Husbands' Participation in Housework and Child Care in India

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106852/1/jomf12108.pd

“Day and night people run after money … where is the time to spend chit-chatting with parents?”: Challenges of, and coping strategies for, supporting older relatives in adults of varied socioeconomic backgrounds in Tamil Nadu, India

Fertility has declined significantly across the socioeconomic spectrum in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which has the potential to increase the strains of support provision for family members and to limit support for dependent older people. We used a qualitative approach to explore the challenges that adults (N ​= ​113) from varying socioeconomic backgrounds (urban/rural and socioeconomic status) in Tamil Nadu experience when supporting their older relatives, and to understand how they cope with these challenges. While the broad challenges mirrored those seen elsewhere in India and globally (e.g., role conflict), some were particular to the context of contemporary Tamil Nadu (e.g., difficulties around supporting son/child-less or non-co-resident elders). The challenges experienced were qualitatively similar across socioeconomic groups but affluent families had more coping strategies available to limit the negative outcomes of support provision. We highlight the potential value of universal health coverage for promoting family-based support for older Indians, the urgent need for strategies to ease the challenges for lower socioeconomic status families, and the importance of wider socioeconomic policy to reduce the financial and time pressures that restrict the support that much of the population can provide each other

15. Self-help groups and the empowerment of Women – a study on Community Development Society in Alleppey, Kerala

The concepts of civil society, empowerment and community participation have become part of the liberal discourse of non-party formations such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the Welfare State in recent years. As a result, the State came out with many welfare policies for poverty alleviation and the decentralisation of power. NGOs, on their part started many local-level economic development programmes such as microcredit to uplift the poor, particularly women, from their economic..

Microfinance challenges: empowerment or disempowerment of the poor?

Microfinance is often presented, not only as an efficient tool to fight against poverty, but also as a means of promoting the empowerment of the most marginalized sections of the population, especially women. However, reality has shown that the causal relation between microfinance and empowerment is neither linear, nor unequivocal and that it is even less systematic. This book is an attempt to nourish the debate, on the one hand, by combining theoretical reflections and case studies, and on the other hand, by engaging practitioners and researchers from various backgrounds (mainly economists, sociologists and anthropologists). First of all, we consider the question of definitions. Even if everyone agrees that the concept of ‘empowerment' refers to notions of choice, of power and of change, the diversity of definitions suggested here confirms that under no circumstances does a universal conception of it exist. The second part insists on the central role of the environment. The link between microfinance and empowerment is all the more subtle, and sometimes unforeseeable, as microfinance projects take place within an economic, socio-cultural and political context that is itself complex, evolutionary and which partially conditions the results obtained. Microfinance projects - as any development projects - should therefore be understood and analyzed as endogenous processes. Finally, a third part relates to the crucial question of evaluation. Here still, the diversity of the results is striking: certain experiments are very positive while elsewhere the results are very mixed and sometimes even worrying. One does not speak any more of empowerment, but of “disempowerment” or even “overempowerment”. This heterogeneity of results is due as much to the diversity of the projects, their methods of action, the target population, and the context of intervention as to the methodologies of evaluation. The conclusion leads us to go beyond a certain number of contradictions evoked throughout the book while proposing to think of empowerment using the French concept of “solidarity-based economy”. This concept of solidarity-based economy, which is theoretical as well as normative, is a framework for analysis and action, which, according to us, must make it possible to guard against the risks of failures and perverse effects mentioned throughout the book.La relation de causalité entre microfinance et empowerment n’est ni linéaire, ni univoque et encore moins systématique. Cet ouvrage propose d’alimenter le débat, d’une part en combinant réflexions théoriques et études de cas, d’autre part en confrontant praticiens et chercheurs de diverses disciplines. Une première partie propose de définir le concept d’empowerment. Une seconde partie insiste sur le rôle central de l’environnement. Le lien entre microfinance et empowerment est d’autant plus subtil, parfois imprévisible, que les projets de microfinance prennent place dans un contexte économique, social, culturel et politique qui est lui-même complexe, évolutif et qui conditionne partiellement les résultats obtenus. Une troisième partie porte sur la question cruciale de l’évaluation