Contextual Factors Which Affect the Success of Microcredit Programs Among Women

Microcredit programs usually target poor rural women to reduce poverty and empower the women involved. The general body of existing research provides conflicting evidence, depending on context, poverty reduction and empowerment may or may not be partially achieved. Research on the effects of context on microcredit is limited in Ghana. Based on focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with stakeholders, the contextual factors that affect microcredit for poverty reduction among women are explored. The findings of this study suggest that the orthodox use of social collateral through group lending doesn’t fully account for why some microlending programs are effective, and others are not. Contextual factors appear to make the difference.

Sustainable Empowerment Initiatives among Rural Women through Microcredit Borrowings in Bangladesh

Microcredit is an effective instrument that has been recognized to alleviate poverty, especially in developing countries such as Bangladesh. This study seeks to use microcredit as an instrument to bridge the gap between the accessibility of microcredit among poor rural women and sustainable socio-economic development, providing novelty to the concept of “sustainability of empowerment”. In addition, this study employed poor rural women to estimate the empowerment performance of microcredit borrowers compared to non-borrowers in the same socio-economic environment as it relates to microcredit in rural Bangladesh. A regression analysis was used to accomplish these objectives. This study also used propensity score matching techniques to find an easy way to access microcredit. The empirical results not only involve participation in microcredit accessibility but also the particular qualitative attributes of women empowerment. The results also suggest that sustainability is accompanied by affluence among microcredit borrowers, as indicated by women empowerment. The outcome of the empirical analysis shows that there is a significant impact of microcredit on increasing participation in the overall decision-making process, in legal awareness, independent movements, and mobility, as well as enhancing living standards to encourage sustainable women empowerment. This study recommends future investigations for microcredit providers to explore how to build an integrated, holistic approach to women empowerment in Bangladesh.

Precarity, aspiration and neoliberal development: Women empowerment workers in West Bengal

While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site—as volunteers and not as employees—these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations that sustained the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism and the restructuring of women’s development under neoliberalism.

School Meals

This chapter makes the case for free midday meals in Indian schools. School meals have wide‐ranging social benefits. First, they help to ensure regular school attendance. Second, they contribute to better child nutrition. Third, midday meals help to impart egalitarian values among children, who learn to sit together and share a meal irrespective of caste and class. Fourth, India's school meal programme is a major source of employment for poor rural women, and also helps other women to join the workforce by liberating them from the burden of having to prepare lunch for their children. All this, of course, depends on midday meals meeting adequate quality standards. In that respect, one recent breakthrough in many Indian states is the inclusion of eggs in school meals. Alas, this is being resisted in some states under the influence of upper‐caste vegetarian lobbies.