Women's empowerment in India: a comparison of microfinance and transport sector initiatives

The 'empowerment of women' is often identified as an important aim of international development
policies, and many donor agencies now include women's empowerment in their strategies. Many of these
projects in developing countries aim to promote women's empowerment by using microcredit. The
assumption that microfinance embodies aspects of social capital that enhances women's empowerment
status is implicit in most advocacy literature on microcredit. While much academic research supports
microcredit as a development strategy, a growing number of researchers are critical and suspicious
about microcredit's ability to correct longstanding social ills, fill the void of formal wage work, and
empower women within existing patriarchal structures (Scully, 2004, cited by Norwood, 2014). Kabeer
(2001) suggests that access to economic resources alone is not necessarily sufficient to address
inequality and to empower women. To locate women at the centre of the empowerment process, some
authors suggest that the concept of women's empowerment should change from a welfare-oriented
approach to an equity approach, seeking to end gender discrimination (Nayak and Mahanta, 2009).
However, most initiatives are still trying to respond to the needs of poor women by making relatively
small investments in income-generating projects (Badola et al., 2014). Often such projects fail because
they are motivated by welfare and not development concerns, offering women temporary and part-time
employment in traditionally female skills such as knitting and sewing that have limited markets (ibid.).
The question arises as to whether women would be more empowered if they had the option to leave
traditionally female-dominated work roles and enter other economic sectors. This research will shed
some light on this debate by comparing two projects. It aims to open new conversations around ways to
empower women, focusing on the effect that women working in environments where they have
traditionally been excluded will have not only for themselves, but also for their communities.
The study will analyse two programmes using differing economic models that aim to promote women's
empowerment. One case study will look at a microcredit programme for women in rural areas of Andhra
Pradesh, India, managed by the NGO Fundación Vicente Ferrer (FVF). The other will look at the Female
Electric Rickshaw Driver programme run by the Karuna-Shechen organisation, a programme that
provides disadvantaged women with the skills and the means they need to work as e-rickshaw taxi
drivers in Bodhgaya, India. By comparing these programmes, the research will examine two economic
models intended to empower women, and the resulting effect of each intervention on the women
involved.
To answer the research question, anthropological data collection techniques will be used, including
participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The research will take place in India where
interviews will be carried out with staff and participants of the programmes, as well as family and
community members. Dimensions of empowerment will be assessed including elements such as
women's knowledge, as well as their physical, emotional, economic and social autonomy.
Focusing on current debates around how development agencies can engage in changing patriarchal

structures rather than accommodating women within the inequitable existing order, the research will ask
how this can be achieved, and what facilitates change in women's lives. It will analyse the impact that
working in a traditionally male environment can have, not only in terms of income generation, but also as
a way to change how women see themselves, in turn enabling them to step away from the expectations
that limit them.