SWAYAM’s program aims to empower women through women’s collective groups so that they can foster community and institutional support for themselves in responding to the unique challenges they face. IDinsight’s process evaluation aims to capture how women, leaders of self-help groups, trainers, and government officials experience SWAYAM’s program activities. Such evidence can better inform program implementation and the program’s scale-up in other states.
The Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE) partnered with the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in India to implement different programmatic activities of the Strengthening Women’s Institutions for Agency and Empowerment (SWAYAM) program. At the end of 2019, implementing partners began introducing program activities across SWAYAM’s four states (Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha). These activities ranged from establishing gender resource centers, training women in self-help groups, and training government officials to sensitize them to women’s issues. IWWAGE sought to understand how each program at each state worked to achieve high level key program goals.
Many approaches to women’s empowerment have focused on government-led initiatives in a “top-down” approach. By contrast, SWAYAM’s program aimed to empower women through women’s collective groups so that they could foster community and institutional support for themselves in responding to the unique challenges faced by them. IDinsight’s process evaluation aimed to capture how women, leaders of self-help groups, trainers, and government officials experienced SWAYAM’s program activities. Such evidence could better inform program implementation and the program’s scale-up in other states.
IDinsight conducted a process evaluation of SWAYAM’s programs by conducting two rounds of phone surveys of key stakeholders: women in SHG groups, gender champions, panchayat leaders, village officers, and block managers. Topics of the survey covered awareness, attendance, and use of key program activities, as well as outcomes related to women’s agency, economic empowerment, bodily integrity, social networks, and political empowerment. These activities allowed IDinsight and IWWAGE to understand if SWAYAM was being implemented as intended, which in turn could help inform future programming and scale-up.
5 December 2024
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We support NGO partners to improve program design, streamline implementation, evaluate impact, and accelerate scale-up.
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