Women’s economic empowerment seeks to enhance human development through enlarging women’s capacity to control their livelihoods on a sustainable basis. It demands long-term change in national and international policy and in power relationships at all levels. As such, it requires a variety of strategies, including support for women’s organizing and awareness of their rights and recognition of women’s skills an contribution to the economy. It also requires an enabling policy environment, with government support for reducing gender disparities in the way in which globalization impacts people’s lives and willingness to engage in policy dialogue with women. Demands for economic justice, first voiced at the First World Conference on Woman in Mexico City in 1975, reached a crescendo at the Fourth World Conference on Woman in Beijing in 1995, when women from both the North and South joined to protest the impact of globalization on their lives. That same year, women and men joined at the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, demanding that governments make human development the goal of the process of globalization. In June 2000, as nations gather to assess progress in implementing the commitments made at Beijing along with those made at Copenhagen, the world has an opportunity to link the goals of economic justice and the elimination of poverty to those of women’s empowerment. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, women have organized to claim their economic rights and place women’s empowerment and economic justice squarely on the national and international development agenda. The articles in this book present some of the strategies that women are using in order to take advantage of the opportunities while minimizing the negative impacts of the increasingly global economy.