Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Exploring Linkages between Citizenship, Livelihood Security 361
the question of how women’s personal control over resources will help
in altering patriarchal relations and impact on gender asymmetry—the
preference for male children, violence against women, as well as ensuring
equal opportunities for girls in choosing their future—has not
been articulated clearly and remains unclear to programme managers
(IDS 2004).
It is clearly evident that the project, while addressing the economic
needs of women, has not focused on aspects of women’s subordination
and the structural causes of inequality that deny women their rights and
prevent them from gaining a voice. The CIGs are yet to reach a stage where
they can demand and question their social and political contexts, and get
into a bargaining position and engage strategically with the state. This
in turn would help achieve the objective of sustained and empowered
livelihoods.
It is also evident that the need for using the gender lens at all stages of
planning, implementation and evaluation has not become an institutional
habit, nor is it an assimilated perspective in DPIP. No effort seems to have
been made within DPIP to understand the gender-differentiated nature
of the experience of poverty and the constraints women face in struggling
out of poverty. The experience suggests that issues of gender and poverty
cannot be reduced to quotas for women, as in the Integrated Rural Development
Programme (IRDP), or women’s specific target groups as in the
Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA). Such
interventions may merely serve to institutionalise the marginal position
given to women in official development (Rajagopal 2004).
In contrast, in a recent intervention on poverty alleviation around
natural resource management, the effort has been to promote women’s
collectives for integrated development involving issues of livelihood,
environment and the use of local resources. Central to the process is motivating
women to take on leadership roles and empowering them instead
of creating a dependency on institutions. Convincing men regarding
women’s role in decision-making is an ongoing activity. In one district
(which is common to DPIP) where the project is being implemented,
regular trainings and meetings have been organised by the partner NGO,
where women have discussed issues related to their participation in village
forums, their role in village development, understanding of rights and
duties, health issues, right to food, right to work, and issues related to