Self-development and empowerment are inherently interrelated. In the context of health and social development, the concept of “empowerment” has received much more attention. Empowerment, both as a process and a goal, has taken considerable prominence within community organisation theories, especially as operationalized by NGOs since 1970s [
10]. It has been defined as “a group’s or individual’s capacity to make purposive choices, that is, to make choices and then to transform those choices into desired action and outcome’” [
11]. Women’s empowerment, introduced as a concept at the International Women Conference in 1985 at Nairobi, was defined as redistribution of social power and control of resources in favour of women. Other definitions [
12], such as one given by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) (1978–98) [
13] have added that the poor men and women have limited or no access to resources, and socio-economic structures play a critical role in reducing or inhibiting access of women. Cultural traditions also inhibit women’s access to other productive resources and services. There has been almost no research that has explored the process of self-development or empowerment among CHW in India. Only one study explored the process of action on social determinants and it found that the CHWs developed identities as change agent and advocates for the community, both with respect to local culture and gender norms and in ensuring accountability of service providers [
14]. One reason for the lack of past research could be that there are few CHW programmes that articulate and visualize this role for CHWs. Another factor may be that funding of CHW programmes and their evaluations are compelled to focus on individual health outcomes and thereby ignoring work on social determinants [
1]. However, where these have been explicitly studied, it has been found that the CHWs can play the role of community advocates and “change agents, empowering individuals, their community, and themselves” [
15]. There is hence a further need to explore outcomes of any development process involving women in a broader context. It is also important to study, besides the program aim, the perception of participating women about the outcome of their involvement in terms of individual development.