Toledo Tapia, Lourdes Paola; (2025) Gender and empowerment: Learning from a microentrepreneurship programme for low-income women in peri-urban communities of Guadalajara, Mexico. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Preview

Text Toledo Tapia_thesis.pdf - Accepted Version Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

Women’s empowerment has been used as an inspiration to create entrepreneurship initiatives and as a measure of their success or failure. This thesis explores a microentrepreneurship initiative in urban Mexico which highlighted women’s empowerment as one of its objectives. I explore empowerment through Rowlands’s three-dimensional model developed in her seminal 1995 research with women in Honduras. I apply this approach to a case study involving UELI, a women’s programme working in four peri-urban communities of Guadalajara, Mexico’s third-largest city. I observed training sessions and conducted four group interviews and in-depth individual interviews with forty-one participants and with the husbands of six of them in different fieldwork periods from 2014 to 2018. I discuss the inhibiting and encouraging factors that hindered or helped women’s empowerment in its three dimensions: personal, relational and collective. This study contributes to knowledge in the following ways. The findings show that relatively few women succeeded in creating successful enterprises. The mixed results shed light on the various obstacles facing women’s empowerment from a ‘liberal’ point of view. When women’s empowerment is understood only in economic terms, microentrepreneurship programmes are an unsuccessful endeavour for the most part. Looking at empowerment as a multidimensional construct can nonetheless show a different panorama. The programme enabled women to further their understanding of the limitations they face as women and entrepreneurs. All interviewees reported that they had ‘changed’ because of their participation in the programme. Some entrepreneurs also experienced positive changes in their close relationships, thanks to their involvement in UELI. The findings also show how collectivity in microentrepreneurship programmes can be ‘artificial’ when forced or made conditional by the programme. Lastly, the longitudinal nature of this study allowed for a better understanding of the interconnectedness of the three dimensions of empowerment and its dynamism as a non-linear process.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item