3. Women’s Micro-Entrepreneurship: Can It Lead to Sustainable Empowerment in Nepal?

Women’s participation in the economy of Nepal has been at the forefront of the country’s policies since the 1980s, especially with a view toward development, poverty reduction, and women’s empowerment. Various development agencies have either adopted income-generating programs or micro-enterprise development schemes. Income-generating programs allow women who have no prior experience with a cash economy to work as employees or to produce goods at home for the domestic market. Micro-enterprise development schemes give women knowledge and skills that can result in sustainable self-employment. Both these schemes are used to empower women, but the Government of Nepal favors micro-enterprise development as an approach to raising women’s status. The main objective of the research on which this chapter is based is to understand the sustainability of women’s empowerment through studying women’s micro-entrepreneurship in Kathmandu Valley. The study uses Rowland’s (1995) four structures of power as a conceptual guide to understand the extent of the women’s empowerment. The study has a sequential design that uses quantitative data followed by qualitative data to generate respondents’ perceptions, feelings, and experiences. Data were gathered through interviews with 83 female micro-entrepreneurs and through participant observation. The findings indicate that micro-entrepreneurship has contributed to some extent to women’s empowerment, but that challenges remain, not least due to how women perceive themselves. In addition to the problem of low self-esteem, weak empowerment was observed in the form of domination through cultural norms and values, and in particular, through women being constrained to follow patriarchal values, to obey men, and to focus on traditional gender-based work. The sustainability of empowerment requires that women become agents of change in their own lives; if not, there will be no improvement.