Research On Enabling Path Of Rural Women’s Community Participation

With the rapid development of urbanization,in China,a large number of young and middle-aged labor force poured into the cities,and rural areas formed a large left-behind group with women,children and the elderly as the main body.According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics in 2018,the rural women population is about one quarter of the total population.The challenges and difficulties faced by the left-behind groups in rural areas are of concern.The report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China clearly states that "the strategy of rural revitalization" should be implemented and that "the care and service system for left-behind children and women and the elderly in rural areas should be improved".At present,China’s Rural Revitalization Strategy mainly develops the countryside by injecting external forces,ignoring the main role of the left-behind groups.Women are naturally sensitive to community care and environmental hygiene.If women are given some support and companionship in ideology,economy and capacity-building,they will become the backbone of village change.This study uses empowerment theory to establish an analytical framework,and selects 13 rural women for in-depth interviews by means of purposeful sampling.It focuses on the practical experience of rural women’s community participation to analyze the difficulties in the process of empowerment practice,so as to construct the empowerment path of rural women’s community participation.Taking the rural project of L Foundation as an example,the researcher summarizes the project practice experience from the individual level,the group level and the community level.Through the research on the empowerment practice of rural women’s community participation,we find that there are mainly the following difficulties: confined to the development limitations of rural women themselves,the empowerment practice fails to fully mobilize rural women’s participation,and rural women’s willingness to participate is low;rural women’s group consciousness is weak,the backbone influence of rural women is weak,so that rural women’s grass-roots organizations are less organized;Community development relies heavily on social organizations,cooperates less with local authorities,and the community has not formed the ability of self-development;the government pays insufficient attention to community participation policy and lacks gender perspective in policy design,which makes rural women lack institutional guarantee in the process of community participation.Combining with their own practice and Adams’ empowerment theory framework,the researcher puts forward the empowerment path construction of rural women’s community participation from four levels: individual empowerment,organizational empowerment,community empowerment and policy empowerment.Among them,empowerment at the individual level is the precondition to mobilize rural women’s community participation.Empowerment at the organizational,community and policy levels revolves around individual empowerment and influences each other.Organizational empowerment is an important platform for rural women’s community participation.Community empowerment is the goal of rural women’s community participation.Policy empowerment is the fundamental guarantee for rural women’s community participation.