Sustainable Development through Enterprise’: Gender as a Third Dimension

Book ID: ISED-365

Book Type: Soft Copy

Description

‘Gender and Enterprise’(G&E) is a critical theme of development debates today. This theme can be summarized in terms of its twokey aspects: 1) economic empowerment of women through the entrepreneurship route; and 2) contribution to the creation of an ap-propriate enterprise ecosystem, where income opportunities are gender neutral. This is not a question of women empowerment alone.. In India, the practice of women entrepreneurship development is often confined to two key areas: a) awareness creation; and b) financing. The Union and State governments have a number of programmes for training and mentoring of women, which often leadsto some entrepreneurial activity, individual, collective, or both. The financial institutions have several gender -specific programmeswhich target women.In most of these programmes,provision of credit services is a common thread. A portion of the institutional cred-it go to women as per directives of the RBI and of the government. Beyond these, there is a key question: How relevant are the publicprogrammes for women entrepreneurship development ,and how effectively they are implemented. Another fundamental questionfollows: What are the critical constraints endemic to gender-specific programmes in relation to the larger and more broad based goalof economic empowerment of women.