Women Empowerment and Micro-Entrepreneur in India, Essay Example

The study is based on the argument that the market strategies to empower women’s enterprise are faced with numerous challenges in terms of equity, participation, as well as effective results with regard to gender empowerment. Because of these strategies, women mostly find employment in unorganized, unregistered, or informal sector. To further the argument, the author analyzes the success of the entrepreneur approach followed by Gram Mooligai Limited (GMCL) in empowering women. The focus is to identify how far the initiative has been transferred into an effective process of poverty elevation.  GMCL is a community enterprise managed by women, active in India’s herbal sector- a sector believed to favor big contractor and traders.

The author found that although, GMLC has succeeded in enhancing women productive capabilities, leadership skills, and to some extent social learning abilities. In this regard, it has not confronted marginalization resulting from issues of caste embedded in established patriarchal norms and practices. The author argues that in order to empower women’s enterprise successfully, a more holistic approach that conceives empowerment as a dynamic, social-culturally constructed process has to be adopted. Otherwise, enterprise development is likely to increase women’s responsibility without increasing effective empowerment as the previous studies suggest.

Reference

Martinez, A & Torri, C. (2014). Women’s empowerment and micro-entrepreneurship in India: Constructing a new development paradigm? Progress in Development Studies Vol. 14 (1), pp. 31–48.