Introducing Empower

It is often believed that those living in informal settlements, in households with low socio-economic status are reliant upon the state or charitable means for basic quality services. This representation of development typically hides the story of community solutions. The Empower Project focuses on three informal settlements in Delhi, India. It aims to show how communities overcome the absence of basic quality service provision by providing services themselves through community and private means as well as developing approaches to enterprise and employment that circumvent the need for formal provision.

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Promoting Best Practice

What is important for development is freedom of choice and freedom to control one’s own life that engenders well-being. This project will promote best practice from the communities that stimulate sustainable lives overcoming barriers to employment and entrepreneurial activity. This multidiscipline research team will provide knowledge for change, knowledge to inform and knowledge to empower individuals to control their own lives.

Empower Project Objectives

This project will promote and enhance individual freedom in several ways, first it will discover how individuals, enterprises, and communities are able to provide basic services for themselves promoting policy change that will put such private solutions at the heart of public policy.

Second, by spreading best practice, it will ensure that communities can better adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves and live lives that are characterised by gainful employment and enterprise thus promoting empowerment, resilience and reducing dependence.

Third, by spreading best practice, it will promote amongst communities, approaches to providing essential basic services through the community and private enterprise. Ensuring accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability of these services for all community members including young people, women, and migrants.