India’s development story has a quiet, persistent workforce that rarely makes it to the headlines: Its women. Women across rural and urban India have been, for years, holding together communities, keeping education and health systems functioning, building livelihoods and negotiating with local systems and institutions for the wellbeing of their families and communities.
Whether through Self-Help Groups (SHGs) that bring women together to save, borrow and collectively work towards better livelihoods, ASHA workers who are often the first link between households and the public health care system or anganwadi workers who support the nutrition and wellbeing of children and mothers in some of the country’s most remote regions, women are at the heart of India’s social infrastructure. In the face of a climate crisis, it is the woman farmer who, despite having no land in her name, works the fields, sustains her household, and brings together fellow women to respond to the crisis. These are not isolated stories. Across the country, women are navigating challenges within their own homes and communities while also responding to wider inequities.
Women’s contribution at the grassroots has often been measured by what they do for others rather than by their role in building institutions and influencing systems. While we celebrate their work as service, responsibility or resilience, we often overlook their leadership in bringing together communities, navigating complex challenges and shaping responses to wider social and developmental inequities.
{{/usCountry}}Women’s contribution at the grassroots has often been measured by what they do for others rather than by their role in building institutions and influencing systems. While we celebrate their work as service, responsibility or resilience, we often overlook their leadership in bringing together communities, navigating complex challenges and shaping responses to wider social and developmental inequities.
{{/usCountry}}What makes women’s leadership at the grassroots particularly powerful is its proximity to communities, lived realities and systems shaping people’s lives. At Rebuild India Fund, over 60% of our partner NGOs are led by women from diverse social, economic and geographical backgrounds. Many of them are proximate leaders — women who come from or have deep lived experience in the communities they serve. This gives them an understanding of local realities that goes beyond what data or distance can capture, allowing them to build trust, navigate complex social dynamics, and shape solutions rooted in their communities, directly impacting how they see issues and build solutions on the ground.
For instance, Deepa Pawar, who leads Anubhuti Trust, a grassroots organization in Maharashtra, belongs to the Ghisadi community, a Nomadic Tribe in the state. She works with Denotified and Nomadic Tribes that continue to face deep social and economic exclusion. Her own experiences have shaped both her commitment to these communities and the way Anubhuti approaches its work.
That proximity allows Anubhuti to take a more holistic approach to the challenges these communities face. Its work on mental health, for instance, looks beyond clinical interventions to examine how caste, gender, sexuality, discrimination, and violence shape experiences of mental distress. Its constitutional literacy work similarly seeks to build young people’s understanding of equality and dignity.
This is what proximity can make possible: A shift from treating problems in isolation to understanding the conditions that produce them. A livelihood challenge may also be about safety or migration. Climate vulnerability may be inseparable from poverty, gender, or insecure livelihoods. Leaders who are embedded in their communities are often able to see these connections and, importantly, work with the communities to respond to them.
Shaheen Malik, who founded Brave Souls Foundation, which works with acid attack survivors, is another example. Having survived an acid attack herself, her experiences of navigating legal systems, bearing the cost of healthcare, facing social stigma, and finding employment shaped the organisation she went on to build. Brave Souls takes a comprehensive approach to survivor support, helping women access legal and healthcare services, rebuild livelihoods, and work towards financial independence and social reintegration with dignity. Its leadership reflects this same principle of lived experience: the organisation is led entirely by women, with acid attack survivors forming its institutional leadership team.
If we value the outcomes of community-led development, we also need to value and invest in the leadership that makes it possible.
Many women grassroots leaders in NGOs Rebuild works with often fight massive battles. Unlike many of their male counterparts, they often continue to carry substantial care responsibilities on the domestic front. For most of them, building an organization is an additional responsibility alongside running a full-fledged household.
On the professional front, they face endless barriers. They have little access to capital, policymakers, or larger civil society networks. They may be uncomfortable navigating formal fundraising processes, speaking the language of institutional philanthropy or travelling to cities for conferences. These constraints are sometimes interpreted as individual limitations — insufficient ambition, inadequate exposure, or weak organisational capacity — but are, in fact, deeply entrenched in age-old gender roles, patriarchy and marginalisation, which are ironically, the same barriers that they work towards overcoming for other women.
For decades, development programs have invested in women as participants. Women have collectively built SHGs, trained as health workers, mobilised as community volunteers, and created pathways to inclusion in livelihood programmes. Time and again, women have brilliantly proven how they can lead on all these fronts. But it’s time for civil society at large to recognize women’s role in institution-building, decision-making and community stewardship.
For civil society and intermediaries, it means creating more pathways for grassroots organizations to be identified through their peers and networks, and for women leaders to access spaces where decisions about resources, policy, and partnerships are made.
For philanthropy, it means looking beyond programme delivery to invest in the conditions that allow leadership to grow. Flexible, multi-year support can give an organization room to respond to changing community needs, while support for organisational systems, technology, communications and leadership development can strengthen institutions for the long term. Equally important are the less visible costs of participation — travel, childcare, accommodation and, most importantly, compensation for time, which can determine who gets access to networks and opportunities in the first place.
And for institutions, recognising women as institutional actors, not only beneficiaries or frontline workers, can mean designing programme and partnerships that give community organisations greater voice in shaping solutions.
If women closest to India’s most complex social challenges are given the resources and room to lead, the gains will extend well beyond individual organisations. They can mean stronger community institutions, more responsive development systems, and solutions that are shaped by the realities of the people they are intended to serve.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Sangeeta Bhattacharya, co-lead and Ankita Bhatkhande, manager, Rebuild India Fund, Dasra.