Between ‘Empowerment’ and ‘Liberation’ The Kudumbashree Initiative in Kerala

TLDR: In this article, the authors assess the claims of the Kerala government's poverty eradication programme, the Kudumbashree, which combines a micro-finance model with other elements through critical feminist lenses, and place this programme within Kerala's own historical experience of empowering the poor.

Abstract: Micro-finance and its (purported) capacity to empower women is by now a well-explored field all over the world. We now have several tools by which micro-finance programmes may be assessed. However, here we attempt to critically assess the claims of the Kerala government's poverty eradication programme, the Kudumbashree, which combines a micro-finance model with other elements through critical feminist lenses. Further, we attempt to place this programme within Kerala's own historical experience of empowering the poor. Given the fact that this major effort to popularise micro-finance in Kerala has the twin aims of poverty alleviation and women's empowerment, this seems justified. We try to place the ‘micro-finance revolution’ in Kerala within the larger historical trajectory of successive ‘regimes of empowerment’ in order to understand the different political stakes in each, and their implications for gender politics. While using some of the available tools that employ indicators of gender effectiveness to ...