women empowerment through participation in ngos’ programmers

this paper attempts to determine the relationship between women’s participation and their empowerment. empowerment is a process whereby women become able to organize themselves to increase self-reliance and to assert their independent right to make choices and control resources. empowerment in this study was adopted from rowlands (1997) and schulz, et al. (1993) which has two levels, individual and community. participation was adopted from the cohen and uphoff’s(1988) model. the data was collected from 195 women who involved in eleven ngos in the city of shiraz, iran. the survey method with standard questionnaire was applied to answer the research objective of the study. the result showed that the level of empowerment among the women was at the moderate. level of participation also tends to be high among the women. finally, the result revealed that the participation has positive contribution to empowerment of women.