About half of Indian women above the age of 15 continue to be illiterate. Inaction in promoting adult literacy is foregoing significant gains that can be made with simple interventions. This article studies the impact of an adult literacy programme (ALP) on women from the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in India. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods research design, we show that the benefits of this ALP go beyond the acquisition of literacy skills, to impact the personal and public lives of its participants positively. We provide evidence that the programme participants have improved self-image, increased mobility, changed attitudes towards domestic violence, better interaction with their children and are more engaged in the social and political life of the village. The programme design could provide insight into policymaking for adult education.

We use a mixed methods approach to explore why some girls drop out of secondary school despite conditional cash transfers (CCTs), using quantitative and qualitative data collected during the Odisha Girls Incentive Programme, a CCT pilot in India. We estimate a quantitative discrete choice model in the first phase to identify factors that separate dropouts from non-dropouts. In the qualitative phase, we control for those factors by careful choice of case studies and conduct a ceteris paribus analysis. After accounting for socioeconomic differences, we find that the girls' agency, albeit 'thin' as in Klocker (2007), is crucial and may often prove to be the tipping point in enrolment decisions. This has policy implications vis-à-vis counselling strategies for dropout mitigation.

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Less than one-fourth of women in the working-age group are in India’s workforce. This article draws from multiple studies of a 5-year-long programme that intervened to connect a million underprivileged women to employment opportunities across five Indian states. The article’s objective is twofold. One, identification of the barriers that keep women from joining and continuing in the workforce. Two, documentation of the enablers that the programme devised for women to overcome these barriers. The studies employ qualitative research methodologies to service these objectives, deriving their sampling typologies from the programme’s quantitative monitoring data. We find that severe impediments keep women from the workforce, especially so in the case of underprivileged women. These include curtailed mobility; mismatch in aspirations, education, training and work; first-generation-employee disadvantage; and traditionally gendered work division reinforced by male preference in the new urban economy’s emerging jobs. We schematise the programme’s services as a continual provision of information, counselling and mentorship to enable women to surmount these barriers—from girlhood to their adult lives. The programme design could provide insights for policymaking towards improving women’s participation in India’s workforce.