Public decision making by women’s self-help groups and its contributions to women’s empowerment

Keywords: cultural norms, India, local institutions, process tracing, self-help groups, social change, women’s empowerment
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

‘Women’s empowerment’ is among the most influential concepts in contemporary international development. To date, most development policies that seek to empower women of the Global South have focused on the individualistic and economic dimensions of empowerment, of which women’s self-help groups (SHGs) form a key site. Far less attention has been paid to SHGs’ role in collective forms of empowerment, even though feminist scholars have advocated for a reframing of power that includes collective action, consciousness, and resource access components for some time. In this poster, I present evidence of the importance of women’s collective decision making in the public sphere to women’s empowerment by illustrating how a group of SHGs in West Bengal, India formed a group identity and leveraged its power to successfully execute community-based initiatives. This involved: (1) the establishment of trust, unity, and solidarity among group members via effective leaders who emphasized the consistent participation of all members in group activities; (2) the development of the SHGs’ sense of self-sufficiency and their legitimacy as decision-making bodies within their community through a self-led project to establish a grain bank in their village; and (3) the exercise of that legitimacy and developing sense of authority via the organization of multiple SHGs beyond their village around a controversial goal—alcohol prohibition—that sought to change male behavior for women’s benefit. These data suggest that public decision making by SHGs working collaboratively at scale can lead to enduring empowerment because it puts women in a position to challenge patriarchal norms.