Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 35. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. xii, 148 pp. (Tables, figures, map.) US$42.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-415-53367-6.
Patrick Kilby notes towards the end of this short book that there are two dimensions of empowerment that have received inadequate attention in development discourse and practice: one is empowerment as personal agency, that is the choices that can be made and the ability to follow through on them, and the second is the connection with the accountability of NGOs to those they serve.
Many Indian NGOs, in common with others across the world, have somewhere in their missions or visions the empowerment of women. There is an almost ubiquitous interest in the betterment of women’s lives, often an instrumentalist view that sees better fed, educated women living healthy lives as the route to improved delivery of development objectives and less commonly from a rights-informed interest that sees women’s control of their own lives as a good in itself.
There is no shortage of words and paper devoted to empowerment. As Kilby notes “empowerment…[has been ] slowly washed and bleached of any meaning” (2), yet he offers his understanding of it as follows: the expansion of choice and autonomous action for women (21). He explores whether and how NGOs can be empowerment intermediaries.
The book begins with an account of the context of NGO work in India including the rise of self-help groups. He then looks more specifically at NGOs in Karnataka and one running a waste-picker programme, covering primarily rural populations though one case study is in an urban area. A survey of 80 self-help groups provides the basis for an assessment of what they considered to be empowering. Finally, Kilby explores the issue of organizational accountability to the women they service and what lessons might be learned from this.
Outlining a 50-year-long tense relationship between the state and NGOs in India, Kilby points to a strong local base among such groups and the parallel dynamic of being constantly buffeted by the demands and expectations of donors. Second, NGOs face a stark choice: between becoming service delivery arms of the state or doing real empowerment work with women, which entails enabling the most poor and marginalized to claim their rights from the state.
As elsewhere, Indian NGOs are under pressure from donors to be accountable to them, to deliver according to their priorities and measure quantifiable outcomes and deliverables. And all this is to be done according to the donors’ (often too-short) timelines. What is missing, or least is less of a priority, Kilby tells us, is downward accountability: that is, to those we call beneficiaries, those who are served by the NGO. The core question then becomes: if the NGO seeks women’s empowerment then are women actually becoming empowered through engagement with the NGO? Rather than using externally established indicators and timelines to answer this question Kilby goes to the women beneficiaries. For the powerful (NGOs, donors) to define empowerment is a contradiction in terms.
There is a problematic chasm between addressing the marginalization of women and not touching the sphere of household relations, argues Kilby. It means that a major structure of gender inequality remains intact. The NGOs, he notes, tend to focus on issues of access, especially to social and community spheres, but these too remain gendered. Nevertheless, the research was intended to explore the nature of changes brought into the lives of women.
In exploring with women in the SHGs what changes they had experienced, that most closely identified with was the notion of personal agency: an increase in self-esteem through having more choices and an increased ability to act on them. The scale of the challenges that women faced has to be acknowledged: one of the choices that women appreciated was that of going outside the house. For those of us who understand engagement in the public sphere as being replete with possibilities, this is a fundamental and enabling choice. Kilby’s research confirms the consequent link to key forms of social and political engagement, such as becoming involved in civil village processes.
Two important characteristics of the nature of the engagement that enabled these changes for poor women are crucial: long-term engagement with the women (in terms of years) and the existence of formal mechanisms that invite input into the shaping of both the programmes being delivered and strategic direction. NGOs with these features are those that also had the strongest empowerment outcomes.
Non-membership NGOs are least likely to be under internal pressure for accountability, so the onus is on them to be committed to the principle Pacific Affairs: Volume 86, No. 3 – September 2013 666 of accountability and not to rely on others to press for this. The most marginalized, who are served by such groups, may not be the most vocal in calling for such mechanisms and processes. This reverses the accountability to which we are accustomed: that of the funder, the donor, who exerts control and sets timelines and outcomes, over those they fund. Instead, Kilby brings attention to the relatively powerless (aid beneficiaries) holding their providers to account. It is through such processes that power is exercised, and where empowerment grows, for poor women. But it is a difficult balance that NGOs must obtain in allowing “outsiders,” so to speak, to exercise control or significant influence over their work, yet still manage somehow to keep the confidence of the donors without whom they may not exist. This is no easy task. Further, it asks us to go beyond the popular development interest in participation to focus on accountability: the divesting of (at least some) power to others, not the funders who keep us going but the poor in whose name we act. It is not unknown to link questions of empowerment to questions of personal agency, as those contesting violence against women have shown and argued. But more can be made of this aspect, in addition to the material dimensions preferred in development. A more holistic understanding of the reality of poor women’s lives, and how the personal and the public remain inextricably entwined, can only be helpful. Kilby invites us to re-focus on this, which is most welcome.
Purna Sen
London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom
p. 664