Transformative Grassroots Leadership: Understanding the Role of Rojiroti’s Women Leaders in Supporting Social Change

Abstract

Many have argued that supporting women’s leadership is an important pathway to women’s empowerment. However, there is still a need for better understanding of how women become leaders, particularly at the grassroots level, and how they support social change. This article explores women’s leadership as part of a grassroots microfinance organisation, Rojiroti. Through interviews and focus group discussions, it finds that Rojiroti’s women leaders were motivated to become leaders to create better opportunities for their families and communities, and that they lead in line with frameworks of transformative leadership by supporting relationship building, by facilitating and guiding knowledge transfer and by providing space for reflection and skills for action (Wakefield, 2017). In particular, their situated knowledge was essential for inspiring shared vision for challenging unequal power relations. Overall, better understanding their leadership, that particularly nurtures relationships and collaboration, due to their position as being from the social groups they sought to support, is critical to the current challenges facing interventions and activism that seek to promote women’s empowerment and contribute to social change.

Leadership and Change in Asia-Pacific: Where Does Political Will Come From?

“…Similarly, Craney (2020) questions the assumption made by donors and multilateral organisations about who is included in the concept of the 'local,' arguing that a diversity of voices and experiences should be captured. Gordon (2020) similarly sheds light on the complex landscape that are constituted by local politics through a thicker understanding of what 'grassroots' leadership is about.…”

“…Craney (2020) looks at 'locally led development' through an informal elite network lens, problematizing simplistic understandings of what constitutes the local in that respect. Gordon (2020) contributes to the 'transformative leadership' discussion, understanding how actors operating outside of traditional politics manage to bring effective social change through their actions. Krishna and Roche's (2020) analysis makes a crucial contribution to the understanding of political will as being contingent upon leadership at the individual, collective and societal levels.…”

“…Through their focus on Simbo for Change, an initiative in the Western province of the Solomon Islands, Roche et al (2020) bring to light the leadership of the director of the initiative, Esther Susi, and the notion of 'quiet feminism' showing how the initiative she led re-articulated women's empowerment as an essential part of creating a cohesive a broader island identity. Gordon (2020) looks at what motivates women to become leaders in their own communities through an analysis of a grassroots microfinance organisation called Rojiroti in India. Because of their own positions in their communities, women leaders were best placed to tackle a number of issues and managed to display 'transformative leadership' in doing so.…”

‘Your mind becomes open with education’ : exploring mothers’ aspirations for girls’ education in rural Bihar

“…Overall, there are three distinct mechanisms of Rojiroti microfinance that may positively influence aspirations for, and ability to support, girls' education: the fact that Rojiroti provides loans through women leaders from the communities in which they operate; the flexible repayment structure and emergency loans, which reduce stress and enable loans to be taken for educational purposes; the focus on social solidarity and group cohesion and support through SHGs, combined with skill training and information transfer (Gordon 2020). However, in order to understand the aspirations for girls' education of women who are members of Rojiroti, it is important to engage further with theoretical perspectives on gender, education and parental aspirations.…”

“…Rojiroti's women leaders may influence socio-cultural norms and thus impact aspirations for girls' education. For example, women's labour within grassroots organisations has played an important role in contributing to social change (Gordon 2020) and the presence of female models has been noted as having changed aspirations and outcomes for girls' education in other studies (Beaman et al 2012). The sociocultural determinants of parental aspirations act alongside the economic ones, and thus the concept of returns and respectability, equally reflective of economic and sociocultural considerations that influence parents' aspirations for girls' education, will support the analysis of the data from this research.…”