Empowerment

Progress, I am coming to notice, is very relative.
An interesting discussion today with the Deputy President reiterated this. Talking about women's empowerment and progress, he explained about the garment industry in third world countries.Businesses come in and establish factories with very poor working conditions and low wages who employ poor women. And, oddly enough, the factories make their lives better one hundred fold. It is progress, however small, from unemployment and poverty into working hours and some type of income. When people come in and see the conditions and ban imports from Bangladesh, or a similarly situated country, they threaten to throw thousands of women out. But at this point, they cannot go back to their village to just return to poverty. So they take to prostitution and begging on the streets, which is obviously a step down, even from bad factory working life.
Many women who receive the loans from microfinance institutions go straight to their homes and give the money to their husbands, because that is what is expected. Then the men go out and use the capital to improve their own businesses, and have the money for themselves to use at their own (hopefully wise and inclusive) discretion. When it comes time to pay the loan installment each week, the women must go back to their spouses and ask for the money again. And this does not seem like it really fosters into good, empowered, strong women. In the West, this woman would be considered to be in an abusive and tyrannized marital relationship. However, by being the provider of the money in any way gives the woman a bit more leverage in the family life. Now, she is seen as someone who not only cooks and cleans and takes care of children and comes to bed each night, but a person who contributes to the family's financial well-being.
What Mr. Ahmed was saying, therefore, is that people in the West and in developed countries cannot see the small and simple things that is happening to improve lives. Relatively to world culture, their advancement in the world is nothing. But in context with the rest of their lives, and their mothers' lives, we see this as a huge improvement. This is not to say that we shouldn't press for better conditions for everyone: to give women more empowerment and safer working conditions and better jobs, but we can do so at a gradual rate, and taking into consideration the context that they came from.