Goal 5: the KAPADA project, empowering rural India’s women weavers

In our first article on Goal 5 (Gender Equality) of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, we looked at the case of Liliam Juárez, a successful engineer who runs the control room for several Enel Green Power hydroelectric plants in northwestern Guatemala. For our second article in the series, we head to a rather different world: that of underprivileged women in rural India. Here, specifically in the western state of Gujarat, our KAPADA project is training a group of women between the ages of 20 and 40 to become self-employed spinners and weavers, thus enabling them to earn an independent livelihood. Not only that, the Kala cotton they use is almost carbon-neutral and grows without irrigation, chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The women are also learning to weave plastic waste. In addition to Goal 5, the project respects SDGs 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and 15 (Life on Land). Indian society As in other countries, there is an urgent need to empower women in India, as its record in this respect is contradictory, to say the least. On the one hand, it was the second country in the world to elect a female prime minister, with Indira Gandhi in 1966 (the first was Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, with Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1960), while, on the other, its ranking in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report is low: it slipped from 108th in 2018 to 212th on 2020. And according to the International Labour Organisation’s 2018/19 Global Wage Report, its gender gap was the highest of the 73 countries studied in detail. According to a 2020 paper by Roshni Kapur and S. Narayan for the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies, Women Empowerment in India: More needs to be done , the problem is particularly acute in rural areas. It concluded: “A more concerted effort is needed to close the urban-rural divide and ensure that women in rural areas enjoy the same access to education, employment, healthcare and decision-making as their urban counterparts.” The economic benefits of empowering India’s women would be immense: an IMF report estimates that equal female participation in the workforce could increase the country’s gross domestic product by 27 per cent. The initiative This then is the context of the KAPADA initiative, which operates in villages around the Coral Enel Green Power wind farm. Kala cotton has been produced by the local Kutch people since time immemorial, but issues such as market linkage, awareness of the value of end products and access to water have impeded its progress in recent years. The KAPADA initiative trains the women (so far 41 have signed up), while an NGO partner provides them with raw materials and tools, in addition to acting as a facilitator in connecting the young female producers with the market more effectively. Rajbai and other women of her community Rajbai Malshi Payar, who is from the village of Dhareshi near Lakhpat, not far from the Pakistan border, first became part of the initiative eight months ago. She says: “Our village had traditionally worked in weaving, but had shifted to farming. This provided a more reliable source of income, even though it was only for four months of the year.” The project has enabled her and the other members of the group to improve their skills in different types of cotton and waste plastic weaving and stitching work. “I am happy to have relearnt a local tradition, and particularly pleased to be able to work from home and not on a farm, which entailed hard labor in the hot sun during the day and having to follow the orders of the owner,” Rajbai concludes.

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Goal 5: the KAPADA project, empowering rural India’s women weavers

Goal 5: the KAPADA project, empowering rural India’s women weavers

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