Empowerment of Iraqi Women and its Effect on Their Quality of Life

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Women’s empowerment is an efforts to enhance their general condition and role of women in building of nations, along with their quality of life (QoL). The aspects of womankind empowerment are given importance such as the education of girls (social empowerment); also the employment and participation in the labor market (economic empowerment); it is expected that the most of the world’s poor are women and they are frequently in charge of providing the essential needs for their families. Therefore, they are at specific threat of poverty. Women perception of their position in life cycle in the background of culture and value organizations where they live and related to their aims, anticipations, values, and worries termed as QoL.

AIM: The aim of the study was to assess QoL and its association with economic and social empowerment of women furthermore, find out the association between QoL and some sociodemographical variables.

METHODS: A descriptive and correlational study was conducted; from the period of October 1, 2021–December 20, 2021. It is used an online questionnaire by Google form as a method of data collection on 500 women their ages (15–66 years old) from all of Iraq’s provinces. The questionnaire composed of two parts; sociodemographical characteristics of Iraqi women in addition to “RAND 36-Item Health Survey” of QoL (SF-36). Data were analyzed with SPSS (26) to meet certain objectives of current research.

RESULTS: The majority of study sample live in urban regions, most of them were diploma holder and above, approximately half of participant with sufficient income, positive significant correlation between QoL and education level, income, and inverse or negative relationship between QoL and work, age. The present study demonstrates the greatest proportion of participants with fair quality of life.

CONCLUSION: They carried out extensive social media campaigns and awareness sessions on the social and economic empowerment for women. They support and authorize autonomous women to be represented in decision creation positions in development processes. They develop a tough and gender balanced private subdivision in Iraq, providing motherhood authorization and basic sexual role friendly facilities, including safe transportation, care of children, and gender disaggregated health services, Governmental encouragement of women’s access to education, and urge enrolment of Iraqi girls in school. Introducing sessions about the health services provided by health sectors especially in rural zones to increase of awareness regarding to public health services.