Key Agencies of Development: Empowering Women Through Education, Employment, and State Support

Women’s autonomy is rarely the result of a single decision or a one-time policy. It builds slowly through the conditions that surround a woman’s life: whether she can read, whether she can see a doctor, whether she can earn money she controls, and whether the people around her recognise her right to make choices. These conditions do not appear on their own. They are produced and sustained by specific actors working at different levels. Political scientists call these actors the agencies of development: the individual, the community, and the state, with international organisations now playing a growing supporting role. Understanding how each contributes, and where each falls short, explains why women’s empowerment is such a complex and contested goal.

What we mean by agencies of development 🔗

An “agency of development” is any actor capable of expanding a person’s real opportunities. When the focus is women’s status and autonomy, three agencies stand out. The individual woman acts on her own behalf through education, skills, and personal choices. The community, including the family, caste groups, self-help networks, and local panchayats, shapes the norms within which she operates. The state creates laws, funds schemes, and guarantees rights that the individual and community cannot provide alone. In recent decades, international organisations such as UN Women and the World Bank have added finance, data, and global accountability frameworks to this mix.

The key insight is that these agencies are not interchangeable. Each handles problems the others cannot. A woman’s determination cannot overcome a complete absence of schools. A supportive community cannot legislate equal wages. A distant state cannot change attitudes inside a single household. Effective development depends on these agencies acting together, which is harder than it sounds.

The individual as an agency 🔗

The starting point of empowerment is the woman herself. Her ability to define her own goals and act on them, often called agency in development studies, is what distinguishes genuine empowerment from welfare delivered from above. But individual agency is conditional. It depends heavily on access to education, health, and income, none of which a woman can simply will into existence.

Education as the foundation 🔗

Education does more than teach literacy. It delays marriage, improves health awareness, and widens the range of jobs a woman can pursue. Research consistently links women’s education to better outcomes not just for them but for their children and households. India has made real progress here, with the female literacy rate reaching around 77.7% against 84.7% for males according to recent government figures. Yet a persistent gap remains, and dropout rates climb sharply for girls in rural areas due to poverty, early marriage, and the burden of household work.

This is precisely why individual effort is not enough. A girl cannot stay in school if there is no school nearby, no toilet for her to use, or no family willing to spare her from chores. The individual agency only becomes effective when other agencies remove these barriers.

Healthcare as a condition, not a reward 🔗

Health is the second pillar. A woman cannot exercise autonomy if she is malnourished, anaemic, or unable to access maternal care. The challenge in India is partly about facilities and partly about attitudes, since families often prioritise the health needs of boys. Correcting this requires deliberate intervention. Government programmes work to expand healthcare access, while organisations such as UNFPA India support women’s reproductive health and bodily autonomy. Importantly, decision-making power matters here too: national survey data show that around 81% of married women participate in their own healthcare decisions, but only about 71% have autonomy across all major household decisions.

The community as an agency 🔗

The community is the most ambiguous of the development agencies. It can be a powerful source of support, and it can be the primary site of women’s subordination. This double character is what makes communitarian approaches to development both attractive and risky.

The strength of collective support 🔗

When communities organise to support women, results follow. Self-Help Groups (SHGs) are the clearest Indian example. By pooling savings, accessing credit, and acting collectively, women in SHGs gain economic resources and the confidence to participate in decisions that were previously closed to them. The Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission is built precisely on this logic, harnessing the capabilities of SHG members and adding skills, finance, and collectivisation. Community health and nutrition programmes that recruit peer women as change agents have also been shown to improve both empowerment and household nutrition.

The problem of patriarchal bias 🔗

The difficulty is that communities are not neutral. The same family and caste structures that can support a woman are often the structures that confine her. Gendered norms are absorbed from a very young age and shape what a woman is expected to do, leading to the disproportionate burden of unpaid household labour that remains largely feminised, undervalued, and invisible in policy. A purely community-based model risks reinforcing these hierarchies rather than challenging them. This is the central weakness of the communitarian perspective: it assumes the community is benevolent, when in patriarchal settings the community is frequently the source of the constraint.

The libertarian and communitarian debate 🔗

The disagreement over which agency matters most reflects a deeper philosophical divide. Understanding it helps explain why development policy is so contested.

The libertarian view 🔗

The libertarian position emphasises individual merit, free choice, and minimal state interference. Libertarian feminists agree with other feminists about the dangers of patriarchy, but they argue that replacing domination by fathers and husbands with domination by a state still controlled largely by men is no real liberation. They prefer voluntary solutions such as mutual aid networks and private associations over government programmes. The appeal of this view is its respect for women’s autonomy and its scepticism of coercion.

The weakness is also clear. A market-driven approach assumes women already possess the education, capital, and safety to compete on equal terms. For poor and disadvantaged women, this assumption simply fails. When choices are severely limited by poverty and lack of education, the freedom to choose means little.

The communitarian view 🔗

The communitarian view emphasises the community as the proper site of care and belonging. It rightly recognises that humans are embedded in relationships and that isolated individuals rarely flourish. Yet, as noted, communities carry the very biases that disadvantage women. Some scholars argue that the answer is not to discard community but to build on culturally appropriate notions of communitarianism while reforming the practices that harm women. The challenge for any communitarian model is to keep the support while shedding the subordination.

The state as an agency 🔗

Where the individual lacks resources and the community carries bias, the state has a unique capacity to set rules and guarantee rights. State intervention can correct market failures and override discriminatory local norms, which is why a proactive state role is so important for women’s development.

MGNREGA as a model of inclusion 🔗

The clearest example of state-driven empowerment is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), enacted in 2005. It legally guarantees the “right to work,” offering at least 100 days of wage employment to every rural household. Crucially, its guidelines mandate that at least a third of beneficiaries be women, and it requires equal wages for men and women doing the same work.

The results have been striking. Women’s participation reached a ten-year high, with women accounting for around 58.8% of person-days in 2023-24. By providing independent income, MGNREGA shifts household decision-making, raises women’s self-esteem, and increases their visibility in their communities. It demonstrates how state design can deliberately build inclusion into the structure of a programme rather than hoping the market produces it.

The limits of the state 🔗

State action has its own limits. There are wide variations in how well schemes work across regions. Women’s participation in MGNREGA, for instance, exceeds 80% in states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu but has historically hovered around 40% or below in northern states such as Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. A scheme on paper does not guarantee delivery on the ground. Effective state action depends on local administration, awareness, and the willingness of communities to comply, which brings us back to the need for several agencies working together.

International organisations as a newer agency 🔗

In recent decades, international actors have joined the picture. UN Women advocates for women’s political and civic participation and sets global standards through frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals. The World Bank contributes financing, research, and comparative data that shape national policy. Its analysis, for instance, shows that despite barriers, over 43% of Indian STEM graduates are women, even as female labour force participation lags behind men. These organisations rarely deliver services directly. Their role is to provide finance, accountability, and knowledge that strengthen the work of the state and communities.

Why no single agency is enough 🔗

The lesson running through all of this is that women’s development cannot rest on any one agency. The libertarian faith in individual merit ignores the poverty and discrimination that limit real choices. The communitarian faith in community ignores the patriarchy embedded within it. Pure reliance on the state ignores attitudes that no law can directly change. The strongest development frameworks do two things at once: they provide concrete services such as schools, clinics, and guaranteed work, while simultaneously challenging the social conditions that made those services necessary.

Women’s autonomy, in the end, is not merely the absence of legal restriction. It is the presence of real conditions, including education, health, income, safety, and voice, that make meaningful choices possible. Producing those conditions requires the individual’s effort, the community’s support, the state’s guarantees, and international resources working in combination. When any one of these is missing, empowerment stalls.

What do you think? If communities can be both the strongest support and the deepest source of bias for women, how should development policy decide when to work through them and when to override them? And given the wide gap between states in scheme delivery, is the real obstacle to women’s empowerment a shortage of good laws, or a shortage of effective implementation?

References

1. https://www.shakshamfoundation.org/women-empowerment-in-india-2025-education-to-equality/
2. https://india.unfpa.org/en/news/sustainable-model-womens-leadership
3. https://www.ijrss.org/index.php/ijrss/article/download/677/429/1008
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10118087/
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12548890/
6. https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/how-is-libertarian-feminism-different-other-feminisms
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10426024/
8. https://plutusias.com/women-participation-in-mgnrega/
9. https://theprint.in/india/womens-participation-in-mgnregs-hits-10-yr-high-at-58-8-meghalaya-up-see-biggest-spikes/2026112/
10. https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/women-in-mgnregs/