Tulus T.H. Tambunan
Center for Industry, SME and Business Competition Studies
Universitas Trisakti
Jakarta-Indonesia
Himachalam Dasaraju
School of Commerce & Management
Sri Venkateswara University,
India
Shilpi Kavita
Dept. of Economics & Finance
International School of Management,
India
Introduction
Gender equality is a fundamental human right, and it’s a necessary foundation for a healthy, peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world. Women’s empowerment is a critical aspect of achieving gender equality. Gender equity is a basic right of human beings across the world. But in reality the situation is different, as the entire world is disguise with a wide significant gap in getting accessibility to the natural and physical resources and opportunities. The participation and decision-making power in economic activity are widely varying in between women and men, women have lesser role to play than men. The women are having very limited access to basic needs, like higher education, health and safety, independent decision making, entrepreneurship, and political involvement. Assuring women’s own rights and providing opportunities to them in order to attain full potential is very challenging and critical task not only for achieving gender equality but also in attaining other UN sustainable development goals. The women empowered and educated girls give away to their family’s good health, communities, and countries, creating a knock-on-effect that ensures benefits to everyone (Peace Corps, 2019). Women’s Empowerment is a buzzword worldwide, as the global decisions of various countries as a part of global partnership for development, centering on population development, more so on women empowerment. The task of promoting women's empowerment is included in the Millennium Development Goal and ICPD Programme of Action, Principle-4, (ICPD, 1994). Women’s empowerment is a very convoluted and multi-faceted concept where in women get required access over all kinds of resources and decision-making power at home, society, state and nation level as well. It leads to social recognition, economic independence, and participation in economic activity of the nation. The economic development is greatly associated with the active involvement and progress of women at all levels of economic activities of any country as rightly emphasized by UN (UN, 2020).