NIRANTAR - a centre for gender and education

Education & Microcredit

Nirantar’s work in the field of gender and education has involved looking at and creating learning opportunities for adult rural women. Our explorations have revealed that today learning opportunities for adult women, and the spaces and processes required for undertaking the journey of empowerment, are shrinking.

At the same time, the discourse on empowerment has been shifting in a manner that has excluded aspects of social and political rights of women and focused only on financial efficiency and sustainability. Similarly, within the discourse on development, the onus for poverty reduction is increasingly being put on poor women. Reducing state accountability is an accompanying feature of this neo-liberal paradigm for development today.

Our explorations into the study of gender and education for adult rural women led us to understand in greater depth the ‘self-help group (SHG) phenomenon’ in India. We figured that all the claims that are being made about SHGs, microcredit and empowerment, were not translating into reality at the grassroots level. We have come to realise that SHGs are not another development issue. Rather, it is a phenomenon that has significantly changed the way we see ‘empowerment’ and ‘poverty alleviation’ and, in a sense, the way in which we have begun to see ‘women’.

Recognising this, since 2001 Nirantar began creating a space for reflection and discourse in a context in which no such space existed. Today, our interventions range from perspective building and training of community-based NGOs, building a collective voice within civil society organisations, impacting national policies and using international advocacy mechanisms like CEDAW.

Our work has included:
Research studies, publication and dissemination of the learnings of the two study reports:

- “Examining Empowerment, Poverty Alleviation and Education within Self Help Groups (SHGs) – A Qualitative Study”
- “Examining Literacy and Power within Self Help Groups (SHGs) – A Quantitative Study”

Perspective building, advocacy and lobbying in order to influence discourse and policy, within civil society organisations, donor agencies and the State, to urge them to reflect on their policies and programmes vis-à-vis SHGs and women’s empowerment.

To get copies of the reports, contact us