Entrepreneurship has been increasingly promoted as a means to achieve women’s empowerment in the pursuit of gender equal societies by international development organizations, NGO’s as well as national and local governments across the world. Against this, the paper explores the role and influence of multi-actor engagement on successful empowerment of women based on a case study of Kudumbashree program in a regional context of Kerala, in South India. Our objective is to examine the women empowerment outcomes of the Kudumbashree initiatives, implemented within a multi-actor engagement framework supportive of women’s empowerment through capacity building and social inclusion programs. The case study demonstrates ‘how multiple-level engagements help enhance women’s development and support broad sustainable social change, in view of their sensitivity to the embeddedness of women’s agency under specific socio-political and cultural contexts’. We find that Kudumbashree programs, through its multi-actor engagement, strives for an equilibrium between social change through policy and regulatory change (top down) and social change via mobilizing the people (bottom-up). From a policy angle, the key learnings from the successful outcomes of Kudumbashree may be considered for designing rural and urban community development programs with a focus on the multidimensional empowerment as well as social and economic inclusion of women and other marginalized communities.

中文翻译：

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多方参与在印度喀拉拉邦妇女赋权和创业中的作用

国际发展组织，非政府组织以及世界各国和地方政府在追求性别平等的社会中，越来越多地促进企业家精神，以增强妇女的权能。与此相反，本文基于印度南部喀拉拉邦的Kudumbashree计划的案例研究，探讨了多方参与对成功赋权妇女的作用和影响。我们的目标是研究通过能力建设和社会融合计划支持妇女赋权的多方参与框架内实施的Kudumbashree举措赋予妇女的权力成果。案例研究表明“多层次的参与如何帮助促进妇女的发展并支持广泛的可持续社会变革，考虑到她们在特定的社会政治和文化背景下对妇女机构的包容性的敏感性。我们发现，Kudumbashree计划通过其多参与者参与，力求在通过政策和监管变更（自上而下）的社会变革与通过动员人民（自下而上）的社会变革之间取得平衡。从政策角度来看，在设计农村和城市社区发展方案时，可以考虑从库杜巴什里的成功经验中汲取的主要经验教训，重点放在妇女和其他边缘化社区的多维赋权以及社会和经济包容性上。力求通过政策和监管变革（自上而下）与通过动员人民（自下而上）实现社会变革之间的平衡。从政策角度来看，在设计农村和城市社区发展方案时，可以考虑从库杜巴什里的成功经验中汲取的主要经验教训，重点放在妇女和其他边缘化社区的多维赋权以及社会和经济包容性上。力求通过政策和监管变革（自上而下）与通过动员人民（自下而上）实现社会变革之间的平衡。从政策角度来看，在设计农村和城市社区发展方案时，可以考虑从库杜巴什里的成功经验中汲取的主要经验教训，重点放在妇女和其他边缘化社区的多维赋权以及社会和经济包容性上。