The Role of Multi-Actor Engagement for Women’s Empowerment and Entrepreneurship in Kerala, India

Murale Venugopalan,Bettina Lynda Bastian,P K Viswanathan

doi:10.3390/admsci11010031

Murale Venugopalan, Bettina Lynda Bastian + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci11010031

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Abstract

Entrepreneurship has been increasingly promoted as a means to achieve women’s empowerment in the pursuit of gender equal societies by international development organizations, NGO’s as well as national and local governments across the world. Against this, the paper explores the role and influence of multi-actor engagement on successful empowerment of women based on a case study of Kudumbashree program in a regional context of Kerala, in South India. Our objective is to examine the women empowerment outcomes of the Kudumbashree initiatives, implemented within a multi-actor engagement framework supportive of women’s empowerment through capacity building and social inclusion programs. The case study demonstrates ‘how multiple-level engagements help enhance women’s development and support broad sustainable social change, in view of their sensitivity to the embeddedness of women’s agency under specific socio-political and cultural contexts’. We find that Kudumbashree programs, through its multi-actor engagement, strives for an equilibrium between social change through policy and regulatory change (top down) and social change via mobilizing the people (bottom-up). From a policy angle, the key learnings from the successful outcomes of Kudumbashree may be considered for designing rural and urban community development programs with a focus on the multidimensional empowerment as well as social and economic inclusion of women and other marginalized communities.

Highlights

Entrepreneurship has been increasingly promoted as a means to achieve women’s empowerment in the pursuit of gender equal societies by international development organizations, NGO’s as well as national and local governments across the world alike (Bastian et al 2019)
We explore the role and effectiveness of Kudumbashree programs on women empowerment highlighting the role of critical multi-level elements and players supportive of women’s empowerment and their advancement in economy and society
We introduce the case of Kudumbashree, Kerala, which shows the effectiveness of multi-actor approaches for the promotion of women’s empowerment

Summary

Introduction

Entrepreneurship has been increasingly promoted as a means to achieve women’s empowerment in the pursuit of gender equal societies by international development organizations, NGO’s as well as national and local governments across the world alike (Bastian et al 2019). It is expected that entrepreneurial activities lead to a certain financial and economic autonomy, which will enable women to liberate themselves from gendered constraints that have hindered the development of their potential (Nawaz 2019; Bastian et al 2019). Ojediran and Anderson (2020) reveal how gendered formal and informal institutions in the Global South continue subjugating women and maintain the second-class status for female entrepreneurs despite empowerment efforts by various national governmental and international development agencies. Scholars increasingly pay attention to intersectional influences, such as gender, patriarchy, migration and displacement on women entrepreneurs

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