It is a common thing to observe that women are unable to complete their studies or do not get proper jobs or lack in skills, which lead to their deteriorating financial condition, they are dependent on others or they are unable to support their families. By providing vocational training to the girls and women, we can help them a step further so that they could do things on their own and earn their bread. With the vocational training, women can get economically empowered even when they do not have any proper job. They can start their businesses, they can make and sell things from home, they can get jobs in manufacturing units, etc. There are many training sessions conduct online as well so women who are working from home or working online, can enhance their skills.
Women empowerment and economic development are closely related. Development can bring down inequalities in society; however, gender inequalities can only be brought down by ensuring women’s participation. Women's economic participation is fundamental to strengthen their rights and enable them to have control over their lives and establish a place for themselves in society. An inclusive development, therefore, can happen if the participation of women is ensured. In this context of discrimination and inequalities against women, Amartya Sen coined the term, “missing women,” which aptly sums up the society we live in. This term focuses on the persistence of gender inequalities in societies. According to a World Bank report (2011), six million women go missing every year; of these twenty-three percent are never born, ten percent go missing in early childhood, twenty-one percent in the reproductive years, and thirty-eight percent above the age of 60. In developing countries women are treated differently from their male counterparts. These discriminations deprive them of education, job, awareness and political responsibility.
In many countries, women still do not have legal ownership rights to land and manage property, conduct business or even travel without the consent of the husband. The number of women falling within the poverty cycle is increasing at a faster rate than that of men (Duflo, 2012). In addition, the rise in the number of households supported solely by women is an important factor explaining the increase in poverty among women. Less job opportunities, along with low wages for women are discriminatory, more so when the general responsibility of running the household in on women, in response to male migration in search for better work. As the dependency increases, the resources at disposal decrease, further exposing the households to the menace of poverty. Nevertheless, in the last 30 years, through many affirmative actions, women are doing well in many fields. The situations prevalent in society have demonstrated the need for developing policies and programmes that empower women.
Empowerment, in the context of women, should include the expansion of choices for women and additionally, increase women’s ability to exercise choice. It has been observed that women’s access to employment raises women's ability to exercise choice more firmly than otherwise. Further, it is easier to expand women's capabilities than their opportunities. There is a disproportionate representation of women in developing countries. Much of the work done by women goes unrecognized because generally they work in the informal sector of the economy. Therefore, much of the support is needed in the informal sector of the economy, where they could engage in petty trade, household help, food processing, garment manufacturing and other skilled trades.
It is a common practice that when women are in paid employment, they are more likely to be engaged in part time rather than full time work, in the informal rather than the formal sector, and across the globe women earn less than men for comparable work. While remunerated work is important for women, it is important to remember that women still undertake the bulk of unpaid work in the home, household plot, or family business. Women play the key role in the 'care economy', which not only provides care to the young, old and the sick, but is also vital for ensuring a productive workforce. As this work is not remunerated, it is undervalued and lies outside general conceptualizations of the economy.
Care needs to be taken to ensure that programmes serve women's needs and women are not merely placed at the service of these policy agendas (Molyneux 2007). It is important to remember that policies to promote economic development that include women but do not tackle the structural inequalities at the basis of their exclusion may bring growth gains, but will not necessarily bring gender equality gains.
It is important to integrate women into the formal sector of the economy. Women have been subordinated and sidelined in the process of economic development and this was seen as having its roots in their exclusion from the market sphere and their limited access to, and control over resources. For this, it is necessary to understand the constraints on realizing the full potential of women in the process of economic development and identify the priority areas of intervention necessary to unblock these constraints. Further, there is need to question the notion of ‘development’ and its benign nature, implying a need to shift from a narrow understanding of development as economic growth, to a more social or human centered development.
Empowerment of women firstly involves the change of consciousness to change their fate. It is a critical aspect of the process of change. The second step involves the importance of valued resources, that is, material, human, and social resources and has a control over them in society. Thirdly, women should come together and understand the nature of institutionalized injustice and act to tackle these issues of injustice. Women do not form a homogenous group; other factors like race, class, caste, and ethnicity are also in play, which further exacerbates the injustice.
Since the initiation of the debate on gender inequality, many attempts have been made to conceptualize women’s empowerment. Naila Kabeer, in her study has defined it “as a process through which women gain the capacity for exercising strategic form of agency in relation to their own lives as well as in relation to the larger structure of constraint that positioned as subordinating to men” (Kabeer, 1999). The conceptualization of women’s empowerment in terms of agency proved influential in policy circles. Heinsohn (2005) describes empowerment as “when the individual possess the capacity to make effective choices: that is, to translate the(ir) choices into desirable actions and outcomes”. The Inter-American Development Bank (2010), defined 'women empowerment' in terms of “expanding the rights, resources and capacity of women to make decisions and act independently in social, economic and political sphere”. The United Nations (2001) has defined women’s empowerment in terms of five components: “women’s sense of self worth; their right to have and determine choices; their rights to have access to opportunities and resources; their right to have power to control their own lives both inside and outside home; and their ability to influence the direction of social changes to create a more just and social and economic order, nationally and internationally”.
Skill development and vocational training is a good opportunity for them. Various kind of programmes and activities are being organized various government departments and civil society organizations promoting skill development trainings among the urban poor, helping in their economic empowerment and societal upliftment.
Skill development helps strengthen women’s agency by building women's ability to identify and act on economic opportunities, define, influence, and make economic decisions; and challenge social and cultural norms. Moreover, it increases women’s economic opportunities by supporting women to secure decent work, successfully establish and grow their businesses or increase their productivity and earnings. Women’s socially constructed altruistic behaviour means that economic resources that enter the household via women are more likely to be spent on household and children's needs. Female headed households may not be the 'poorest of the poor' as popularly constructed, since women who live with men may suffer 'secondary poverty'-the household overall is not poor but, as the man withholds income for personal consumption, women and children within the household are poor (Chant 2006). When women earn, men may withhold even more of their income, leaving women and children with access to the same level of resources but improving the position of women through greater control of those resources.
Skills development is a key to improving productivity, employability and income-earning opportunities, enhancing food security and promoting environmentally sustainable economic development and livelihoods for women in the slum areas. Skills development is not equated with formal technical, vocational and agricultural education and training alone, but is used more generally to refer also to the productive capacities acquired through all levels of education and training, occurring informal, non-formal and on-the-job settings, which enable individuals in all areas of the economy to become fully and productively engaged in livelihoods and to have the opportunity to adapt these capacities to meet the changing demands and opportunities of the economy and labour market. The acquisition of these capacities is dependent on many factors, including self-motivation, good quality education/training and the presence of a supportive environment, looking into the socio-economic condition of the slum areas.
Skills training provides for improvement in the quality of employment for disadvantaged women, in terms of earnings and job security. The basic assessment can be done through monitoring the change in the nature of employability. Expectations and non-cognitive skills are the possible channels through which the behavioural qualities of the respondents are shaped. Skills development training enhances women empowerment by increasing women’s confidence, decision making, capability and well being. The surest way of making women “partners in development” is through vocation based training and employment, which infuses them with a sense of economic empowerment, in a largely patriarchal setup. It also strengthens their representations in the visible workforce of the country, thereby providing them the ability to learn and grow.
The highest proportion of respondents expressed that attending skills training had helped them to enhance their skills. There was a consensus amongst more than half the respondents regarding enhancement of self-esteem and employability post skills development training. However, a large number of women opined that profitability of business did not improve after participating in training, neither did the service delivery. The respondents stay divided in their feedback regarding the impact of the skills training with people generally believing that it has helped open more opportunities for them but not exclusively in the economic sense as initially expected.
The employment rate reflects the success of skills training for the beneficiaries. A woman's access to skills training information is indirectly reflective of the way in which she overcomes barriers to information about opportunities and job seeking skills, which in turn impacts employability. For the top modes of information from which respondents received information about skills training and were currently working, it was seen that the employment rate for women who sought information from social workers and SHGs was the highest. The respondents stated that they learnt about the skills training programme mostly through neighbours/friends (49.1%) and social workers (17.7%). It was also seen that the optimal duration of training was for a period of three to six months, as most women (40%) trained in skills provided for this duration, showed a high employment rate. This shows that this period of time is ideal for respondents to learn a new skill or hone skills, and inculcate job seeking/self employing abilities. The number of trainees who had received individual training was lesser than the number of respondents who received training in groups. Despite that, when one looks at the employment rate, it can be seen that the employment rate for both are almost the same, thereby showing that individual training played a good chance in skills enhancement, provided more trainees received it across various skills training programmes/workshops.
Access to credit sources, which is an essential feature for economic empowerment, showed changes as most women shifted their focus towards Self Help Groups (SHGs), nationalized banks and Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs), alongside dependence on family members. This shift away from moneylenders and family members reflects the levels of financial inclusion amongst these women. The percentage change in the number of credit sources available before and after training show that access to nationalised banks have increased the most, followed by cooperative banks, SHGs, MFI, private banks, chit funds and other sources, in decreasing order of increase.
In terms of post training support in the form of cash or appliances, it was seen that only 4.2 per cent women received support after training, to start work. These were majorly in the trades of tailoring (36.5%) and beauty-care (33.5%); followed by computer training, retail management and others. Out of these recipients, only 40.5 per cent were using the cash or appliances given to them after the training, to earn personal income. This shows that very few training providers provide women with handholding post training. In spite of getting support, almost 60 per cent of women are not using it; this can be attributed to the fact that they face certain barriers in the form of lack of information, lack of financial assistance, moral support, inability to market their skills and lack of forward and backward linkages. It is also reflective of the women's lack of control over money matters, even if it were their own earnings. Based on the responses gathered during the survey, contrary to expectations, most women were still unable to influence family decision making (62.7%), despite contributing to household income. It was seen that only 30.6 percent of the women were involved in decision making in their families about money transactions after the training.
It was observed that, 16.2 per cent of the women stated that they received mediation or handholding from the training organisation or government after the training. Out of these, 31.1 per cent women received support from family members, followed by 13 per cent women from the NGOs and 3.1 percent from the government. Very few women received financial assistance in the form of cash from the training (1 percent), while 9 per cent did not receive any such support to start work on their own. Most of the women, that is, 83 per cent were unaware of receiving any such emoluments. This shows a lack of information on behalf of the beneficiaries about any form of handholding facilities provided by training providers.
The skills development programmes lack follow up services to help women make the transition to work, and they tend to measure the number of persons trained rather than the number of women gaining sustainable jobs or self employment. With a few notable exceptions, training programmes are not geared to the particular needs of women, especially the young. They are rarely linked to any assessment of market demand for goods and services. Nevertheless, the assessment of the women in slums shows an improvement in terms of economic empowerment. The improvement in access to markets and credit sources, post training, has instilled confidence in them about their abilities to activate the forward and backward linkages. Many women could also prioritize both economic and non-economic factors to improve their standard of living, which shows a fundamental understanding of the issue of poverty, that which comes only with empowerment.
The women within the age group 15 to 35 had received training mainly in the trades of tailoring, beauty care and computer training. Even though many still demanded training in beauty care (20.6%) and tailoring (17.7%), these women demanded training in a more diverse set of skills, as compared to earlier trades they were trained in, even though many trainees who have trained before still demanded advanced training in beauty care (20.6%) and tailoring (17.7%) The respondents’ skill desire showcased a lot of fluid responses; women showed keenness to learn any practical vocation provided it was a job-oriented skill (8.9%) and income incrementing (5.6%).
Women show dispersal from their previous state of access to markets outwards. The number of markets accessible after training varies between production and service based trainings. For the production-based trainings, there is an increase in access to all markets, except the local haats. There is lesser dependence on local haats in the urban areas, than in the rural areas. The service sector related trainings are accepted in all markets. Before training most women accessed local haats (22.2%). However, post training, women have increasingly started accessing the community markets (33%), the block (15.2%) and district (20.1%) level markets, and exporters (15.2%).
Subcribe on Youtube - IGNOU SERVICE
For PDF copy of Solved Assignment
WhatsApp Us - 9113311883(Paid)
0 Comments
Please do not enter any Spam link in the comment box