acase@tulane.edu / Abstract This research seeks to further the understanding of female microentrepreneurship as it is conceptualized and applied to initiatives that supporting women’s economic and social empowerment. Social norms, institutional discrimination, and gender constraints define the activities and persons that are entrepreneurial, thereby affecting female microenterprise motivations, characteristics, and success. In addition, contemporary microenterprise initiatives draw on women’s stereotypical caret-taking roles to justify their economic development, while female microenterprises remain distinguishable by their informality, small size, and low returns. The enterprises created through resource allocation programs, such as microcredit, are largely informal and home-based subsistence enterprises that offer a low-quality employment option to women and fail to challenge or expand existing gender constraints. Data from focus group participants and analysis of survey responses from 487 female microentrepreneurs in Kandy, Sri Lanka are used to compare female microentrepreneurial success in terms of both financial and empowerment outcomes. A novel conceptualization of the capabilities approach is presented and utilized to build an original analytical framework that redefines success in terms of women’s capabilities: whether female microentrepreneurship expands what they can be and do. An iterative approach to defining success outcomes establishes that adding empowerment indicators to definitions of success highlight different gender constraints to female microentrepreneurship than purely financial measures. Group differences provide an analysis of the gender constraints that are more prevalent among those meeting compound definitions of success and those who do not. A logistic regression of gender constraints, including personal household, and business characteristics, and women’s capabilities (as a proxy for empowerment), determines the impact of each constraint on the likelihood of being successful. The results suggest that, at the microenterprise level, female entrepreneurs are constrained by social and household norms that reduce their capabilities and enterprise success. Women’s hybrid entrepreneurial motivations, driven by their own economic and household considerations rather than outcomes desired by development initiatives, are established as offering fertile ground for future research, specifically regarding the impact of the household context. It is suggested that the motivations are distinct from those of women operating larger SMEs and require specific attention / 1 / Melissa E Langworthy

Evidence suggests that employment for women can reduce poverty and inequality resulting in improved living standards. The garment industry is an important source of income for Indian women. This thesis tested the effects of garment work as an income source on women’s health-care utilization practices and decision-making in comparison to both agricultural labourers and general women in India. Cross-sectional data collected from India’s National Family Health Survey-3 were used to generate descriptive statistics. Statistical modeling was used to test the effect of garment work on a) barriers to health care services and b) decision-making abilities of Indian women. Results suggest garment workers are younger, more educated, urban, and wealthier, make more cash earnings, and have more access and control over their own money as compared to agricultural labourers. Results indicate female garment workers report facing fewer barriers to accessing health care services. As well, access to cash earnings increases their decision-making abilities.

This study explores the effect of two NGO empowerment programs on the lives of women in urban slum communities of Ghana and India. In particular, the research aims to understand whether and to what extent economic empowerment through microfinance and skills training addresses women’s basic need and gender inequality in contexts of urban poverty. Considering the centrality of “empowerment” to collective feminist politics as well as development policy and practice, the purpose of this study is to contemplate what “empowerment” actually means from the perspective of those actively engaged in the process. Based on the survey and interview responses of program clients, this project explores the depth and scope of NGO empowerment interventions and considers steps that can be taken to further women’s empowerment. / text

The strategy of gender mainstreaming was implemented as a policy tool with its objective of achieving gender equality and benefitting both women and men. But it has been seen that the strategy had the tendency to present and focus only on one side of the gender coin, which are women and girls. Men and boys are hardly mentioned in gender related issues and appear as hazy background figures, which have further resulted in serious consequences for women and men, as well as the relationship between them in relation to gender equality efforts. This research analyzes the existing literature within the field of gender and development in order to comprehend the complexity surrounding gender equality concerning the policies with gender mainstreaming and its impact on women, men, and on the relationship between them. To increase the reliability of the research, an analytical model in the shape of a triangle was constructed to illustrate the symmetric correlation between gender policies, and their impact on women and men. The results of the research showed that with its main focus on women’s issues and empowerment, policies with gender mainstreaming appear to contribute to negative and threatened responses from men towards women’s increasing power. This is in relation to men’s sense of exclusion and disempowerment. The results further indicate a potential backlash in the objective of gender equality where men’s negative reactions can be seen to hamper women’s ability to perform their advanced role in households and communities, which further exacerbate the efforts of achieving equality.

Shea butter production in West Africa has been dominated by women and Northern Ghana specifically is a leading global producer. This thesis explores women’s perceptions of power, control and agency in the Ojoba Women’s Fair Trade Co-operative in Upper East Ghana. I add to the literature on women’s experiences with and in fair trade. I examine how the shea industry and the co-operative provide a marketplace for women and a space for women to co-operate and resist power structures. I emphasize how the Western language of empowerment builds substantially from pre-existing women’s networks and labour sharing practices in the agricultural context. The thesis evaluates the factors within Ojoba that contribute to women’s empowerment. To be ‘empowered’ in Ojoba reflects a variety of understandings, experiences and locations. Indeed “women’s empowerment” may misrepresent how the women are capable of building a physical and social space of safety, debate and growth.

Empowerment-based approaches to social development has attracted substantial attention in the last two decades. At the core of this debate is the preposition that empowering marginalised groups can improve their agency, with possible favourable implications for their life outcomes. The household bargaining literature has examined the effect of women’s empowerment/bargaining power on development outcomes (e.g. health, education, agriculture and household expenditure). A core issue in this literature is the measurement of what constitute women’s empowerment. The literature in economics and human development has tended to rely on the use of proxies that capture women’s access to resources and or capabilities/functioning. This approach tends to ignore or deemphasise the importance of social norms/informal institutions (norms, values, traditions, beliefs etc), which via patriarchal gender stereotypes, restrict women’s voice and access to resources. Although some researchers in demography have used proxies that capture social norms, they have been used alone, thus telling a single sided story as in the case of the economics and human development literature. Secondly, the discussion on the instrumental importance of women’s empowerment in this literature seem to have focused mainly on mean development outcomes compared to the distributions of such outcomes in the population (inequality). Thus, the current study, using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 20 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, computes a composite women’s empowerment Index (CWEI), together with two sub-indices (social norms and access to resources) representing two dimensions of CWEI. The study further examines the comparative effect of social norms and women’s access to resources on household health (i.e. mean health outcomes for women and children and poor child health inequality). Results suggest that in general, women from Southern Africa have a higher score on CWEI compared to their counterparts from East and Central Africa and West Africa. In addition, Southern African women are more able to negotiate social norms that constrain their voice and agency, whiles women from West Africa perform better on the access to resources index. Information from the DHS data and other external data sources (World Development Indicators database, International Labour Office and WEIGO), together with the SSA literature on the politics of liberation struggles and the formal/informal dichotomy of SSA economies, suggest that the sub-regional differences may be due to the unique history of liberation struggles in Southern Africa and the relatively large size of the informal sector in West Africa. Multivariate results also confirm the long held view that women’s empowerment positively influences household health (mean health outcomes and inequality), with social norms having a much higher effect on household health compared to women’s access to resources. In addition, the results suggest that other factors such as women’s education, household wealth, access to and availability of health services, rural/urban and provincial differences have a higher effect on household health compared to the two dimensions of women’s empowerment. The study concludes, advocating that interventions aimed at improving women’s empowerment and bargaining emphasise issues of social norms, since they are likely to constrain women’s voice, access to resources and consequently implications on household outcomes. This emphasis must however take into consideration the importance of other equally important factors (women’s education, household wealth, access to and availability of health services etc), given that women’s empowerment (especially informal institutions such as social norms) could take a long time to change and their effect realized in the long-term.

In Benin, women in general and rural women in particular are central to the development and sustenance of the household, community, and society at large. Yet, often, they lack the agency, as a result of limited education, life skills, and resources, to contribute to community development, or the structures in place (laws, religious beliefs, policies, and institutions) limit women’s ability to participate in community development. As a result of their limited agency and the unequal structures in society, women in Benin have often been denied participation in decisions around education, health, economy, and agriculture. While women are key actors in all these sectors, they are often not represented sufficiently in the discussions that shape their lives. Women in Benin have collectively organized into associations to address these issues. Associations such as Mothers Associations (MAs) in Benin, have emerged with the specific purpose of improving the education of their daughters. MAs function under the umbrella of Parent Associations (PAs) to address issues of particular concern to girl students. While PAs have helped to improve basic education by putting pressure on school administrators and political leaders to address the quality of schools, these associations have been primarily male dominated, rarely identifying the specific barriers to education for girls. My dissertation has three main objectives: to assess how MAs in Benin have collectively mobilized to enhance the quality of education for schoolgirls; to determine whether MA activities and mobilization efforts have led to women’s empowerment and influence within their respective communities; and to examine whether MAs have had an impact on changing harmful social norms. Overall, the objective of this research is to examine how members of the MAs have used their collective agency to enhance gender equality within the school and community life. Through a critical feminist approach and applying a socio-ecological model, I examine the process in which African women have mobilized, collaborated, and advocated for girls’ education in ways that subtly undermine the harmful relations of power that govern their position in society.

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The following thesis is a qualitative comparative case study which investigated the values, practices, perspectives, and strategies of Indian and American community organizers (practitioners and volunteers of non-profits and non-governmental organizations) who use microfinance, including savings schemes, as an instrument within the social intermediation process of developing disadvantaged women's capacities for self-sufficiency/empowerment. The focused inquiry was conducted through similarly structured in-depth interviews of directors, staff members and volunteers/community-based organizers of a women's business center in Northern Virginia, a large U.S. metropolitan area, and a women's federation in the rural Himalayas of Uttarakhand, India. Interview questions focused on savings, social intermediation, and financial sustainability/subsidization, which are three significant facets of microfinance. Katz's framework for constructing analytical topographies, contour lines, and countertopographies was used to structure of the various levels of analysis. Contour lines were drawn from the similarities between the two organizations. Differences were explained by situating each organization in Mayoux's theoretical paradigms of "Women's Empowerment through Microfinance." Analyses concluded with the construction of countertopographies on practices and strategies aimed towards collectively empowering women in disparate places around the world.

No description available.