Gender and development approach gained attention during the 1990s, since then government and nongovernmental organizations adopted these approaches for gender and political empowerment in Pakistan. This paper analyzes the contribution of NGO towards gender and political empowerment in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This study explored how NGOs interventions created opportunities for gender and political empowerment. This study presents an analysis of NGO policies and practices for gender and political empowerment in the research area. Qualitative research methods including semi-structured interviews and participant observations were used to conduct this study. The study revealed that NGOs created spaces for political awareness and participation of men and women community members, councilors and policymakers. This study argues that NGOs interventions can create opportunities and effectively contribute to gender and political empowerment goals if contextually planned and implemented in the research area.

In the current research, a quantitative content analysis of four leading newspapers Dawn, Daily Times, Nawa-i-waqt, and Daily Jang was conducted to investigate the patterns of coverage of women empowerment. The time period for this study consisted of November 2023 to April 2024. The results showed that Urdu newspapers gave more coverage to the issue at hand as compared to English newspapers and Nawa-i-waqt gave the maximum amount of news regarding women empowerment as compared to other newspapers. The outcome of this research revealed that Pakistani Urdu newspapers give suitable coverage to women empowerment-related news, although different newspapers use different agendas to portray news related to women empowerment, such as political empowerment, social empowerment, economic empowerment, and education empowerment. The results showed that more importance was given to political and social empowerment and the common agenda of these four newspapers was social and political empowerment.