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| Social Empowerment
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| Introduction |
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Social empowerment is the extent to which the personal capabilities of individual people and their ability to act are enhanced by social relations.
Empowerment’ means to enable people to control the personal, communal and social environment to foster their own development over the environment as well as accessing the environment to enrich their socio-personal life
Empowerment is here defined as the realisation of human competencies and
capabilities, in order to fully participate in social, economic, political and cultural
processes. This reflects Mayo and Craig's notion of empowerment as a
tool for democratic transformation . Community empowerment –
enabling communities to develop their own potential – has both internal and
external connotations . Internally, communities
need a strong sense of identity to be empowered and they must have a strong
common volition for empowerment. There are two facets of empowerment
necessary to maximise internal community social quality: passive and active
empowerment. Its passive connotation relates to a community being enabled or
facilitated in its empowerment, often through the extent of its social integration
through normative structures and associational networks .
Its active connotation is strongly associated with 'team membership', leadership
and positive community identity as exemplified in the British women's Black
Pride movement .
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| Indicators |
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Social indicators can serve a range of purposes related to vision, budgeting, community
mobilisation, agency accountability and public education . By
considering changes over time, social indicators are a critical tool in the development,
assessment and monitoring of social policy. They can describe, in quantitative and
qualitative terms, the level of social development achieved in a particular society and the
current extent of social problems.
- Political empowerment
- Economic empowerment
- Socio-psychological empowerment
- Information empowerment
- Social mobility
Social empowerment requires both that the objective conditions exist and that individuals have the ability to make use of the opportunities available to them. Empowerment is both a conditional factor for socioeconomic security, social cohesion and social integration and an outcome of their existence. There are three dimensions to empowerment – access, participation and control.
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Domains
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Sub
Domains
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Social
Indicators
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Knowledge base
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Application of knowledge
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-% own PC
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Availability of knowledge
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-% internet subscribers
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-No of internet users; internet users per 100
inhabitants
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-Estimated PCs per 100 users
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(DOS, Malaysia)
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Personal relationships
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Provision of services supporting physical and
social indepoendence
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-% of national and local budget devoted to
disabled people (mental and physical )
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