Take a relatively homogeneous sample of a traditional and low-income village cluster. The sample will be restricted to women, based on the well-established understanding that working through women yields stronger development outcomes. The women will have similar backgrounds. Thousands of generations would have had no education and patriarchal disadvantage would have remained entrenched through these generations. Further select a smaller, more idiosyncratic sample of women who have expressed a desire for entrepreneurship, and initiated a micro-enterprise. Test them for motivation. Find the achievement motivation overlaps successful enterprises, which match improvement in standard of living. Voil?. We have a targeting model for future investments in poor rural women?s entrepreneurship. Theoretically, it could transform India?s 100 poorest districts into enterprise hubs that herald a golden age of economic growth and cultural evolution?where women are more confident and less suppressed.

It is precisely such a project that?s documented in Empowering Rural Women, based on the work of NGO Asian Centre for Organisation Research and Development (ACORD), and spear-headed by psychotherapists Dr Kiron Wadhera and Dr George Koreth. Their survey methodology is inspired by Dr David McClelland. And their enthusiasm for Dr McClelland?s use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is absolutely infectious, pulling this correspondent to the edge of her seat at their Delhi office?the tea was strong and aromatic too. Dating back to his 1961 book The Achieving Society, Dr McClelland argued that people?s work motivations can be basically divided between the needs for achievement, affiliation and power, wherein TAT has been developed to provide fairly reliable scoring and wherein high scores in achievement motivation are strongly linked to ?perseverance and sustained effort in different fields wherever results can be measured??predicating and predicating success from sports

to entrepreneurship.

Unlike cognitive exercises like interviews, the TAT tool captures subconscious material. Subjects are asked to respond to ambiguous pictures with stories, which should be of their own making, ?to reflect the underlying patterns of their imaginative thoughts?. The assumption is that ?received? stories?from textbooks or folklore or grandmothers?project individual needs less clearly. ACORD subjects are ill-educated, but even so Dr Wadhera was surprised by the absence of stories in their lives. Even familiarity with mythology was minimal. Overworked mothers with overmany children, married young and sickly, working in the fields and eating last, hardly spent any time with family except when feeding it. So their stories were ?weak?, told in few sentences. But the motivation drive still came through clearly. What we fantasise about gives us away.

?If a person spends her/his time thinking repeatedly about doing her/his job or work better, accomplishing some unique or improved results or advancing her/his career by better performance, the person displays a need for achievement. The person not only thinks frequently of what results s/he wants to achieve but also how s/he can attain them, what obstacles or blocks s/he may encounter, how to resolve them and how s/he will feel if s/he succeeds or fails.?

Dr Wadhera and Dr Koreth find that this country does not have enough people who have a need for excellence, who want to rock the boat, who want to do something different, who want to take risks. ?We want a sure-shot thing.? But on the upside, they also believe that half the country?s population is ?trainable?. They are really heartened by their findings across 27 villages and 1,000 women in Rajasthan, even while admitting that this survey needs to be scaled up before asserting broad claims. What they found has, nonetheless, confirmed the McClelland finding that education doesn?t matter, economic situation doesn?t matter, conditioning in cultural, caste, religious and gender chauvinism doesn?t matter. Achievement motivation transcends these differences; here the urban male is no different than the rural female; here we see what makes one woman stand out among her rural, poor and veiled peers. Consider Gopi?s success.

Her husband was suffering from TB and she was working as a domestic help for R300 when she first took a ?material loan? of R1,000 to set up a tea shop. It didn?t do well within the village so she moved it to the main roadside with the help of local elders. Dr Wadhera sees her as a ?big businesswoman? now, who has used more material loans to install her husband at an expanded tea shop and get him treated, launch a fruit-selling cart for her son, and upgrade her kachcha house into a brick one. ?Gopi?s husband did not think that women should move out for work, yet he was quite supportive of her initiative.?

In retrospect, Dr Wadhera and Dr Koreth believe that one ?pre-entry? decision was critical to the success of their project. They talked to the panchayats, pradhans, the elders, the husbands and the moneylenders. The last couldn?t be bothered by the small material loans. Engagement with the rest made it very clear which husbands were supportive or resistance or on the fence. The opposition was very strong in Gopi?s village for example, where only an exceptional five women stepped forward. Instead of following in the footsteps of missionaries, Dr Wadhera and Dr Koreth chose the pull model over the push one.

What they do display a missionary zeal over are the merits of the material model vs the cash model. Along with its tendency to be used up in consumption or appropriated by the men, the cash model promotes unhealthy pressures on recovery. Materials are harder to liquidate for drinking or gambling, and they can simply be redeposited if the production plan proves unproductive. Plus this model makes substantial investments in entrepreneurial counselling and training?in the action learning process. Micro-enterprise vs microcredit or microfinance.

Empowering Rural Women: Micro-enterprise through achievement motivation

Kiron Wadhera &

George Koreth

SAGE

R395