Manisha Ghule

In remote interior villages of India, Manisha Ghule is opening up new jobs and career pathways that enable the most invisible and excluded rural women to earn with dignity, while transforming the agricultural economy and social structures of their regions. Across villages affected by global climate change, migration, declining agriculture, and joblessness, Manisha is shaping a new and sustainable employment model for rural women – one that establishes them as leaders of economic progress and social equity.

In rural India, more than 73.2% of women are at the forefront of livelihoods and agricultural production. But their contribution is invisible because their roles continue to be informal and grossly unpaid. Despite being the backbone of their village economy, the leadership of rural women is neither valued nor recognized.

Manisha Ghule is reversing this trend. Through her work, she is redefining the roles of women in rural areas and building new jobs and career pathways that transform rural women into leaders of village development. These women ‘frontline development professionals’ (called Sakhi or friend) are drawn from denotified tribes, Dalits, and other backward communities. Most are single or destitute women – a large, unseen, and untapped force for rural India whose current livelihood options are seen only as inexpensive labor.

Manisha has built village-level architecture to sustain and strengthen the leadership of Sakhis. The Sakhis are selected democratically by their villages for a tenure of three years. After intensive leadership training by Manisha’s organization, they step into their village as independent development professionals. They lead and own their own goals, performance targets, and service fee structures, all of which are set in consultation with their communities. Village households pay the Sakhis for the services they provide to transform livelihoods, agriculture, education, and social protection. In this way, the earnings of the Sakhis become directly linked to better development outcomes of their villages.

To prevent the Sakhis from getting relegated into an informal, temporary, or a poorly valued workforce, Manisha has integrated them into the village Panchayat system. This has given them the confidence and legitimacy of being embedded in the village system. It has also enabled Sakhis to activate defunct village development committees and programs that are crucial for the progress of their communities.

Over four years, 1200 rural frontline development professionals have emerged across 300 of the poorest villages of Maharashtra. From earning subsistence wages a mere four years ago, the Sakhis are today clocking a 30-50% increase in annual household incomes . They are also equipped with leadership tools, technical expertise, and the social capital to step into new career pathways.

Eventually, Manisha recognizes that long-term career pathways, not jobs, will build a groundswell of women aspirants for the role of rural frontline development professionals. She envisions four careers emerging from these roles – social entrepreneurship; progressive political leadership; business leaders; and professional farmers. For example, upon graduating from their three-year tenure, Sakhis are getting elected as panchayat leaders, or becoming founders of women-led businesses, or even setting up a bank.

Manisha sees the model of rural frontline development professionals as a sustainable and scalable strategy for rural development. Over time, she aims to set up state-level platforms where women frontline rural development professionals can engage in peer learning and collaborate as a professional body. For greater community buy in and to increase Sakhis’ legitimacy and visibility, Manisha is also partnering with local colleges of social work to research, formalize, and recognize the Sakhi model as a job role that will open up leadership and career pathways for rural women.

India, which has one of the lowest female labor force participation rates in the world, has always had more rural women at work than urban. This is especially true for remote and inaccessible villages. More than 73.2% of rural Indian women are informally engaged in agriculture. But despite their lived experience, they are not valued as a positive workforce for rural India.

In the last five years, the marginalization of rural women has accelerated into a steep downward spiral. Immediately after the first wave of COVID, more than 12 million rural women lost their jobs. Further, nearly 12 million Indian women, especially those in agriculture, could lose their jobs by 2030 owing to automation, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report .

The picture is worse for the nomadic and denotified tribes (DNT) of Maharashtra that Manisha hails from and works with. They are among the most vulnerable, landless communities of rural India who earn a living from cutting sugarcane. They migrate with their entire families for six to eight months, to live and earn in subhuman conditions in sugarcane fields. Despite being the backbone of the state’s sugar industry, which is among the most profitable in the country, the average family income of DNT community earns less than 900 USD a year. Hit by decades of drought, Beed, Manisha’s area of work, is also infamous for corruption and political violence. Women from the DNT families of this region are routinely coerced to have hysterectomies, so that they don’t have to skip even a day of work, especially during their menstruation cycle.

For a long time, there has been an overt recognition by all sectors that women are the route to revival for rural India. Yet opportunities that have engaged rural women (such as Self-Help Group leadership) have been limited and limiting. The government has instituted roles for rural women such as ASHA health workers, Aanganwadi workers, digital Sakhis, etc. Despite their reach and impressive work in remote corners of the country, this women’s workforce continues to be viewed as affordable, temporary, and last-minute labor. They receive limited technical training, are not engaged in any leadership programs, and are denied their service fee for years due to deficits in the government systems. Non-profit organizations working in rural areas also recruit and train rural women to deliver their project activities. But this cadre gets remunerated only for delivering field services that are within the remit of the organization.

Manisha recognizes that rural India needs rural jobs that channel the talent of its vast and resilient workforce – i.e. women. She is focusing on the domains of climate-resilient agriculture, livelihoods generation, and social protection where rural women experts can apply their lived experience and knowledge to turn around ailing village economies.

As the daughter of an ultra-poor family of sugarcane cutters, Manisha has drawn the blueprint for rural frontline development professionals by looking into her own life. Hailing from historically marginalized communities, these cadres of frontline professionals are comprised of women between the age of 30-45, who are selected at a lifecycle stage when they have accumulated lived experience and have leverage with their families/communities. Most have built a solid fund of grit and equanimity. Their children are also older – freeing up their time and mind space to focus on a career.

The women rural frontline development professionals are launched through a structured process of identification and selection that is endorsed by the community. The Sakhis are selected by the village council (Gram Sabha) and validated by the village women collectives (a platform set up by Manisha and her team, with the representation of women from all village households). Five to seven women are nominated for four or five specific roles, with room for dropouts or other exigencies.

A one-year Leadership Development Academy transforms women with limited formal education into rural frontline development professionals. Curated by Manisha and her team, the leadership immersion includes technical training, leadership development, on-site learning, coaching, and peer support for the Sakhis. The Academy curriculum blends the knowledge of village communities with the technical know-how of thematic experts. The faculty ranges from progressive local farmers to experts from financial institutions such as NABARD, leaders from agri-businesses, and representatives from government and non-profits.

The leadership academy is a springboard for Sakhis to launch into their change-making journeys. In every village, five frontline development professionals take on the critical roles of village livelihood officer, agriculture service provider, education officer, social entitlements officer, and Police Mitra (or friends of Police). Together, they build new knowledge, practices, and behaviors in their villages, that have otherwise seen little or no development interventions before.

The Livelihoods Development Officer provides village women the technical services of setting up Self-Help Groups (SHGs), opening bank accounts, managing record books, incubating micro-enterprises, setting up market linkages, and serving as rural business coaches. The Agriculture Officer engages marginal, small plot holders in climate-resilient farming methods that restore the nutrient balance of soils, recharge natural irrigation systems and cultivate water-efficient crops. The Education officer maintains a strict track record of the schooling of children of migrant families and provides care and upkeep services for children in village seasonal hostels. The Police Mitra ensured steady and timely access to the justice system for women survivors of violence. All five role holders collaborate on the more complex and intersectional challenge of securing women’s access to property and land rights and unlocking government schemes and programs.

The adoption of these roles is overturning the obstructions that block rural women’s leadership in India. The Sakhis are able to serve throughout their village, overcoming social norms that otherwise frown upon women leaving the housing to work commercially. Through the social capital built by the Sakhis within the community, they are able to engage with the customers within their role for the first time along with balancing household responsibilities. Though they are not formally educated, their wealth of lived experience enables a strong contribution back to their work in the villages.

So far, Sakhis have served 15,000 families, incubated 4,500 micro-enterprises, and engaged 3,500 farmers in bio-farming of high-value crops. They have enabled 20,000 women to become joint owners of property and opened up access to social protection schemes for 5,000 women. Riding on the capable shoulders of its Sakhis, villages are now reporting a 60-80% increase in household incomes. As a result, more than 3,500 families have altogether stopped inter-generational migration.

The increase in household incomes has yielded a surplus for families, enabling them to pay the Sakhis. This has built a business case for the Sakhi model. Sakhis earn up to INR 30,000 annually for 50-75 days of their time every year. They also harvest the recognition factor, as they stand tall in their communities as go-to-advisors, ‘business doctors,’ ‘crop experts’ and ‘panchayat leader.’ Manisha is planning to open up or co-locate other roles for Sakhis, which could enable them to earn a minimum of INR 50,000 annually.

As a true test of sustainability, Manisha and her team have shaped this model, without any external funding.

Manisha was born into a family of agricultural wage laborers in a remote village in the district of Beed in Maharashtra. When she was nine months old, her parents left her and her siblings in the care of their grandparents, to seek work in distant sugarcane fields. Despite poverty and the routine of eating one full meal every alternate day, Manisha recalls being a happy child. She experienced care and well-being from her siblings and grandparents.

Manisha’s life was upended after her marriage at the age of 13. Her education came to a grinding halt. In her marital home, she experienced extreme physical, sexual, and psychological violence. Shouldering the burden of agricultural and domestic responsibilities, she gave birth to her son at the age of 15. In a life-altering episode of violence, Manisha was flung into the village well one night by her husband and in-laws. She was pregnant with her second child at the time. Manisha survived the night in the swirling dark waters. This was a watershed moment – the moment when she decided to walk out on violence and give herself permission to build a life of purpose.

The threat of social ostracization drove Manisha’s natal family to reject her and her children. But her aunt, a single woman, stood up in her support. With her as the tailwind, Manisha, a single, penniless mother of two, set on a new path of grit. During the day, she earned money as a domestic help and cleaner in a local NGO. She studied at night. With scholarship support and mentorship of a village school teacher, Manisha topped her high school exams. She went on to complete her undergraduate and postgraduate education in social work.

But Manisha’s real education came from her role as a community worker. She fought many attitudinal barriers to get a job as a field coordinator in the same rural civil society organization that had employed her as a cleaning woman. In this role, she was responsible for some of the activities that today fall in the remit of a rural frontline development professional. The job role gave Manisha a new lens. It opened multiple new windows for her to read her own community. She understood that she and her lot were not worthless, but that structural violence and exclusion mounted huge obstructions on their path to progress.

Manisha also witnessed other forms of discrimination. In her non-profit, Manisha and the other field-worker colleagues, who came from local communities, were not consulted on program matters by the managers and leaders of the organization. And then, there were limited or no pathways of career progression for them.

In 2008, Manisha launched Navchetana, with seven other single rural women. Manisha ran from pillar to post to learn the basics of organizational management, administration, compliance, and fundraising. The absence of clear information, advice, and roadmaps led her realize the need for development management training for grassroots women who are off-the-grid of the development sector.

It took her ten years to develop the soil for her idea. In 2018, she rolled out the model of rural development frontline professionals.