Public gains, private struggles: Women’s collective livelihood initiatives and gender inequality in India

In the past decade there has been increased support from governments, NGOs and donor agencies for collective livelihood interventions organised by poor women. This support is largely in response to two assumptions: first, that collective enterprises are an effective buffer for the economic vulnerability of poor women, particularly since market liberalisation has made the livelihoods of individual women producers more precarious; and second, that collective interventions will offset the ambivalent and even negative effects on individual women’s economic empowerment that have been demonstrated to arise from the dominant program modality of microfinance channelled into individual women’s micro-enterprises (Garikipati 2012; Leach and Sitaram 2002; Goetz and Sengupta 1996).