Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach and Its Implementation

Abstract

All over the world, people are struggling for a life that is fully human, a life worthy of human dignity. Countries and states are often focused on economic growth alone, but their people, meanwhile, are striving for something different: they want meaningful human lives. They need theoretical approaches that can be allies in their struggles, not approaches that keep these struggles from view. As the late Mahbub Ul Haq wrote in 1990: The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth. Consider Vasanti, a woman in her thirties, in the Indian state of Gujarat, whom I interviewed for my book Women and Human Development. Vasanti's husband was a gambler and an alcoholic. He used the household money to get drunk, and when he ran out of that money, he got a vasectomy in order to take the cash incentive payment offered by local government. So Vasanti had no children to help her. Eventually, as her husband became more abusive, she could no longer live with him, and returned to her own family. Her father, who used to make Singer sewing machine parts, had died, but her brothers were running an auto parts business in what was once his shop. Using one of her father's old machines, and living in the shop itself, she earned a small income making eyeholes for the hooks on sari tops. Meanwhile, her brothers gave her a loan to get another machine, one that rolls the edges of the sari. She took their money, but she didn't like being dependent on them-they were married and had children, and their support could have stopped at any time. With the help of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), therefore, she got a bank loan of her own and paid back the brothers. Now she has almost entirely paid back the SEWA loan itself. She can also enroll in SEWA's educational pro