Social and economic development of women will lead to the progress of any society. Particularly, empowering empower women in rural areas is both challenging and essential. Women entrepreneur faces many barriers to success such as a lack of financial independence and education, family, work-life balance, male-dominated society, and social-culture barrier. The Women Technology Park (WTP) is an initiative that leverages the use of appropriate technology to catalyze economic growth and development of rural women by raising their productivity, generating sustainable income, and improving their livelihoods. This paper uses a WTP model to illustrate the process of developing, training and enabling of rural technologies related to metal art, banana fiber extraction, weaving, construction and habitat services, and food processing technologies. It presents how a WTP acts as a resource center and a catalyst to translate opportunities into reality to empower rural women.

Motivation: Governments support women's self-employment as a means to support women's empowerment. While they tend to do this by providing financial assistance, skills development and vocational training, they have not paid enough attention to entrepreneurship-related education in the school curriculum. The article addresses this research and policy gap. Purpose: While education may lead women to take up self-employment, anecdotal evidence also suggests that as women continue towards higher education, they tend to opt for wage employment. We investigate whether secondary school is the ideal time to encourage young women to take up self-employment. Approach and Methods: To test our hypothesis, we used two rounds of the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) dataset as it contains granular information about education and self-employment at the individual level. We analysed data in univariate and multivariate settings. Findings: Our results indicate that while education is a key dimension for women's self-employment earnings, its effects peak at moderate levels of secondary education. We find that the increase in business income for each additional year of schooling between classes 9 and 12 (ages 15 to 18) is more than four times that from classes 1-8 and over twice that beyond class 12. We also find that social factors, such as marriage and infrastructure, have implications for the returns of education to women's income from running a business. Policy implications: To improve women's economic and social empowerment, policy-makers should encourage women to attain higher levels of education, since it is a significant predictor of entrepreneurial endeavours. Second, the 9-12 curriculum should focus on making girls and young women more aware of entrepreneurship and encourage them to take up self-employment.

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For any developing country, rural infrastructure development and expanding farming and the non-farming economy will be the major area to look forward to inclusive growth. To eradicate poverty and to have holistic growth primary approach should be towards developing employment potential, creation of enterprises and livelihood enhancement in rural people through region-specific technologies using indigenously available resources. The establishment of Women Technology Park (WTP) proposed in this research work will lay emphasis on promoting appropriate technological inputs that may improve productivity. Also, the quality of farm and non-farm sectors will be enhanced with supreme livelihood options in tandem with skill enhancement and capacity building. They also promote developing management skills coupled with the entrepreneurial mindset and will enable them to introduce new and innovative technologies. This kind of parks will promote usage of indigenous resources with increased energy and ecosystem management. Hence, it is envisaged that this kind of establishments, if done such as “Technology parks” will help to create a concrete and also tangible socio-economic benefits to the rural society by provision of newer technological solutions, alternate training method implementation which will end up in unique skill development and also will increase the support rendered for their implementation. In this research work, authors considered four different location-specific techniques for interventions including weaving technology, metal art skill development, banana fiber extracting and usage, habitat and construction technology development. Through the establishment of WTP, these technologies were tested first, and the rural women were trained to sustain via usage of those technologies for their livelihood.