From despondency to ambition - Uschi Kraus-Harper

This book is about poor women and whether they see self-employment as a desirable and feasible solution to the economic and social difficulties they find themselves locked into. It is also about change, about how change has come to some women and why not to others. The lessons learned are not based on statistical evidence, but on the stories that women have told the author, on personal notes of interviews, visits and observations, collected over many years in many countries, particularly over the last five years in India. Yet it is more than a journalistic account of the lives and work of women, because a more systematic analysis of all the data and the development of 'types' brought out some essential topics, for example that often the very poorest women are not earning, because of poverty and gender constraints; or that most women want employment or a plot of land of their own.