Rafia Zakaria on Western Feminist Interventions in the Global South

At the Human Rights Workshop on November 8, 2018, Rafia Zakaria led a critical discussion about Western attempts to empower women in the Global South. Zakaria is an attorney, the author of several books, and a weekly columnist for DAWN, Pakistan’s premier English newspaper. As a Pakistani woman who spends much of the year in Indiana, Zakaria explained, she is accustomed to “being on the margins.” This experience, she said, has taught her to be wary of so-called empowerment programs that fail to treat women as agents of change or address the “larger forces of subordination” at play in women’s communities.

Zakaria criticized programs, including those run by the Gates Foundation and Heifer International, which seek to empower women by giving them limited technical assistance that Zakaria derided as nothing more than “sewing machines and chickens.” As Zakaria went on to explain, such programs assume that “empowerment is easy.” In reality, technical assistance programs do lead to a temporary improvement in women’s standard of living, but “the help is not enduring, and eventually the women and their families are back to where they started from.”

Such programs are not just ineffective, Zakaria argued, but also fail to consider women in the Global South as “full subjects.” Said Zakaria, “You’d never hear the argument that women in the West will have all their problems solved if they get an Instant Pot” — yet empowerment programs geared towards the Global South “substitute minor material improvements to the condition of women for the capacity to mobilize or shift the conditions of their repression.” Zakaria further argued that political rights and grassroots organizing are critical to achieving real change.

Another problem Zakaria identified in many women’s empowerment initiatives is that they let their donors shape the mandate of their projects, rather than seeking buy-in from the local community. She emphasized the necessity of consulting community members before beginning projects and inviting them to evaluate projects once completed. Fundraising appeals, Zakaria said, further center donors by encouraging them to feel like they are saving women in the Global South.

Zakaria described empowerment projects today as expressly apolitical. However, as she reminded the audience, “the term ‘empowerment’ was originally introduced by feminists from the Global South and was a profoundly political project.” She explained that organizations are explicitly disavowing a political agenda — providing only technical assistance rather than trying to “help shape the political platforms of resistance” in the countries where they work.  

Zakaria contended that, in spite of their claims, it is impossible for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to be truly apolitical. In truth, NGOs have to strike deals with those in power in order to gain access to a country. “Everyone is working to pretend neutrality,” she said, “but there is a huge amount of politics that goes into having access to war-torn and crisis areas.” Zakaria urged organizations, particularly feminist ones, to be more open about their politics and to place more emphasis on addressing structural barriers to women’s rights. Only then, she concluded, can organizations genuinely contribute to empowering women in the Global South.