Women empowerment through education : a case study of nurturing entrepreneurship in a female pesantren

Abstract

Women empowerment is a theme of interest and importance to many academics and policy makers today.United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its program Suistainable Development Goals (SDGs) encourages the protection and empowerment of women:. In Indonesia, the issue is also one of the agendas in the National LongTerm Development Plan (RPJPN) 2005-2025. The echoing of the women's empowerment program above stems from several cases of women's inequality that still occur in many sectors, one of which is the unbalanced participation of men and women in the world of work. One way to support this is to provide entrepreneurship training for women to make them more independent and empowerthem economically. Women entrepreneurs can contribute significantly to economic growth if they have equal opportunities and access to resources. Pesantren, as the first Islamic educational institution in Indonesia, also responds to this case where entrepreneurship coaching programs are made part of the curriculum. This study aims to find out: 1) how female leader manage entrepreneurship program in a femalepesantren;. 2) the extent to which the pesantren entrepreneurship program can contribute to women's empowerment; 3) how students perceive entrepreneurship coaching program in pesantren as a form of women's empowerment. This research uses a qualitative case study method in a female pesantren in West Sumatera by using observation, interviews, and documents analysis as data collection and for triangulation. Data analysis was conducted through manual thematic analysis using Nayla Kabeer's empowerment theory including 3 dimensions; resource, agency, and achievement. This research finds: 1) A female leader manages entrepreneurship coaching programs in three aspects; planning, organizing and implementing, evaluating. The planning process starts from designing the vision and mission of the pesantren, the organizing and implementation process start by providing training to all teachers and conducting the program once a month. For evaluation there are two types. Internal evaluation of each unit a week after the display event, secondly,external evaluation with all units during a work meeting at the beginning of the new school year. 2) To measure the extent to which the entrepreneurship program contributes to women's empowerment, it can be seen from three dimensions. First, for the resource dimension: the pesantren only provides human resources in strengthening skills and social resources to assist students in conducting promotions and marketing products. For the achievement dimension, the students have produced a variety of products. Furthermore, all of these works were exhibited in the end-of-semester project exhibition and some of them were sold during the event. 3) Female students perceive entrepreneurship coaching program in pesantren can increase creativity, support female students to be independent, and support female students to be economically productive. Based on the findings above, this study recommends expanding the research by comparing the types of programs in this female pesantren with other female pesantren to enrich the research on female pesantren and support women's empowerment.