Capacity Building Skills: Promotion of Women Entrepreneurship Through Training Programmes to Initiate an Enterprise at Household Level for Income Generation

Abstract

Promotion of women entrepreneurship is a dependable path to economic stability of women and her family. It leads to more spending on education and health, increased decision making power and reduced gender discrimination. Besides there are certain other reasons for spread of women entrepreneurship viz. its close link to social, cultural, religious and psychological variables; the flexible nature of work that combines gainful employment with domestic responsibilities; economic demands specially in rural women, and above all the modernization that snatches bread and butter of an increasing number and proportion of women. This attracted the attention of policymakers and planners towards the significance of women’s productive activities and their need of income generation through entrepreneurship. Keeping in view the above facts, All India Coordinated Research Project on Home Science, FRM component under the objective “Empowerment of Women through Capacity Building” conducted intensive training programmes in three adopted villages of Ludhiana district to improve the knowledge of women for better living and to empower them for undertaking income generating projects so that they can contribute towards family income and improve the financial status of their families. Different training programmes were conducted to impart knowledge to total 80 participants (at Bhata-Dhua village) Further, impact analysis of the training programmes was done and the results shows that almost all the respondents gain full knowledge of all the aspects of training programmes. But most of them used the knowledge gained through different trainings for making articles to fulfill their household needs or to give these items to their friends and relatives. There were only few respondents who use the knowledge of candle making for earning money for their families.