Among other initiatives, Hunger Project programs in India empower women to join elected village councils. Mobilizing people for self-reliant action, empowering women as key change agents and engaging with local government leads to vast, sustainable change. These fact sheets, combined here, detail four component elements of that work through personal stories and organizational objectives: Building Capacities Towards Leadership; Federations: Collective Action for Good Governance; Transforming the Political Agenda;  Advocating for Good Governance, and Women’s Equal Participation in the Electoral Process

Gender equality is critical to causing society-wide change. And though women bear the major responsibility for meeting basic needs, in much of the world, they are systematically denied the resources, freedom of action and voice in decision-making to fulfill that responsibility.

This article looks at the performance of the Women Component Plan (WCP) introduced at the local level in Kerala to encourage participatory planning by studying the experience of five village panchayats over a 10 year reference period. There has been a marked difference among projects carried out under the WCP and general sector projects and projects meant for Scheduled Castes in expenditure efficiency. The article also looks at the nature of projects implemented, the extent of participation of women members in their design and execution, and the opinion of elected representatives on the usefulness of the WCP.

This article discusses gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) at the local level in Kerala by studying a village panchayat, the lowest tier of rural local government. GRB of a rudimentary form, known as Women Component Plan (WCP), had been in existence at the local level for the last 20 years as a key feature of participatory planning. The study adopts a fourfold classification of all projects implemented in the panchayat on the basis of their gender friendliness and calculates allocation and expenditure under each of these categories. The data on which the article relies relate to the expenditure incurred under the annual plans rather than budgets, which are based on inflated and unreliable data. The article ends by making some observations based on the data and the overall experience of Kerala in gender budgeting.

In 1994, women made up 49 per cent of the total registered voters of 8,652,252. Table 6 shows the number of registered voters in 1999. The 1999 election list indicates there has been a slight increase in women voters. Both the National Parliament and State Legislatures, share the common electorate list. Representatives for the Urban Councils are nominated members and women form less than 10 per cent of the total nominated members