Published Paper Details:

The paper will explore the concept of entrepreneurship education as one of the solutions to socio-economic empowerment of women in Arunachal Pradesh, which is a culturally diverse and geographically isolated area characterized by unique development challenges. The study is qualitative and exploratory and explores the role played by formal, non-formal, and informal entrepreneurial education in enhancing skills, confidence, generating income and social involvement amongst women. The results show that entrepreneurship education is effective in improving the economic capacity and contributing to social empowerment through increasing the power of decision making, mobility and social recognition among women. Nevertheless, empowerment results are different based on capabilities of having quality training, institutional support and enabling environments. Women-led enterprises are limited in terms of structural factors like limited finance, weak market connectivity, inadequate infrastructure and entrenched gender norms, which reduce the scalability and sustainability of these ventures. The paper notes that there is a necessity to have context-specific, gender-sensitive policies that combine entrepreneurship education with financial inclusion, market access, and institutional support. The paper adds to the conversation on regional and gender-related development through the foregrounding of education as the key facilitator of women empowerment in Arunachal Pradesh.