Keywords Women’s empowerment Capacity building Livelihood generation Community owned institutions |
The brief for my project was to create employment opportunities for women, who have been trained in stitching under the Swaranjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) scheme in Bhagalpur. The project aimed at empowering the women through employment and alleviating poverty with the help of capacity building.
I devised a well-planned approach which could be utilized and do justice to the project. I started with understanding the target group i.e. women. Analysis and mapping helped in bringing out the factors and forces that affected the women and their environments, their aspirations and the challenges they faced. Based on these inferences, certain concepts were proposed which would enable women to find employment. One of the proposed concepts was selected and an enterprise model for women’s empowerment was developed.
Based on the insights, inferences and analysis of markets and target segments, a decision was taken to set up small enterprises that would be run by women. The women were then given inputs so they could effectively carry out the operations.
This turned out to be a great learning experience for me. Working with a community at the grassroots-level helped me identify the gaps in the system, which otherwise might have gone unnoticed. |