Empowerment as a guideline for development policy

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,7, University of Applied Sciences Bremen, language: English, abstract: In 2010, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development is equipped with approximately six billion euros - the highest budget it has ever had on its disposal. But still, the choirof critics is growing louder. One group is unsatisfied with the amount of money provided. They claim that the poverty of more than two billion people in the world cannot be overcome with 104 billiondollars the worldwide amount of development aid in 2006, which is only one third higher than the budget of North Rhine-Westphalia. The other group of critics points to the fact that more than 500 billion dollars of development aid have been spent since the 1960s whereas poverty, public debts and violent conflicts in the Global South3 have not at all diminished. They plead for a renewal of development policy concepts. One of those more progressive concepts is the idea of empowerment, which I am going to examine in this paper.