Can Social Enterprises Create Holistic Women Empowerment? A Case of Indian Artisan Women
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Abstract
World leaders across the globe are focusing on issues of women empowerment through the creation of equal opportunities in education, work, and society. The Indian artisans are being exposed to several interventions that aim at creating empowerment for these women from the rural underprivileged social strata. Social entrepreneurship has been considered as a driver of women's empowerment; hence it also becomes important to assess its potential to empower women in Indian rural artisan communities. The study was conducted in rural villages of one of the most underdeveloped states of India. Woman empowerment was measured on indices proposes by OXFAM. 130 women engaged with a social enterprise, and 127 women who were part of an NGO were compared with a base group of 130 women untouched by any intervention. We found that both social entrepreneurship and non-governmental organizations had the potential to influence women's empowerment, but social enterprises performed better on most of the indexes. The women working with the social enterprise have stronger financial independence that may be attributing to better self-confidence, autonomy, individual capability, opinion towards women’s economic role, greater control over household decisions and assets. While the environmental level indicators are slightly improved for NGO-based women, most probably due to their unity and psychological effect of being in a group. Social enterprises provided these women with hassle-free earnings and were accepted by the patriarchal social structure.
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