Srilatha Batliwala is an India-based Civil Society Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University, Chair of the Board of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, New York, a member of the Board of Directors PLAN International. She is also a Senior Associate of Gender at Work, an international learning collaborative on gender equality and institutional change, and a Just Associate, an international capacity-building network for supporting the movements of women in marginalized communities. Srilatha came to Harvard from the Ford Foundation, New York, where she was Civil Society Program Officer from 1997 - 2000.
Through the first twenty-five years of her professional life, Srilatha gained extensive hands-on experience in struggles for the empowerment of some of India’s most marginalized and oppressed women, working as a grassroots activist, a policy advocate, and trainer and researcher. She is well known in South Asia for her leadership of large-scale grassroots programmes (such as Mahila Samakhya) that mobilized and empowered thousands of the poorest women in both urban and rural areas. A particular area of focus in this work was enabling the entry of poor, and often illiterate, rural women into India’s local government (Panchayati Raj) bodies; in many districts where she worked, this resulted in the percentage of women elected far exceeding the mandated quota of 33%.
Dedicated to bridging the worlds of practice and research Srilatha has combined activism with writing and publishing extensively on gender equality and women’s empowerment - including the well-known “Women’s Empowerment in South Asia – Concepts and Practices,” (1993) a conceptual framework and manual which has been translated into more than 20 languages and continues to be used throughout the world in training on women’s empowerment. She also published “Status of Rural Women in Karnataka” (1998), analyzing the results of the only study of gender relations in the world with a 100% male control group, which provided new insights into women’s decision-making roles and rights both inside the family and in the larger community and political structures.
From the late eighties, Srilatha also became involved in a number of international networks engaged with gender and women’s empowerment – such as DAWN – and thus gained experience in bridging the grassroots, national and global activism and advocacy for gender equality.
At the Hauser Center at Harvard, in her capacity as a Research Fellow, Srilatha’s work focuses on transnational civil society, particularly on transnational grassroots movements, and she brings a strong gender focus into this research. She has recently published an edited volume, “Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction” (Kumarian Press, August 2006) which helps lay readers understand the role and history of the major transnational social movements - labour, environment, women’s, human rights, economic justice and peace movements - that have impacted our world. She is now working on her second book, “Grassroots Movements as Global Actors” analyzing six grassroots movements – four of which are women-centered - that have linked up across borders.
Srilatha sums up her life’s work as follows: I have worked in many different organizations, levels, and thematic areas – but from all these locations, I have always worked for one cause: the empowerment of women.”