Women in Control of Their Lives

India is comprised of 28 states. MYRADA works in three, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. MYRADA is drawn to the state borders. Transport, agricultural development, sustainable water, education and health programmes spread out from each capital, but only so far. MYRADA works in the places where the tentacles of infrastructure don’t reach. These are…

In February 2020, 11 people from the U.K. set off to India to study what we call Self-Reliant Groups, an idea born in India. There they are variously called Self-help Affinity Groups -producing an unfortunate acronym- or Self-Help Groups, which in the U.K. suggests recovery from alcoholism. There have been other study tours like this….

A woman living outside of the geographies where existing SRGs operate and who wants to join the movement will receive a Tiny Box to give her a sense of what is involved, and to motivate her to form her own group. The first prototype of Tiny Box developed by the Design Group existing SRG members…

Eleven women from five Self-reliant groups came together to form a design group. Their objective was to spread the movement to new places. They met every month to design the box, listen to feedback, make adaptions, and try each prototype out with prospective SRG members. They thought out of the box. They came to the…

In entry 15, we introduced the concept of the Self-reliant Group box, a container with everything ended to establish a group. It is a concept. And it might have stayed that way. But then we were faced with a simple practical opportunity. Every month, WEvo receives a request from somebody who lives in a place…

Everett Rogers grew up in rural Iowa. He noted that farmers were slow to pick up on innovations, even those that were likely to make them money. He started studying the process of ‘diffusion’, the spread of innovations. He noted that there were always a few ‘innovators’, people willing to take a chance on anything…

We started with a big envelope. And we started writing notes on the back of it. There are 5.4 million people in Scotland. Just over half (51%) are women, so that is 2.8 million. We can be pretty sure from the census that 64 per cent (1.8 million) of these women are aged 16-64 years….

The staff team at WEvolution read John Lanchester’s review of Universal Basic Income in the London Review of Books. Universal Basic Income provides a guaranteed cash payment for every citizen, rich or poor, unconditionally for life. The amount is enough to live on, not comfortably, but enough. Lanchester looks at many studies and comes away…

How do we get women queuing around the block to join an SRG? That is the question we asked above (see entry 10). We have been trying to push SRGs. We need to create pull. A starting point is to reflect on how we communicate, and to whom. Like many charities, WEvolution has geared its…

As we said in an earlier post, pull beats push every time. A pushed innovation will not last. We want people queuing around the block to get the innovation. How do people get to know about the innovation, and when they know how do they get a hold of it? In other partnerships, the following…