Entrepreneurship has been increasingly promoted as a means to achieve women’s empowerment in the pursuit of gender equal societies by international development organizations, NGO’s as well as national and local governments across the world. Against this, the paper explores the role and influence of multi-actor engagement on successful empowerment of women based on a case study of Kudumbashree program in a regional context of Kerala, in South India. Our objective is to examine the women empowerment outcomes of the Kudumbashree initiatives, implemented within a multi-actor engagement framework supportive of women’s empowerment through capacity building and social inclusion programs. The case study demonstrates ‘how multiple-level engagements help enhance women’s development and support broad sustainable social change, in view of their sensitivity to the embeddedness of women’s agency under specific socio-political and cultural contexts’. We find that Kudumbashree programs, through its multi-actor engagement, strives for an equilibrium between social change through policy and regulatory change (top down) and social change via mobilizing the people (bottom-up). From a policy angle, the key learnings from the successful outcomes of Kudumbashree may be considered for designing rural and urban community development programs with a focus on the multidimensional empowerment as well as social and economic inclusion of women and other marginalized communities.
This study highlights the appropriateness of innovation management principles to successfully manage radical change in the e-commerce industry during the COVID-19 period. The study focuses on transforming delivery platforms in the context of popular e-commerce organizations in the U.A.E. We conducted the study through interviews, and the results reflect the development of three major themes (shifting consumer behavior, implementation of innovation, and innovation for effective change management) since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the transition stage, critical aspects concerning product delivery have emerged to stabilize logistics performance with sustainability. The study suggests that firms need to be faster and more flexible to address the market uncertainty through innovative practices. Similar organizations can use this study to develop mechanisms to improve their delivery systems. Additionally, the study also argues that collaborative innovation significantly contributes to the enhancement of consumers’ well-being and boosts economic growth.
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