Seeing Through their Eyes: Empowering Grassroots Women in their Search for Economic and Political Development

Women's empowerment faces different challenges depending on the socio-political context. In Mexico, a country with several gender gaps, grassroots women face more obstacles than women in urban zones. However, instead of assuming the main obstacles that prevent rural women's social and political empowerment in rural zones, we asked them directly. From July until December 2014, we undertook a six-month social research project that included 20 focus groups and 51 interviews in 10 different Mexico municipalities. Our primary purpose as women and researchers was to provide tools for catalyzing women's empowerment in pre-selected Mexican communities. Inserted into the Capabilities Approach, our research aimed to promote the idea ofagency as defined by Amartya Sen: "being free to do and achieve whatever goals or values a person sees as important" (Sen 1985, p. 203). Other theoretical insights from the Capabilities Approach we considered were those by Martha Nussbaum, Solava Ibrahim, and Stanley Sharaunga. We worked under the aegis of the Red Mujeres, Desarrollo, Justicia y Paz, one of the branches of Unión Nacional Integradora de Organizaciones Solidarias y Economía Social A.C. (UNIMOSS), a Nation-wide Mexican NGO devoted to promoting human development among grassroots and indigenous populations. This NGO has been working for more than thirteen years to empower women; however, before our intervention, there was no research about the effects of their work. The project's financing was thanks to the Proequidad Program (INMujeres), which conducted the bidding process, which we won.