ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how multidimensional poverty, global inequality, and increasing financialization contribute to social divergence and disempowerment. It examines how macro-trends – political, environmental, and economic – create systemic barriers that hinder people whose livelihoods depend on labor income from investing in their development, thereby deepening marginalization. In response, the chapter introduces empowerment not merely as the opposite of disempowerment, but as a dynamic process essential to human development. Drawing on the work of Kabeer, Sen, and Nussbaum, particularly within the Capability Approach, it presents empowerment as grounded in the concept of agency: the ability to make meaningful choices and act upon them. This perspective reframes development as a person-centered and participatory process, emphasizing internal capacities as much as external conditions.
