Community Based Women Empowerment Initiatives in India

Over the years, India has designed and implemented a number of targeted interventions for the poor including putting in place specific reservations for the disadvantaged to ensure equitable access to pro-poor central and state government programmes. India also has several examples of small scale community designed and implemented poverty alleviation programmes that began as donor funded pilots and have, over time, been scaled up and mainstreamed with government programmes. This document discusses the salient features of three such programmes that are among the more successful community based poverty alleviation programmes in India. These are Kudumbashree, Kerala; Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), Andhra Pradesh; and Jeevika, Bihar.