Empowering Widows in Low-Resourced Communities: Rethinking Multidisciplinary Interventions for Widowed Women in Low-Resourced Communities

Abstract

Women empowerment is well documented and topical globally in human service professions. While that is the case, the same cannot be claimed about the empowerment-focused interventions for widowed women. Widows have been side-lined and excluded from deliberate mainstream women empowerment endeavours yet bearing a host of psychosocial, socioeconomic and cultural challenges. This chapter aims at illuminating on the empowerment of widowed women through a multidisciplinary approach in low-resourced communities as relevant in interventions. The chapter discusses power, empowerment, empowerment strategies and the multidisciplinary model for empowerment. Following the strengths-based intervention approaches, the relevant roles of the social service professionals are explored. The chapter draws its rethinking approach to interdisciplinary interventions for the widows from integrating literature with the findings of the qualitative study which engaged widows, traditional, indigenous social service providers as well as trained professional social service providers in individual and focus group interviews in the poor communities of Binga District in Zimbabwe. The findings indicated the gaps in empowerment of widowed women with less prioritisation in deliberate interventions. Empowerment interventions of widowed women were found to be fragmented and an afterthought yet critically important in low-resourced communities with interventions indicating the need for a multidisciplinary approach. This chapter is relevant as it discusses empowerment-focused interventions for widows who are an afterthought in human services. Drawing information from contextually relevant environments and participants, it explores strategies, a multidisciplinary integrative model and roles of social service professionals in empowerment interventions.