Empowering women through participatory adult learning

Mahila Samakhya An example of empowering women through participatory adult learning is the women's programme Mahila Samakhya which is currently being implemented in the Banda district of India. The project has to be understood in the context of the hardships suffered by rural women in India. They are mostly caught up in the daily struggle for survival - fetching water, collecting firewood and securing a livelihood. Women are kept out of the decision-making process, denied access to information, and there is little or no recognition of their productive capacities. Power relations work against women at all levels - in the family, in the community and at the governmental level. Female illiteracy is very high and some villages do not even have a single literate women. Violence and poverty are inextricably intertwined. Mahila Samakhya is run by women activists and mechanics who have been trained in specific skills. It aims to build upon and support the experience of non-governmental organisations in working with women in the field of education to initiate a process of change whereby poor rural women can move from a situation of passive acceptance of their situation to one of actively shaping their lives and environment. A key feature of such programmes is the combination of literacy teaching with training and practical skills such as water pump maintenance. The community participation approach first takes into account the women's experiences in their own communities and then gradually introduces them to basic education and literacy teaching. Thus instead of offering education and literacy as a panacea for their problems, it begins by: n affirming women's existing knowledge and skills; n initiating a process of critical questioning and analysing with regard to issues such as survival or discrimination within the family; n promoting the new role of women as activists in their communities. Adult learning is not just a matter of transferring skills but also of enabling women to use their skills to negotiate more effectively and to deal with structures of power. The training of women as handpump mechanics, for example, has led to building confidence and mobility and breaking stereotypes. It has enhanced competencies in: n dealing with structures of power; n lobbying government for change; n demanding basic necessities from the power structures; n demanding information. Such projects illustrate how women's education and empowerment can be complementary processes. The demand for reading and writing skills as well as other basic educational skills follow social, cultural, political and economic demands. Another innovative empowerment strategy involved encouraging groups of newly literate women to bring out a bi-monthly newsletter. The women were trained in the basic principles of print production, and they themselves decided the content of the material. They were given in-depth training in writing, language, editing and layout, so that they could be responsible for all stages of the production of the newsletter. This had a number of empowering aspects other than just strengthening literacy skills. It helped to break gender stereotypes. It allowed women to control the content, thus giving women a voice in what they wanted to read and how they wanted to see themselves. The newsletter, published in the local language of the women, made possible a broader exposure of incidents of violence. The idea was to create a group that could train other groups of women in the community. It meant decentralising the innovation. It made learning and training not a one-time activity but a crucial process of improving capacities and developing new abilities, procedures and processes that could sustain learning. Empowerment cannot take place without an empowering methodology. The creation of knowledge and information through material production takes into account women's experiential knowledge in various fields, such as health, water, forests and agriculture. Some aspects of empowering methodology are as follows: n using women's own knowledge as critical to social development; n locating literacy in social practices and lived realities of women; n involving women in determining their needs, their issues, what they want to learn, and how they want to develop their own strategies at various levels; n enabling women to transform, negotiate and challenge the structures of power, both at an individual and a community level; n creating structures and institutions for sustaining the adult educational process; n establishing partnerships with collaborating agencies and local government departments as crucial to women's role in the planning and conceptualising of projects, as well as in the actual implementation of them; n making women responsible for managing and providing services such as hand-pump repair; The literacy camp method is another strategy for coping with women's chronic problem of low and irregular attendance at non-formal educational centres. The literacy camp method organises residential training courses in which a conducive and supportive learning environment is encouraged through group learning, ensuring a high teacherstudent ratio, encouraging women to generate their own texts as well as promoting a continuous learning environment including games and songs with an educational purpose. Closely connected to the issue of creating conducive and supportive learning environments is the need to understand the difficulties and constraints experienced by women learners who come to literacy classes. It is necessary to ask why they often lack concentration, drop out, attend infrequently and have low motivation. Research has shown that many adult learners are victims of violence. They are afraid to speak about their experiences, feel unsafe in classroom environments and struggle beyond their capacities and energies while attending classes. Literacy workers are seldom aware of the fact that many of the learn

20 June, 2013 Thursday

Empowering women through participatory adult learning