Empowering women provides more choices for women and creates female role models and mentors in places where their economic opportunities have historically been limited. In the rural areas of the country, many home-based retail shops are run by men and women of the household on a full-time or a part-time basis but unreliable electricity service can make such businesses difficult to manage. To address this problem and thereby help the shop owners increase their earnings we at Technology and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA) provide them a solution through solar powered electricity.

"Literacy to Self Reliance" a package developed by TARA Akshar, is a flagship programme of the Development Alternatives (DA) Group initiating women into Hindi reading, writing and counting in a short span of 56 days (112 contact hours). This programme, in its subsequent stages, teaches women various additional skills needed for starting a small business or obtain a gainful employment. Emphasis is laid on the cultivation of entrepreneurial skills in the female population so as to help them raise their status together with increasing family incomes and boosting local economy simultaneously exercising a positive impact on the next generation. This newsletter discusses the success stories of TARA’s projects run under ‘Hariyali, Sampannnata and Udyamita’. The silver lining here that needs to be highlighted is the boost given to the local economy of the area where they are being implemented.

Several affirmative measures by way of programmes and schemes need to be initiated to bring women into the mainstream of development, especially by introducing them to entrepreneurial skills. Interventions could be focussed on entrepreneurial training as it has a tremendous potential towards empowering women and transforming the society. Yet this potential remains largely untapped, as only 10 per cent of the entrepreneurs in India are women. Making women folk financially literate, training them in life skills and eventually preparing them to run a home based business could be crucial to the local economy. Additionally, information on technical innovations for some crafts and trades (for example improved looms etc.) should be widely disseminated. A suitable model for womens’ financial inclusion must be worked out, too. Similar initiatives are required to bring about a change in women’s status and this aim can be achieved only when they become self reliant. Women need to have insights into market trends and tools to reach out to these markets. There is a need for policy and institutional framework in developing their entrepreneurial skills, providing vocational education and training for the economic empowerment of women. Finally, this will only be possible when we, the people of India, make our country a safer place for women to live in. q