Gender Equality and Empowerment in Contemporary Development Practice: A Critical Analysis of BRAC, SEWA, and Beti Bachao Beti Padhao

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the extent to which contemporary development practice advances gender equality and women’s empowerment. Anchored in the theoretical frameworks of Gender and Development (GAD), Empowerment Theory (Kabeer, 1999), and Feminist Political Economy (FPE), the analysis interrogates both the possibilities and constraints inherent in current gender-focused interventions. Empirical discussion centers on three South Asian case studies: BRAC in Bangladesh, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, and the Government of India’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) campaign. The findings demonstrate that despite institutional commitments to gender mainstreaming, development practice frequently reproduces limitations of instrumentalism, structural blind spots, tokenism, and the neglect of intersectionality. Whereas SEWA illustrates the transformative potential of collective, rights-based mobilization, BRAC exemplifies a technocratic and market-oriented model, and BBBP underscores the risks of symbolic policy interventions with limited structural impact. The paper concludes that meaningful progress toward gender equality requires reorienting development practice away from narrow economic instrumentalism and rhetorical commitments, and toward feminist strategies that foreground collective agency, intersectionality, and structural transformation.