The community gathers in a Rumah Adat (traditional house) in Malaysia. It is a space for discussion and collective decision-making. Problems are brought forward until a way forward is agreed by all.
But when voices rise in these meetings, the majority are usually male. The women? They’ve been asked to manage another important aspect of the gathering. Not the agenda, not moderating the discussion…the food.
The women we work with know this is not accidental. It reflects something older — a set of assumptions about whose voice belongs in public decision-making and whose labour belongs around it.
This is why we need to be more honest about what empowerment means in Indigenous and rural communities. Too often, it is framed as training or inspiration. We run workshops, certify participation, and celebrate completion. Then many women return to communities where formal opportunities remain scarce, or leave for towns and cities where the work is better paid but disconnected from home.
This is not just a pipeline problem. It is a design flaw.
If development programmes are serious about long-term change, they cannot stop at skills building. They have to create real pathways towards paid, respected roles within the communities women already belong to. Otherwise, we are asking women to grow but not changing the structures they are expected to return to.
That has shaped the thinking behind the SOLS ASLI Women Academy (SAWA) programme hosted by SOLS Foundation, a Malaysia-registered non-profit dedicated to education for the poor. The programme trains Orang Asli (Indigenous) women to become community centre managers within their own communities, running Advancing Skills Livelihoods for Indigenous Peoples (ASLI) Centres that provide education, digital literacy, financial literacy and livelihood support to children, youth and adults.
These women are not volunteers or token ambassadors. They are hired into formal roles, with salaries, contracts and institutional backing.
That distinction matters.
For many women, the barrier is not a lack of potential. Education alone does not necessarily lead anywhere. A qualification may exist, but the jobs close to home are informal, low-paid or not treated as skilled.
For married women, the challenge is more complex. Training outside the home often depends on family approval, often from men in the family. The women we work with describe that approval simply as ‘luck’, depending on how open-minded the husband is.
Early marriage adds another barrier, often disrupting futures before they have had a chance to form. In the communities we work in, school-going girls are still being asked by teachers when they plan to get married — not what they want to study, who inspires them or what interests them. They internalise one destination: wifehood, before anyone has given them the chance to imagine another path.
This is why paid employment matters. A predictable salary, social protection and a defined role do more than provide income. They signal that this is real work, and that the women should be taken seriously, not only by funders or programme staff but by her own community.
It also changes what leadership can look like. Too often, development programmes still rely on outsider logic. A facilitator comes in, delivers content, and moves on.
SOLS Foundation was guilty of this too. In earlier iterations of our community centre model, we brought in outside teachers and believed that dedication and good intentions were enough. They weren’t. Even when intentions are good, continuity was weak. Trust had to be rebuilt and relationships reset. The programme may have been completed, but the community was left with little that truly belongs to it.
Sustainable change does not work that way.
Building towards our own irrelevance
In communities facing long-term pressures, from land displacement and the loss of resources once drawn from ancestral lands, to economic exclusion and intergenerational poverty, change is lasting when it is carried by someone consistently present and deeply trusted.
When the educator, organiser or centre manager is a woman from the village itself, the dynamic shifts. She understands the language, rhythms, sensitivities, and trust architecture of the community. She is not an outsider. She is already accountable to the people she serves. These are her neighbours, her relatives, her future too.
This is what makes programmes like SAWA relevant to sustainability beyond just education or women’s empowerment activities. At the community level, sustainability is simple: can the centre keep functioning when the project team leaves? Can communities build systems that are not permanently dependent on outsiders?
At SOLS, we have learned that real sustainability requires us to build towards our own irrelevance. Each ASLI Community Centre operates around a transition model where the community increasingly takes ownership. It moves from external models introduced by SOLS to local systems, local leadership and local decision-making. The goal is not to keep SOLS in charge of a programme forever, but to make sure the work continues when we are no longer the ones driving it.
That is harder than it sounds. Most funding systems still reward visible activity over long-term transfers of ownership. Reports count outputs. Grants move in cycles. But a two-year funding horizon cannot create a ten-year institution. If we want community-led development to succeed, we have to fund for continuity, not just activity. It’s a funder design problem, not a programme failure.
We also have to be honest about what remains unresolved. The clearest gap in SAWA right now is childcare. We provide accommodation, training, and a living allowance, but not in-house childcare. For mothers, that is often the difference between wanting to participate and being able to. Any programme that claims to support women’s leadership must be willing to confront practical exclusions, not just symbolic ones.
Still, when one Orang Asli woman returns to her village with a formal role, fair pay and the confidence that comes with real institutional support, something important begins to shift. Children see leadership differently. Families see women’s work differently. The community sees that capability did not need to be imported. It was already there, it simply needed to be recognised, invested in and trusted.
For too long, underserved communities have been approached as places to send help into.
Hire someone who’s already there. Pay her fairly. Build the structures around her. And then plan, from day one, on the best way to hand it all over.
Danutcha Catriona Singh is managing director of SOLS Foundation, a Malaysia-registered non-profit dedicated to education for the poor.
