Around 3 billion people across the world rely on solid fuels for their daily cooking needs. The adverse effects of traditional cooking methods on health, socio-economic and environmental conditions, especially among women, are well documented. Clean cookstoves promise a solution to these issues, but the effectiveness of this sector in achieving different impact objectives highly depends on how investment decisions are made. A recent study by LEAD at Krea University, supported by FMO, the Dutch development bank, consolidates evidence on the impact of clean
Social Welfare Delivery in the Age of Platforms: Comparing Private Models
Globally, 1.3 billion people (22 per cent) live in multidimensional poverty – with millions of households in 107 countries living with undernourished members, out-of-school children, and lacking access to electricity and clean cooking fuel. The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have pushed an additional 88-115 million people into extreme poverty in 2020 alone, primarily in countries that already have high poverty rates. Moreover, social safety nets, an essential tool to help vulnerable populations cope with shocks and crises, remain out
Re-imagining Entrepreneurship Models for Rural Women
Building on the evidence highlighted in the first part of this two-part blog, the discussion in this second piece is anchored in a normative framework that shapes individual and household-level decision-making processes governing “appropriate” jobs for rural women. These norms do not only organize the time-use of female labor between paid and unpaid work but provide a rationale for the Haqdarshikas to lean heavily on their families and self-help group (SHG) colleagues for submitting citizens’ applications without being away from home
COVID-19 and Adaptation to Mental Health Services
COVID-19 caused disruptions in services to those with mental illness in several countries across the globe. While these disruptions have been well-documented, few studies have looked at the service provider perspective. A recent study by LEAD at Krea University and the Schizophrenia Research Foundation (SCARF) explored care dynamics from the perspective of the service providers at SCARF, based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. This study was supported by the India-Oxford Initiative (IndOx) at the University of Oxford. Accessibility, Availability and Personal Challenges Access
Landscaping the Sexual and Reproductive Rights of Adolescents
Seeta* is a teenager in rural Uttar Pradesh. Harassment by boys from the village had become an ordinary spectacle that relentlessly continued every day as she traced her steps to school. Despite her fears, a wary Seeta chose to not confide in her parents because she was afraid of being accused of promiscuous behaviour. Her dreams of completing college and securing a decent job also hung in the anvil. Seeta’s hopes were dashed when her parents eventually found out about the
COVID-19 Vaccinations: A Double Whammy for Rural Women in India
As the second wave of COVID-19 hit India and countries across the world, severe oxygen shortages, overloaded hospital beds, and acute shortage of critical medicines resulted in a severe public health crisis. The economic and social fallouts of the pandemic have also affected
Navigating the Research-Policy Interface during Crises Situations: What We Have Learned
As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic gripped India and the world in early March 2021, discussions about vaccination inequities, and reopening schools and public spaces caught our attention once again. Social media, particularly the Twitterverse, was inundated with debates between epidemiologists, public health experts, economists, and armchair experts. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, and a strong advocate for using data to guide the decision of reopening schools in the US, found herself in the middle of
Women’s Collectives and Individual Enterprise: A Livelihoods Model for Rural Women in Central India
This blog presents an example of an existing livelihoods model to undertake a critical evaluation of how entrepreneurship is conceived for rural women in self-help groups (SHGs) in two parts. The purpose of this two-part blog is to show that the dominant construction of entrepreneurs as autonomous economic agents who move with, and towards, opportunities does not necessarily apply to our sample of rural SHG women in Chhattisgarh. Using data from an ongoing impact evaluation study, Part 1 describes the design and
Point of View: LEAD in Conversation with Samik Sundar Das
Introducing our new feature series ‘Point of View’, where we speak with experts from different sectors to unpack some of the complex development challenges that they are working on and learn from their experiences. LEAD has been working in the MSME space for over a decade and a half – looking at questions such as why are small businesses stuck in low productivity traps, and what kind of interventions can help them access capital, technology and build skills in new
Menstrual Hygiene Day 2021: Shifting Norms and Improving Women’s Access to Safe Alternatives
The adoption of the human right to water and sanitation by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in July 2010 helped ensure that a human rights perspective is integrated into the design and delivery of water, sanitation and hygiene programming. Global experiences, however, suggest that it has been difficult to fulfil the right to sanitation and uphold equality and non-discrimination as foundational principles of human rights law. In regions where sanitation gaps are highest, severe disparities in access
