WOMEN EMPOWERMENT & KUDUMBASHREE :

A WOMEN ORIENTED POVERTY ALLEVIATION PROGRAMME IN KERALA

S Venkat Narayan *

Are women poorer than men? This question needs to be looked at from a human resource and capabilities perspective. We will then find that women are in fact poorer in terms of endowments as well as opportunities and lag behind men with respect to education, health, employment and other social indicators. Gender inequalities in the income distribution, access to productive inputs such as credit, command over property and control over earned income, and gender biases in labour markets coupled with the social exclusion that women experience in a variety of economic and political institutions, render women more vulnerable to chronic poverty.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 1997), the combined paid and unpaid labour time of women is much more than men's labour. Although it is often stated that labour is the poor man's most abundant asset, much of the work women does is socially unrecognized since it is unpaid, making women relatively more poor. Almost in all cultures and at all levels of economic development; women tend to dedicate themselves to unpaid reproductive or caring labour in contrast to men, who tend to specialize in paid production activities. Furthermore, when women are in paid work, they are paid much less for the same work compared to men. Thus, women, on an average, work more, but have less command over income as well as assets.

In addition to this husband's tend to have a greater command over the wife's labour such that in a crisis situation they may be able to mobilize her labour. Women generally do not have the reciprocal right or ability to mobilize men's labour. Women's responsibilities for reproductive labour limit the range of paid economic activities they can undertake. They are less mobile than men because of their reproductive/caring labour activities and because of the social norms that restrict their mobility in public. In the paid sphere, they tend to be concentrated in informal labour activities1, since such activities allow them to combine paid work with unpaid reproductive labour. However, these also are insecure forms of work as it is hard for such workers to get organized for collective action. The gender-based division of labour between unpaid (and often reproductive) labour and paid labour makes women economically and socially more insecure and vulnerable to chronic poverty. Moreover, familial, personal, social and economic crises force women to work harder as compared to men and increase their paid and unpaid labour activities in order to sustain their households (Moser: 1992).

The vicious cycle of poverty can be further evidenced when women work longer hours than men and earn less. As a result, they are left with less food and maternal time. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that in households where women work, they use their resources more productively than their male counterparts. In Brazil, for instance, a study has found that income in the hands of mothers has a positive effect on child health that is almost 20 times greater than income that is controlled by the father. Similar results have been reported in Chile, Guatemala, Kenya, and Malawi (Buvinic: 1997). This also clearly shows that in households where women earn and control resources, they prefer to invest them in child and family welfare. The difference in the way that men and women prefer to spend scarce resources in poor households suggests that, the income the poor women earn can yield higher health or social benefits than that earned by men.

1 Domestic help, tailoring, pickle making, and other areas where there is little scope for major economic development.

Women empowerment has become a popular method in development and poverty assessment and alleviation work ever since the relationship between gender and poverty was recognized. For a better appreciation of these linkages, we can look into the Kudumbashree programme in Kerala, which is officially described as a `Women Oriented Poverty Alleviation Programme'. In this context it is necessary to contextualize the significance of women empowerment and to be aware of Kerala's interesting past and tradition of popular participation in the political processes. Well known for having the first communist rule in history and a succession of social movements, Kerala has attracted many social scientists across the world for the significant advances made in human development in spite of having limited economic resources.

KUDUMBASHREE - A BRIEF OVERVIEW:

"To eradicate absolute poverty in ten years through concerted community action under the leadership of Local Self Governments, by facilitating organization of the poor for combining self-help with demand-led convergence of available services and resources to tackle the multiple dimensions and manifestations of poverty holistically."

Mission Statement of Kudumbashree2

In 1991, the Government of Kerala, along with the UNICEF, initiated the Community-Based Nutrition Programme (CBNP) in Alleppey town to improve the health and nutritional status of children and women. The CBNP facilitated collective action by forming and developing the capacity of three-tiered Community Development Societies (CDS), composed exclusively of women. Women from families identified as poor by using a nine-point non-income based index were organized into Neighborhood Groups (NHGs) comprising 20-45 families. Each NHG elected a five-member committee called the Neighborhood Group Committee (NHGC) to coordinate and facilitate action at the NHG level. The NHGs were federated at the ward level as an area development society (ADS). The ADS was then federated at the municipal level as a CDS. Based on the positive experiences in urban Alleppey, and subsequently in rural Malappuram, the Government of Kerala scaled up the CDS strategy to the entire state in 1998 under the name Kudumbashree (Kadiyala: 2004).

The focus of Kudumbashree program is on eradicating extreme poverty in the state of Kerala within a period of ten years. The earlier poverty alleviation programs in India had been criticized for applying a strict `top-down' approach, which was said to limit implementation and its outcome (Narasimhan: 1999: PP 35-36). In contrast, Kudumbashree's main objective was to change the situation of the poor `from below' by supporting and making possible incentives for action at the grass root level through a participatory approach involving beneficiaries directly in the process. The approach adopted in Kudumbashree is markedly different and it aims to form opportunity structures for the underprivileged to improve their economic and social situation. Women empowerment initiatives, micro-finance operations, micro-enterprise promotion, and convergent community action constitute the core activities of Kudumbashree, which are carried out through organizations of women below the poverty line.

FIELD STUDY:

Given the time and resource constraints, it was decided to limit the field coverage to Allapuzha Municipality and Muhamma Panchayat, and conduct a small number of in-depth interviews. For exploring the meanings of a project like Kudumbashree, this scale might seem too limited. Yet, the intention was not to seek the hidden `truth' about the progress that Kudumbashree has come to bring about in Kerala, but to make visible the possible structural obstacles and social constraints that could

2 Kudumbashree website: http://www.kudumbashree.org/ Feb 25 2006.

impede the real empowerment of women and militate against the reduction of the poverty (both income and gender) among women.

The personal interviews and the observations made during the field visit are summarized below under various broad headings.

Women's decision making power

Almost all the women who were interviewed said that they were allowed to come out of their houses and participate only with the permission and consent of their husbands. Even after being in the Programme for a long time, they believe that household work is their major responsibility and if they do not do it properly, they will be denied permission by their husband and family members to come out and participate in these activities. Their income from their outside activities is usually lower than their husbands' and they are allowed to engage in them only on the condition that they have to do the household work, along with their work outside, which is considered by both men and women as women's natural duty.

Women's mobility

The mobility of Kudumbashree participants from private to public sphere has given them more confidence and self-esteem. The interviewees were very confident and clear in expressing their views to a stranger, which they said would never have been possible before they came out of their houses. But the improvements in women's mobility and increased interaction with the outside world have only doubled their burden. These have not brought about any major change in the gender roles; women still have to fulfill both productive and reproductive roles, sacrificing a major part of their leisure time. Most of the working women who were interviewed have sacrificed their leisure time for economic gain. They sleep only five to six hours a day. In addition, working women are also under the obligation to be at home before their husbands come back from work.

Women's participation (Political, Social and Economic)

There is perceptible change in the participation level of women in political, social, and economic spheres that were hitherto considered a male bastion. The interviewees do participate in these activities, even though their participation is more or less controlled by the men either belonging to their families or to the institutions implementing the programme. Micro-enterprises and micro-credit are considered the main achievements of the programme by the Kudumbashree authorities that have changed the economic situation of many families. Though in the field study it was seen that the micro enterprises only included those occupations which are traditionally ascribed to women like tailoring, candle making, computer business, lease-land farming, paper-bag production, soap making and catering. Moreover, most of these businesses found it difficult to attract customers due to limitation of resources for marketing. While most of the women I interviewed appreciated the opportunity to contribute economically to the family, and especially to the future of their children, I found their new `profitable' situation to be extremely vulnerable and insecure. The cost of micro-finance and the tenure of the loan are such that the women have to run a profitable business for a number of years before they can access the profit of their work.

Changes in social attitudes towards women

The Kudumbashree program officials (mostly men) themselves, have little or no understanding of gender poverty, though they are very concerned with income poverty, with the target population being women. Gender poverty is related to women's position in the society and the family and the mitigation of income poverty does not necessarily reduce gender poverty and make women happy.

 

The programme officials felt that household work is the duty of women who have to manage their time accordingly, if they really want to earn more money. This lack of understanding of the gender relations and their impact on women will greatly impair the programme's capacity to influence gender relations and power structure in the society.

Gender relations within household

Economic empowerment might offer a prospect of employment and financial autonomy, but the workload of women is being doubled, as they continue to be fully involved in household work. Many of the constraints on the effectiveness of the programme could be linked to intra-household power relations in one way or the other. Strict cultural codes on the gender division of labour in the private sphere are not challenged by social and economic empowerment, as it was not a part of the programme strategy to question the status quo.

Conclusion

To conclude, Kudumbashree has made a significant impact on reducing the income poverty of poor families and has also, to some extent, kept them from falling back into a vicious cycle of poverty. But from the standpoint of a programme aimed at women empowerment, it has not been able adequately to address the issue of gender inequality in the power relations within the household and the society, notwithstanding the fact that this asymmetry is the main reason for women to be poorer than men.

END NOTES:

Buvinic, Mayra (1997), Women in Poverty: A New Global Underclass, Foreign Policy, No: 108.

Kabeer, Naila. 1996. Agency, Well-being, and Inequality: Reflections on Gender

Dimensions of Poverty. IDS Bulletin. 27 (1), pp. 1121.

Kadiyala Suneetha (2004), Scaling Up Kudumbashree.Collective Action For Poverty Alleviation And Women's Empowerment, FCND Discussion Paper No. 180, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

Moser, Caroline. 1992. Adjustment from Below: Low-Income Women, Time and the

Triple Role in Guayaquil, Ecuador. In Woman and Adjustment Policies in the

Third World Haleh Afshar and C. Dennis (Eds.). London: MacMillan.

Narasimhan, Sakuntala (1999), Empowering women: an alternative strategy from rural India, New Delhi, Calif., Sage.

UNDP. 1997. Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Cecile. 1996. Rescuing Gender from the Poverty Trap. World Development , 24(3), pp. 489504

* Mr. S. Venkat Narayan is a Ph D scholar at the Centre for Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

July - November 2007