Voluntary participation and poor women's work: a critical examination of a community health improvement initiative in a Kolkata slum

Abstract

Voluntary participation is a development practice that incorporates and ‘empowers’ marginalized populations by recruiting them as volunteers in community improvement programs in the global south. In India, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) commonly recruit female volunteers in urban slums to ‘participate’ in the improvement of reproductive and child health care needs in the community. In the volunteering literature, the practice is examined as one which uses the unpaid labor of women and legitimizes it within discourses of citizenship and solidarity in declining welfare states in the global north. The dynamics of female volunteering in countries such as India has received little attention in this literature. With a focus on a reproductive and child health care program run by Hope, an Indian NGO, my article undertakes the following. First, I argue that in the Indian context, volunteering needs to be situated within a broader project of decentralizing the traditional authority of the development expert in top-down initiatives. Second, I demonstrate that female volunteering is practiced through stereotypical images of economically marginalized women's work. The article suggests that the volunteering strategy needs to be rethought as it fails to address the social and material realities within which urban poor women work and live in the global south.