empowerment

Geared up with valour,

With strong determination,

A will as turbulent as her intention,

She is interrupted with a Don’t,

For each time she tries,

Women’s empowerment in the informal economy is mainly understood through a solution-based approach: improving access to finance or giving informal women workers avenues to express and acquire their political voice. Yet, little consideration is given to the root cause of their precarity, which, in the end, disempowers the very tools that can secure women’s rights in the informal economy.

Karnataka has evidenced a spurt in the formation and registration of farmer producer organisations in recent times, wherein the participation of women remains relatively low. There is a need for gender-sensitive initiatives to encourage women farmers to join the FPOs and benefit from the emerging agricultural value chains.

Most approaches aimed at increasing the participation of people in development assume that this will uniformly lead to the empowerment of the marginalised. This essay explores the deficiencies of the participatory approach.

With the retreat of the interventionist state, development is often perceived as a product of partnership between the state and civil society with increasing emphasis on people's participation at the grass roots. Using a framework of collective action based upon social capital, this paper examines whether social capital is important for successful development outcomes at the grass roots in forest protection and watershed development. Three villages of Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh are the focus of the study.