over the decisions that affect their lives. To empower such disenfranchised people, simply reaching for political power is not necessarily the most effective strategy. In fact, the single-minded "struggle" for political power, especially if it is at the expense of other development goals, usually diverts energies and commitments from action that could perhaps empower people more quickly and even more thoroughly.

A person becomes more empowered when he or she is able to participate meaningfully in family and community processes. To be empowered, one must have access to basic knowledge, health and social status. Effective routes to empowerment therefore include access to education, adequate nutrition and health care and information about one’s rights. Many civil society organisations throughout the Third World dedicate their efforts to these important instruments of empowerment. Some have been able to make a significant contribution in helping marginalised people attain a sufficient sense of individual self-worth to become active and successful in the political processes of their community.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that, in the increasingly materialised, commoditised, and monetised world of today, anyone can feel truly empowered without access to the income or status that comes with a job. But, in the real world, jobs are usually created by capitalists more concerned with their own financial ambitions than with the welfare of their workers — creating conditions of exploitation that quickly undermine any "empowerment" that the job might have led to in the first place.

It is basically this reasoning that has led to the widely held belief among development workers that "self-employment" is the most effective route to genuine empowerment. Several initiatives in recent years have dramatically shown how much can be done by simply providing access to small amounts of (commercial but fairly priced) capital in getting women and other disempowered people back on their financial feet, thus enabling them to stand on their own legs in the community. Indeed, the success of such programmes as the Working Women’s Forum (WWF) and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India and the Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh have led some actually to equate "empowerment" with "self-employment".

Although some of these ventures have achieved outstanding results, they can only be limited in their impact in the long run unless the financial inputs are supplemented by a variety of other support systems. Genuine, durable, development means that the structures of production and distribution must be transformed – though admittedly not in the mould of the North. This means that households and local economies must create surpluses to be able to accumulate savings and thus make investments that will in turn enable them to continue to improve their material wellbeing. It is not possible, simply with one’s hands and without any amplifying tools, to do more than survive and subsist in the modern world.

This means that in addition to the boat of financial capital, people need the engines of technology, management expertise and marketing skills to be able to sail towards a better future. And this, in turn, means enterprise.

But entrepreneurship is not for everyone. An entrepreneur must have very special traits: to be able to mobilise resources, to manage people, money and machines, and above all, to take risks. Not everyone in society has these attributes. In fact, very few do. Most of us prefer the security – and sanity – of a steady job. Is it fair, then, to expect village (or even city slum) women – illiterate, vulnerable and without any safety nets to fall back on –to take risks that we ourselves are not prepared to?