A Swa-Shakti Working Paper - Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojana

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recognise their strength, take collective
action, and make informed choices through
access to information, resources and
awareness regarding the availability of
options – whether it is seeking health care,
deciding the spending pattern or addressing
social issues. Empowerment is looked upon
as a holistic process of going beyond
addressing gender issues to empowering
communities through active involvement of
men so that they recognise and act upon
these issues. Also, its holistic nature requires the project to intervene in ways that
are diverse depending on the area and need. This multi-faceted nature of
empowerment entails that the project applies its energies to work on different
issues and concerns at the same time requiring multi-sectoral expertise and also
coordinated efforts at all levels.
In its efforts to work on a number of fronts, the project needs to focus on its
strategic objectives – to build a community that promotes values of equality and
social justice through horizontal ties of solidarity between and within groups,
institutions as well as individual men and women, thereby facilitating the building
of social capital 2 . The work on gender issues forms a critical part of this broad
framework.
Need for mainstreaming gender
Recognising the ineffectiveness of an add-on approach to working on gender, its
mainstreaming within the project components is being attempted. It is also
recognised that lack of focus on gender more often than not stems from a lack of
awareness regarding the need for integrating gender concerns in the development
agenda and ways and means of operationalising a gender integrated approach. Under
Swa-Shakti, efforts have been made to alienate both these constraints in addition to
involvement and sensitisation of various stakeholders for a long term and a more
sustainable impact.
The table given in this paper seeks to systematically look at each of the Swa-
Shakti project components with its corresponding activities while highlighting the
2
Simply put, social capital refers to the wealth which is generated when individuals come together & take collective
action for common good.
Introduction