Highlights Women’s empowerment interventions are not as effective as hoped or intended. Could be an issue with intervention design and implementation. Research reveals that there are several limitations to existing women’s empowerment approaches. These include disregard of context, a non-holistic approach, difficulty measuring variables, etc. Vulnerability mapping may be able to address these limitations; we present an adapted framework.

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Vocational Education and Training (VET) helps bridge the gap between limited education and gainful employment. However, it is difficult to make VET readily accessible to economically and educationally challenged communities. To meet this challenge, we introduce a novel solution that adds unique elements to the realms of education technology: vocational education enhanced through both multimedia and haptic technology. This paper will present conceptual elements of revolutionary haptic technology to be applied in vocational education settings as well as present two different vocational training tested in the field using multimedia and haptic technologies. Through the application of multimedia, virtual reality and haptic technology to VET, we demonstrate that this enhanced vocational education and training has the capacity to convey complex concepts and skill sets to illiterate and semi-literate individuals. We also show the vast potential for applicability of such enhanced VET across India, and the resulting promise of increased employment and improved livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of people.

AIDS-orphaned children and adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa have inadequate access to basic services, including health and education. Using a qualitative approach, the study explores the meaning of education in rural Uganda, obstacles faced by AIDS-orphaned adolescents and their caregivers to access secondary education, and the potential of an economic empowerment intervention SEED in addressing the challenges of accessing educational opportunities for AIDS-orphaned adolescents. The findings come from 29 semi-structured interviews conducted with eleven adolescents study participants, four caregivers and fourteen community leaders involved in the pilot SEED intervention. Study participants and community members indicated that the savings accounts offer a unique opportunity for orphaned adolescents to stay in school and imagine the future with optimism.

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