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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines women’s vernacular understandings of empowerment in NGO-led handicraft WEE programmes in Egypt, arguing that taking these meanings seriously is an epistemic and methodological necessity for rethinking empowerment on women’s own terms.

Paper long abstract

Feminist development literature has long questioned what “empowerment” means in practice and how it is translated across contexts. In Arabic, the institutionalised translation of empowerment, ‘tamkeen’, has proven problematic, carrying technocratic meanings that do not resonate with women’s everyday lives. This raises questions about how empowerment is imagined in the design of development policies and programmes, and whose understandings are prioritised in these processes. As highlighted by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme, women’s lived experiences of empowerment should inform advocacy, action, and representation if empowerment is to be meaningful and transformative.

This presentation draws on research conducted as part of the author’s PhD. The research explores how empowerment is understood in the vernacular among women beneficiaries of a handicraft-based Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) programme in Cairo, Egypt, and how these vernacular understandings of the word influence how we, as development practitioners, understand the processes of empowerment in such programmes. Fieldwork was conducted in 2022 across three of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods, employing a multi-method qualitative approach that included focus group discussions, interviews, and ethnographic observations.

Drawing on Levitt and Merry’s process of “vernacularisation on the ground” and a decolonial feminist lens, the presentation shows that ‘tamkeen’ was largely unintelligible to women participants, despite its centrality in NGO discourse. Instead, women articulated empowerment through the locally meaningful concept of ‘kayan’, which captured a non-material, intrinsic sense of selfhood and dignity. The research presents ‘kayan’ as a core outcome of the empowerment process, reflecting a combination of ‘agency’ and ‘power within’.