Micro-Credit, Poverty and Empowerment

Neera Burra is Assistant Resident Representative and Senior Social Development Adviser at the Sustainable Energy and Environment Division (SEED) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), India Office, New Delhi. A sociologist by training, she obtained her Ph.D. from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has previously been with the International Labour Organization (ILO) as National Expert in its women's programme (1988-93) and with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) as Programme Manager for South Asia (1993-95). Dr Burra has been closely involved with NGOs and CBOs working on micro-credit and women's empowerment for the last 15 years. She has also worked extensively on the issues of child labour and education and was recently awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Globalization and Human Rights Programmes of the University of Chicago to study the impact of globalization on child labour.

Dr Burra's current interests are in natural resource management for poverty eradication with a strong thrust on micro-credit, women's empowerment and poverty eradication. She has published extensively in the field of child labour, and has also written on watershed development, women's empowerment and micro-credit.

Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive is Director, Indian School of Microfinance for Women, Ahmedabad. She has 20 years of experience in the field of Gender and Development and has worked with premier research organisations like Research Centre for Women's Studies, Mumbai, Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi and International Center for Research on Women, New Delhi. She has several publications to her credit in the areas of structural adjustment; microfinance; women's empowerment; violence against women; women and ageing; and economic, social and cultural human rights. She has particularly focused on conceptualising power and empowerment, linking together the micro, meso and macro into an analytical framework. She has also taught Economics at the postgraduate level at the Department of Economics, University of Mumbai and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Prior to joining the Indian School of Microfinance for Women, Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive was Country Director of the India office of the International Center for Research on Women, New Delhi.

Ranjani K Murthy is an independent researcher based in Chennai whose areas of interest have been gender, poverty and health for the past two decades. Through her work with MYRADA (1984-88) and with Initiatives: Women in Development (IWID, 1991-94), as well as by conducting independent research, she has gathered grassroots knowledge along with experience in policy analysis, capacity building and impact assessment. She has carried out policy and impact assessment studies with a focus on gender and poverty in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Moldova and Sudan (for UN organizations and for national and international bodies which fund NGOs), and has prepared a global literature review on reproductive health service accountability within health sector reforms (for the former Women's Health Project, South Africa). Ms Ranjani Murthy was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (1994). Her published books include Indian NGOs and their Capacity Building in the 1990s (1997, co-author); Building Women's Capacities: Experiences in Gender Transformation (Sage, 2001, editor); and Denial and Distress: Gender, Poverty and Human Rights in Asia (2003, co-author).