Practice What You Preach? The Role of Rural NGOs in Women's Empowerment

Abstract

If NGO employees are facilitating change for self-empowerment, such behavior must be modeled for successful transmission, as suggested in self-efficacy models of behavior change. Rural NGOs in India often depend on employees from the local population who are as likely to be marginalized as their clients. This may cause a gap between what the employees may be trained to “preach” and what they “practice,” thereby diminishing their effectiveness. We examine the employees of a successful rural NGO in India to establish if this gap exists. Using three empowerment instruments, we find that employees indeed “walk the talk.”