Women empowerment refers to the process of removing barriers that prevent women from realizing their full potential. It encompasses access to education, employment, health care, property rights and political participation. The objective is to ensure equal opportunities for women, enble them to make decisions regarding their education, health, and lifestyle. At its core, it aims to increase the power and status of women in various spheres of life from personal autonomy to economic stability.

Women's empowerment is key to economic and social outcomes. Benefits from projects that empower women are higher than those that just mainstream gender. More than half of bilateral finance for agriculture and rural development already mainstreams gender, but only 6 percent treats gender as fundamental. If half of small-scale producers benefited from development interventions that focused on empowering women, it would significantly raise the incomes of an additional 58 million people and increase the resilience of an additional 235 million people.

Several principles define women's empowerment, such as, for one to be empowered, one must come from a position of disempowerment. They must acquire empowerment rather than have it given to them by an external party. Other studies have found that empowerment definitions entail people having the capability to make important decisions in their lives while also being able to act on them. Empowerment and disempowerment are relative to each other at a previous time; empowerment is a process rather than a product.