Report on the impacts of grassroots management training in India

The Economic Development Institute (EDI) established the Women's Enterprise Management Training Outreach Program (WEMTOP) as a three-year pilot program based on a series of assumptions about improving the income-earning capacity of assetless women in India. Earlier research suggested that in the usual package of supports provided by voluntary organization (VO) and other donors to micro enterprises, management training was relatively underemphasized, while provision of credit, marketing assistance, training in specific skills or use of new technologies, and other technical backup support were far more common. Thus it was decided that WEMTOP will provide management training, a missing component, using a 'package completion' approach that will be particularly significant where women already had other interventions supporting their work. Later, empowerment training was added to the courses to enable women to improve their business managerial capacity and, concomitantly, their status and authority in their families and communities. Training was to be offered in the pilot stage for training VO staff to be part of enterprise support teams (TEST) for grassroots management training (GMT) and for training VO to in turn train assetless women.