Women’s Leadership Building as a Poverty Reduction Strategy

Expansion of women’s political space is a means toward empowering women typically identified in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers of less developed countries. Calls for the cultivation of women leaders in turn correspond with attempts to facilitate this expansion. Focusing on Bangladesh in particular, this article deconstructs normative notions of leadership in the context of current gender and development discourse in order to help understand the value of leadership as a women’s empowerment variable. Though leadership is a necessary adjunct to collective action, itself oft-considered crucial to social change, insight offered by third wave feminist theorists as to the fallacy of the ‘oneness of women’ raises questions as to the exact process by which a woman leader is to develop between herself and other impoverished Bangladeshi women a sense of power with—that is, to ‘collectively self-objectify’ (Drury et al. 2005). Here I offer an analysis of Bangladeshi nongovernmental organisation Nagorik Uddyog’s Grassroots Women’s Leadership Network, a programme whose methodology appears to align markedly well with Spivak’s (1987) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, and which may serve as a useful model for how to reconcile post-modern feminism with the need for power with as a mechanism for social change.