Women in Nepal, in spite of a nationwide Maoist insurgency and crisis iii national governance, are moving mountains. Across the 500 mile-wide terrain of southern Nepal women are saving, building transparent village banks, arid doubling their incomes though successful micro-enterprises. Last year their collective savings were estimated to Irate climbed to nearly $4 million while the revenues from their small business ventures probably broke $20 million - all this in what is one of the poorest countries in the world. This article describes how this happened and the contribution of Appreciative Inquiry to this amazing process of empowerment and community mobilization.
Pact's Project to Empower Women in Nepal
Pact, an international NGO specializing in capacity building for local organizations, adopted an Appreciative Planning and Action (APA) approach with its Women's Empowerment project (WEP) in Nepal. WEP which was undertaken through an US AID project is now known as WORTH.
The APA approach that evolved within the Pact/WORTH initiative has shown remarkable power in capturing and celebrating the pride and self-reliance of women and their groups and in helping them empower themselves to make the extraordinary achievements for which WORTH has become known. The idea was that to reach rural people, particularly women, most of whom are illiterate in Nepal, we had to simplify the AI process and be able to conduct successful sessions in just a few hours. When we asked women how much time they could give to a meeting like this, they said, "Two or three hours... early morning or in the evening after we've cooked dinner and put the kids to bed."
We also knew that we had to make the process action-oriented to empower people to take immediate steps to move their dreams and plans forward. There was no time or interest in theory here in the villages. What's more, we wanted it to be fun, bringing both encouragement and joy into the whole process.
With these ideas in mind, we set to work, village by village, meeting by meeting, to streamline the basic steps around a mission statement that summarized what we were trying to do.' Here's what we came up with:
