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Women Empowerment

All published content in this sector: primers, practice notes, and organisation spotlights.

All Women Empowerment Content

18 published pieces

Scheme Primer Grade A Women Empowerment

Lakhpati Didi Sahayika Yojana — Odisha's Drive to 25 Lakh Women Earning Rs. 1 Lakh a Year

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7 min read Read →
Scheme Primer Grade A Women Empowerment

Stand-Up India — Rs. 10 Lakh to Rs. 1 Crore for SC/ST and Women Entrepreneurs

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6 min read Read →
Scheme Primer Grade A Women Empowerment

PM Ujjwala Yojana — Clean Cooking Fuel for 10.33 Crore Poor Households

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Scheme Primer Grade A Women Empowerment

PM Jan Dhan Yojana — Every Unbanked Adult's Gateway to the Formal Economy

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7 min read Read →
Scheme Primer Grade A Women Empowerment

Jan Suraksha Schemes — Rs. 25,000 Crore in Claims Paid to India's Most Vulnerable in 11 Years

| Parameter | PMJJBY | PMSBY | APY |

8 min read Read →
Scheme Primer Grade A Women Empowerment

Subhadra Yojana — Odisha's Rs. 50,000 Direct Transfer to Women

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6 min read Read →
Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

SEWA Bharat — The Federation That Carries the SEWA Movement Across India

Over 90 percent of Indian women workers are in the informal economy. They are street vendors, home-based piece-workers, domestic workers, agricultural labourers, waste pickers, construction workers. Most have no written contract, no social security, no protection from hazardous c...

4 min read Read →
Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

Mahila Housing Trust — The Women Who Rebuilt Their Slums and Cooled Their Cities

Meenaben Soni lives in Vishwasnagar, an informal settlement in Ahmedabad. She works as a tailor. For months of the year, Ahmedabad's temperatures exceed 40 degrees Celsius. Her tin-roofed home made working at her sewing machine impossible during peak heat — she lost income becaus...

4 min read Read →
Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

Breakthrough — The Gender Curriculum That Odisha's Schools Are Now Teaching

From 2013 to 2017, researchers from J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) partnered with Breakthrough and the Government of Haryana to answer a specific question: can a school-based curriculum actually change adolescents' gender attitudes, aspirations, and behaviours?

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Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

MYRADA — The Organisation That Invented the SHG

The Self-Help Group is now so embedded in Indian development that it is easy to forget it was invented — by specific people, at a specific organisation, in response to specific failures of the existing financial system.

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Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

CREA — The Global South Organisation That Changed the Conversation

Most of the world's leading feminist human rights organisations are headquartered in New York, London, or Geneva. The frameworks they produce, the campaigns they run, the language they establish for global discourse on women's rights — these are generated predominantly in the glo...

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Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

Kudumbashree — What Happens When a Government Actually Listens

Kudumbashree means "prosperity of the family" in Malayalam. It was launched in 1998 by the Government of Kerala as a poverty eradication and women empowerment programme. Twenty-eight years later, India's President inaugurated its Silver Jubilee celebrations at Thiruvananthapuram,...

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Org Spotlight Grade B Women Empowerment

SEWA — The Union That Refused to Choose Between Labour and Sisterhood

In 1972, Ela Bhatt attempted to register the Self-Employed Women's Association as a trade union in Ahmedabad. The labour commissioner refused. Unions, he explained, were for workers who had employers. Self-employed women — home-based piece-workers, street vendors, agricultural la...

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Practice Note Grade B Women Empowerment

Land Rights for Women in Tribal Odisha — The Foundation Everything Else Stands On

The Landesa-supported pilot programme in Odisha, which worked with the Government of Odisha to provide land rights to vulnerable landless women, demonstrated this practically — and produced learning about what institutional and policy reform is required to make women's land right...

9 min read Read →
Practice Note Grade B Women Empowerment

GBV Survivors — Connecting Them to the Support They Are Entitled To

Odisha has a reasonably comprehensive formal support system for GBV survivors on paper. In practice, for women in remote tribal communities, most of it is inaccessible. Understanding both what exists and where it fails is the starting point.

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Practice Note Grade B Women Empowerment

Women's Political Leadership — Supporting Elected Representatives in Panchayats

Lakshmamma (name changed) is an elected panchayat member from Karnataka's Raichur district, documented in a 2025 field study. She attended meetings regularly and signed official documents. In discussions, her voice was rarely heard. Decisions were made by the men in the room — in...

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Practice Note Grade B Women Empowerment

SHG Federation Models — Beyond the Savings Group

Primary savings and credit function. Women meet fortnightly or monthly. They save, they lend to each other, they maintain accounts. This is where the relationship begins. But an isolated SHG has no collective voice beyond its own members. One group of fifteen women cannot negotia...

11 min read Read →
Sector Primer Grade B Women Empowerment

Women Empowerment in Odisha: The Revolution That Is Already Here — And the Work That Remains

She runs the hospital canteen in a district town in Ganjam. Every morning, her SHG delivers diet-chart meals to post-surgical patients — hygienic, on time, twice a day. Before Mission Shakti, she was making between ₹500 and ₹1,000 a month from a small tiffin centre she ran out of...

24 min read Read →