October 2005

Women's Leadership —
Achieving the MDGs in India

in India — the country with the largest number of hungry people in the world — the key change agents for ending poverty, hunger and injustice are the one million women elected to India’s panchayats, or village-level councils.

India has set targets within its current five-year plan that surpass the global Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The 73rd amendment to India’s constitution passes responsibility for these goals to the panchayats and guarantees that one-third of all seats are reserved for women. Yet, to date, the panchayats lack government resources and training necessary to fulfill their responsibilities.

In 2000, The Hunger Project pioneered a new strategy to empower women panchayat leaders as the key to the end of hunger. Today, we implement a four-pronged strategy in thousands of Indian villages across 14 states to build the capacities of elected women, strengthen panchayats overall, build alliances for policy change, and influence public opinion.

How our strategy achieves all eight MDGs

India has numerous national and state government programs, which often fail to reach the people. The Hunger Project trains elected women representatives to successfully link people to government resources that are rightfully theirs, and in this way empower people to achieve the MDGs.
Goal 1. Eradicate extreme poverty: To date, The Hunger Project has trained over 30,000 elected women representatives to take effective action to end hunger and poverty in their communities and villages. The Women’s Leadership Workshop (WLW) trains women to organize themselves into self-help groups, through which they gain access to credit and establish small businesses, which improve their livelihoods. They have succeeded in increasing the nutritional value of school meal programs, growing small kitchen gardens, and making grain supplies available to the poorest of the poor.
   
Goal 2. Achieve universal primary education: A powerful example of addressing this goal is the work of Meera from Rajasthan. When she discovered that the state government had mysteriously cut off teachers’ salaries, she not only convinced the teachers to continue their work, but also stepped in and successfully took on the bureaucracy to resolve the issue.
   

 

Goal 3. Promote gender equality and empower women: The empowerment of women is fundamental to our work in India and around the world. The WLW has women recognize their selfhood, and confront the 5,000 years of subjugation they have endured. Women learn their rights, and take on issues that affect women’s lives — domestic violence, child marriage, dowry, and the importance of nutrition and education for girls.
   
Goal 4. Reduce child mortality: The under-five child-mortality rate in India is 93 per 1,000 live births. Bimla Devi from Uttaranchal is one of hundreds of elected women who have successfully mobilized the state government to build a primary health center in their village. Her single action has saved the lives of hundreds of children in her village, who otherwise would have died due to lack of basic health care.
   
Goal 5. Improve maternal health: Women leaders and their communities are being educated on the critical importance of proper nutrition for women before, during and after childbirth. In a district of Orissa, women panchayat leaders cut maternal mortality in half in 18 months through two simple steps: (1) intervening to improve the government’s mother-child nutrition program, and (2) educating members of women’s self-help groups to overcome superstitious food taboos that leave pregnant women badly nourished.

 

Goal 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases: Gender discrimination fuels the spread of HIV/AIDS. In India, recognizing the critical impact this disease has on the lives of the people, The Hunger Project, in collaboration with UNIFEM, is beginning to utilize the WLWs as a forum for mobilizing awareness among the women and their panchayats on HIV/AIDS and its prevention.
   
Goal 7. Ensure environmental sustainability: Graduates of the WLW have launched thousands of successful initiatives to improve sanitation, waste management and forestation.They successfully create and implement village-level plans to ensure safe drinking water, a cleaner environment, and toilets for every household.
   
Goal 8. Develop a global partnership for development: Hunger Project investors from around the world have been joined by bilateral agencies like the Swiss Development Corporation, Danish Embassy, Royal Norwegian Embassy, and international agencies like UNIFEM to empower and strengthen the leadership of elected women in India. In addition, the government of India has recognized the many contributions of The Hunger Project in strengthening local democracy, and has invited us to be on a panel to eradicate hunger and poverty in India.

Four-pronged strategy of The Hunger Project

Building the Capacity of Elected Women Leaders. The Hunger Project builds women’s capacity in five ways: (1) the three-day WLW transforms women’s self-confidence from “I can’t” to “I can and I will!”; (2) a fiveday training of trainers has prepared more than 500 trainers from 90 local organizations to deliver the WLW; (3) follow-up workshops further strengthen women’s leadership after the WLW; (4) skills trainings are provided as women get into action and discover their need for specific training; and (5) advanced training for the most dynamic women is delivered through our Aagaz Academy (see next page).
Making Panchayats Effective. Achieving the MDGs requires mobilizing entire communities to directly participate with their panchayats. Prior to elections, The Hunger Project conducts pre-election voter awareness campaigns on the vital importance of electing honest and accountable leaders. Post-election, The Hunger Project mobilizes public participation in the gram sabhas — open meetings of the entire population, which build awareness on key issues, set priorities, generate self-reliant action, and hold panchayats to account.
Influencing Public Opinion. The Hunger Project mobilizes the power of the media to report on the revolution under way as women step forward as village leaders. We conduct workshops for editors and reporters in rural areas, link reporters to panchayat women to learn of their success stories, host radio programs, and provide newspapers with stories and information. The centerpiece of this strategy is the Sarojini Naidu Prize for Best Reporting on Women and Panchayati Raj, annually awarded to print-media journalists at a prestigious ceremony in New Delhi on October 2 — Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday.

 

Building Alliances for Advocacy and Action. The Hunger Project builds federations of elected women leaders, so that they have a stronger voice at all levels of government. For example, in Bihar last year, more than 2,000 elected women marched on the state capital demanding that one-third of the panchayat presidencies be reserved for women, as in all other Indian states. This strategy includes creating strong partnerships with more than 90 local organizations — resulting in a Hunger Project alliance that presses for local and national reforms. The Hunger Project also participates in an advocacy coalition in support of achieving the MDGs in India.

OUR NEWEST INITIATIVE — THE AAGAZ ACADEMY

In 2005, The Hunger Project launched the Aagaz Academy — a center for women’s leadership. Aagaz means “a new beginning.” Elected women representatives who have demonstrated outstanding leadership for improving people’s lives will be provided a two-year advanced training course to further enable them to effectively participate in addressing sociopolitical and development issues to end hunger, poverty and injustice in India. The first Aagaz Academies are located in the states of Rajasthan, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

The Aagaz curriculum focuses on three components: personal empowerment, constituency building and technical skills.

Aagaz, like the WLW, expresses a new paradigm of leadership: not the “top-down, I’ll-tell-you-what- to-do” leadership that is widespread in India’s heavily patriarchal society, even among women — but an approach of “leading with” people, a style in which both the leader and the participant grow in self-confidence in the process.

The course includes a 20-day structured training program in year one, and seven days of structured learning in year two. The faculty — some of the top experts on women’s leadership issues — visit the participants at least three times over this period to help strengthen the practice of leadership in the field, and address challenges faced by elected women representatives on the ground.