Women Empowerment: Impact Assessment of Select Interventions by Various Third Sector Organizations in India

Empowerment is meant to bring out the power inside and contingently requires the opportunities to do so; women, more than men, generally suffer from lack of opportunities to bring out the power in them owing to the predominance of patriarchal relations in society during the development of human civilization. Several of the recent researches argue that women empowerment requires a systemic transformation in not just any institutions, but fundamentally in those supporting patriarchal structures (Kabeer, Reflections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment. In Discussing Women’s Empowerment-Theory and Practice. Sida Studies No. 3. Stockholm: NovumGrafiska AB, 2001; Bisnath and Elson, Women’s Empowerment Revisited. Background Paper, Progress of the World’s Women. UNIFEM, 1999; Sen and Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987; Batliwala, The Meaning of Women’s Empowerment: New Concepts from Action. In G. Sen, A. Germain, & L. C. Chen (Eds.), Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment and Rights (pp. 127–138). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). One of the effective tools toward women empowerment is providing an enabling environment for women to develop entrepreneurial abilities (Kushnir et al., Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Around the World: How Many Are There, and What Affects the Count? in MSME Country Indicators 2010. Washington, DC: World Bank & International Finance Corporation, 2010; Ismail et al., Business and Economic Research, 2 (1), 1–13, 2012) and the approach toward women empowerment need not necessarily be through big organized entrepreneurship; the approach of empowering women at the grassroots levels both in the urban and in the rural setting could be very effective and in terms of capacity could reach a wider geography (Kuppusamy et al., Communications of the IBIMA, 2010, 1–10, 2010; Ba, Boao Forum Report on the Development of SMB Financing. Department of Statistics (2010), 2013; Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute, The Gender Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index, 2013). The grassroots level Third Sector Organizations (TSOs) have been playing an important role in providing this enablement. However, it is of interest to see how these TSOs have been empowering women through entrepreneurship development at the grassroots level, small enterprises and organized small and medium scale enterprises. In this context, it is proposed to understand the impact of various Third Sector Organizations working on women empowerment through entrepreneurship development. This study explores the impact of TSOs on women empowerment through the promotion of entrepreneurship. The interpretations are based on the analysis of data captured through a well-structured questionnaire that was administered to the beneficiaries to understand the extent of enablement that the interventions from these organizations provided them before and after the interventions.