Barriers to Women's Empowerment: Contribution to the Debate on Women's Empowerment in the Light of the New Development Model

Abstract

This article comes within the framework of the insufficiency of the measures taken by the public authorities with regard to the empowerment of women. Empowerment is a recent concept that has aroused the interest of academics and practitioners for some decades. The ambiguity of agreeing around a universal definition still persists. On the other hand, the main features of a global definition do exist. However, we can define women's empowerment as the ability of women to make strategic decisions about their own lives and to access the resources necessary to ensure their independence and contribute to their well-being and the prosperity of their country. This work aims to highlight the obstacles facing the empowerment of women in Morocco. For this, we considered semi-directive interviews as part of a qualitative methodology in order to focus on these obstacles from the point of view of women. Subsequently, a textual analysis using the Nvivo tool was applied to interpret the results. These show that access to education and its quality, the socio-cultural structure, family influence are among the main obstacles to the overall and effective empowerment of Moroccan women. However, integrating the notion of empowerment into school curricula, guaranteeing equal access to higher education, ICTs, awareness-raising can play a crucial role in making women's empowerment a participatory process, effective, comprehensive and efficient.

JEL Classification: B54, B55.

Paper type: Empirical research