The role of multi-actor engagement for women's empowerment and entrepreneurship in Kerala, India

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 inf...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAdministrative sciences Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 1 - 20
Main Authors Venugopalan, Murale, Bastian, Bettina Lynda, Viswanathan, P. K
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI 2021
MDPI AG
Subjects
Access to information
Case studies
Decision making
Empowerment
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship
Gender
Kerala
Kudumbashree
multi-actor governance
Participation
Power
rural areas
Social change
Social exclusion
Sustainable development
women's empowerment
India
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2076-3387
2076-3387
DOI:10.3390/admsci11010031