“Access to productive resources, such as land, property, credit, technology and ICTs.”

Women's empowerment and gender equality are no longer theoretical notions with hard-to-grasp meanings. They are terms bandied about by development agencies, not just implying different things to different people as was the analysis a few years back, but also more or less unburdened of their reference to 'power', and transformed into what Andrea Cornwall, in her essay - Pathways of women's empowerment - refers to as “today’s softer, more conciliatory, calls ..... that have none of the rough edges of older demands for justice and equality." It may seem a bit exaggerated, but the onus now is on those actors who actually push for sustained institutional and structural change focusing on micro-macro connections about issues like poverty, marginalisation, discrimination and violence to clarify that their conception of gender justice and women's empowerment is *NOT* the formulaic variety, but more embedded in women's realities and the need for more fundamental change in the ways we imagine and implement development policies and programmes.

Indeed access to productive resources such as land, property and credit are indispensable to the journeys of empowerment, and formal, legal-policy mechanisms to guarantee women their claims to such means of economic independence are vital. However, empowerment is essentially about being able to see how to negotiate one's condition in a process of sustained change - that builds capabilities for well-being and autonomy - even as it allows societies real choices for determining their paths to progress. This freedom to shape the "parameters of the possible", as observes succinctly, is severely constrained for a majority of the world's women, who owing to neo-liberal macro-economic frameworks have suffered debilitating impacts on their productive and reproductive roles and rights. Land itself is being commercialised and taken away from indigenous peoples and small farmers by states colluding with transnational corporations, and disenfranchised communities from around the world have had no recourse, not even in global governance systems, because of huge democratic deficits characterising existing global systems. The larger structural rubric of development today has also led to a rapid and rampant consumerist discourse, with deep consequences for women's autonomy. Research shows how in parts of India there is an increase in dowry because of increased mobility of IT professionals with disturbing consequences for those underprivileged and seemingly unconcerned with the global IT industry. Legal-policy measures do have their limits and therefore, gender equality presupposes changes to society's basic visions and conceptions of progress.

In respect of the lessons from micro-credit, the writing is on the wall and yet, the business instinct of micro-finance squelches development wisdom about poverty, gender and credit. Let us not forget, as Walden Bello says, that “many of the same institutions that pushed and are continuing to push failed macro programs (sometimes under new labels like "Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers"), like the World Bank, are often the same institutions pushing microcredit programs.” The narrative of micro-credit seems to correspond to the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone sees the truth and yet we go on. It is true that access to credit is significant to women's survival; it is a means by which the poor tide over contingencies, particularly in health. And yet, as has been observed by policy experts, the odds are stacked against the self-employed in the global marketplace and the strong clout of transnational corporations places the poor, especially poor women, at a particularly unfair advantage in the global marketplace.

More recently, as the formal banking sector becomes more and more happy with the "prospects" of micro-finance, there seems to be an anomaly between women's empowerment goals and the fundamental rationale of the micro-credit approach . A few years ago, Nirantar, a leading NGO in India working on women's right to education conducted a research that shows how women who are part of micro-credit forums are denied the right to educational opportunities, and how increasingly, the government is presenting the mere creation of micro-credit forums as the pri continuing education strategy as well as the women’s empowerment strategy in the country. Development strategies have a responsibility to expand capabilities, not take them away. A report of the Planning Commission in that scopes the micro-credit market concludes that "Banks could be encouraged to undertake such lending and could be incentivised to do this through being allowed to charge commercial rates of the order of 18-20% on such loans." With such high interest rates, and with the instrumentalisation of women's SHGs for business interests, the micro-credit approach may simply lend legitimacy and greater financial clout to an exploitative form of organised money-lending.

There are models of credit that are women-centred. Organisations like SEWA in Ahemedabad , which is a trade union of women, locate their low-interest lending strategies as one of a multi-pronged approach that addresses rights of women in the informal sector, their capacity and training requirements, and health care, also providing critical institutional mediation for women producers to global markets, actively negotiating their interests. SEWA locates access to credit as one important dimension of women's rights as workers, especially to secure livelihoods.

In a discussion on productive assets, the discussion on access to ICTs seems a bit misplaced. Not because ICTs cannot be productive assets, but because access to ICTs is a more fundamental capability, that cannot be seen merely as translating into monetary or economic gains. Rather, an enterprise based approach to ICTs can backfire, as is increasingly the evidence from programs that see women as franchisees of ICT services. In state after state in India, many government promoted schemes, where young unemployed youth were enticed to set up telecentres with bank loans, have run into huge debts because they were promised profits from e-governance and e-commerce ventures, which simply did not materialize. A similar story of the phone-women of indicates that their income has petered down with greatly increased mobile telephony penetration in the country.
A progressive framework of access to ICTs that addresses questions of women's empowerment needs to see access to ICTs as a 'capability right'. Marginalized women can, through the appropriation of ICTs, gain legitimacy for their concerns; demand accountability from public institutions and explore new platforms for building solidarities and for learning and knowledge sharing. The ICT diffusion paradigm is however deeply entrenched in market fundamentalism and in an undermining of the public policy role of governments to nurture and sustain local and community media and networks that are based on equity and social justice considerations. A public goods approach is vital for women's groups to access ICTs, and leverage the propensities of the emerging information and communication ecology for furthering their struggles, whether around the right to information, right to livelihoods, the need for educational content in local languages or running community radio initiatives. Public financing instruments are critical to realise the capability rights of women through ICT access.

The simple truth about access to resources is that unless we are able to put the politics back into the framework of access - dealing with structural issues of injustice, we are bound to be left with quick-fix solutions, bereft of ethical and ideological values, in the common pursuit of what may, unfortunately have become empowerment's bane – efficiency, at all costs. Often these costs are simply too high for most women.