Women

Women’s empowerment in rural India
Femida Handya
And
Meenaz Kassamb
Paper presented as the ISTR conference, Toronto Canada July, *2004
Primary Contact: Femida Handy
347 Lumbers
Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M3J1P3
Tel 416-736-2100-22633
fhandy@yorku.ca
a Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
b Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, OISE., University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Abstract
If NGO employees are advocating behavior change for self-empowerment such behaviour
must also be modeled for successful transmission as suggested in the self-efficacy models of
behavior change. Rural NGOs in India that depend on local population for employees face a
limited labor pool who are as likely to be vulnerable to the traditional social pressures and
therefore equally marginalized as their clients. This may cause a gap between what the
employees may be trained to 'preach' and what they may 'practice' thereby diminishing their
effectiveness to motivate change. We examine the employees of a successful rural NGO in
India that has received accolades for its work in empowerment to establish if the employees
actually ‘walk the talk’. Using three empowerment instruments, including one developed for
this study, we find that employees indeed ‘walk the talk’ and their index of empowerment is
related to their tenure in the NGO. We suggest some policy recommendations based on our
findings.
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Key words: NGOs, Empowerment Index, India, women
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Section 1 Introduction
Since the 1990’s women have been identified as key agents of sustainable
development and women’s equality and empowerment are seen as central to a more holistic
approach towards establishing new patterns and processes of development that are
sustainable. The World Bank has suggested that empowerment of women should be a key
aspect of all social development programs (World Bank, 2001). Although a... [continues]

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