Empowerment as Disempowering: Creating an Enabling Environment for the Needy

Abstract

The paper critiques the use of empowerment in development work. The evidence is supported from papers presented during the United Nations General Assembly conference in New York 2019 when the phrase empowerment was put to question. It was clear that agencies mean well when they use community empowerment. However, what they may not be aware of is how empowerment is treated within the wider cultural, social, and political dimensions. The one with power empowers or the one who pays the piper calls the tune. Once the one with power leaves the community goes back to where it was. The intended transformation did not take place for the recipients to know that any form of development is for them not for the one with 'power' of the resources or the expert. The paper makes a case to replace empowerment with the UNDP 1990 phrase of creating an enabling environment, where each and every person can pursue their full potential. Development is about people, exposed to millions of opportunities from which they can make choices they value most. The end result should be a people who have voices, can act, critique and come up with a collective communitarian development that is uplifting and transformative within the political, economic, social, cultural dimensions supported by technology, good governance and reflective science.