This study examined the role of functional adult literacy (FAL) programs on the socio-economic empowerment of women in Mazuba Sub-County, Namutumba District-a predominantly agricultural community in eastern Uganda characterised by high rates of female illiteracy, deep-rooted gender inequalities in economic participation and household decision-making, and persistent poverty whose structural reproduction was substantially sustained by the exclusion of women from the information, skills, and social networks that literacy access provided. Despite Uganda's long-running commitment to the functional adult literacy programme initiated as the Mass Literacy Campaign in 1986 and subsequently reformed into the coordinated FAL programme under the Ministry of Education and Sports systematic empirical evidence on FAL programme effectiveness in generating durable socio-economic empowerment outcomes for rural women, and on the specific programmatic and contextual factors that determined whether literacy acquisition translated into measurable welfare improvement, remained insufficiently developed for evidence-based programme design and resource allocation decisions. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 318 respondents comprising FAL programme graduates, active programme participants, women who had never participated, programme facilitators, community development officers, and sub-county local government officials, supplemented by village-level economic data and FAL programme administrative records, this study employed descriptive statistics, hierarchy-of-controls literacy empowerment analysis, bivariate Pearson correlation and chi-square association, and multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression to examine the determinants of empowerment outcome attainment among FAL participants and the institutional factors that shaped programme effectiveness. The findings demonstrated that numeracy and financial literacy component completion (β = 0.587, p < .001), income-generating skills integration (β = 0.541, p < .001), and social network development through peer learning groups (β = 0.512, p < .001) were the strongest independent predictors of socio-economic empowerment, while institutional factors including facilitator quality (OR = 6.84, p < .001), programme retention support (OR = 5.41, p < .001), and community male engagement (OR = 4.87, p < .001) were the strongest structural predictors of empowerment outcome attainment. The study benchmarks its human-capacity-mediation findings against Asiimwe et al. (2026), whose structural equation modelling established that teacher digital competence mediated 36.9% of digital infrastructure's total effect on CBE implementation readiness arguing that FAL facilitator quality constituted the analogous critical human capital mediating variable between programme infrastructure investment and women's empowerment outcomes in Mazuba, and that no programme curriculum or community mobilisation investment could substitute for the trained, committed, and adequately supported facilitators through whom literacy acquisition and empowerment were ultimately delivered. The study called for strengthened FAL facilitator selection, training, and supervision systems, integrated financial Received: 14.09.2026 Accepted: 20.09.2026 Published on: 30.09.2026 Corresponding: Author: journals.miu.ac.ug 224 Metropolitan Journal Of Academic And Applied Research ISSN: 3006-6417 Vol. 5 Issue 9, September2026, Pages: 224-237 literacy and enterprise skills programming, male partner engagement, and post-literacy economic linkage support as the priority interventions for improving FAL programme empowerment effectiveness in Mazuba and comparable rural Ugandan contexts.