Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and health capabilities in rural Bihar in India. The research investigates why despite acknowledged progress in women's empowerment has not resulted in improvements in health outcomes and gender equality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and health capabilities in rural Bihar in India. Since 2007 the state of Bihar has embraced livelihoods improvement strategies grounded in expanding women’s abilities to access better opportunities and public service provision. The state supported women’s Self Help Group (SHG) network Jeevika with over a million members, has been acclaimed for its empowering platform, strengthening both collective and individual agency of rural women (Tiwari, 2010; Dutta, 2015). Additionally, several studies (Anand et. al, 2020) link women’s empowerment to the wider wellbeing of the household including children, adults and the elderly. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) India Index Report (2018) though alerts to the slow progress the state has made in SDG 3 (wellbeing and health).

The proposed study revisits the literature on the associations between women’s empowerment and health and wellbeing in the context of rural Bihar. The investigation draws on primary data using mixed methods from a sample of 1000 Jeevika SHG network women for quantitative analysis and in-depth interviews of 25 Jeevika SHG women. The inquiry focuses on capturing women’s perceptions of transformative changes in their lives they have experienced by becoming active participants of the collective network. A more specific domain of examination is then framed to capture health and wellbeing functionings and capabilities of the SHG women. Additionally, the research tool also gathers information on both the actual public health and/or alternative healthcare provision and how these are accessed or not by the SHG women. Further, both quantitative and in particular the qualitative data draws attention to whether there are other factors influencing health and wellbeing capabilities of the SHG women not captured SHG 3 index scoring.

It is envisaged that the findings of this study will help in identifying wider thematic domains that are needed in addition to women’s empowerment to improve the progress of the SDG 3 targets in the state. Additionally, the findings will also enable mapping the indicators deployed in the SDG India Indexing methods to the data and the rich narrative gathered from the field study to locate gaps and missing factors. The findings thus offer policy implications in designing SHG platforms to address weak health capabilities in different socioeconomic contests int the world with the necessary contextualisation.