August Field Visits

After slogging barefoot through a kilometer of muddy fields and monsoon rains, we reached our first ASHG (adapted self-help group) meeting of the week. We were greeted with warm smiles from the female members of one of the strongest ASHGs developed through the project to date. Trust levels and self-confidence are building incrementally, and a savings habit is being nurtured amongst our members. Over the next couple of weeks, we will work with the local government to link households to various welfare schemes (e.g., child and women's healthcare, NREGA, guaranteeing at least 100 days of employment or the equivalent payment of wages, etc.). Already this week, after meetings with district and block level government officers, we’ve been guaranteed that all of our households will receive their NREGA job cards in addition to 1-2 fruit plants per household by the end of September. While our households are eligible to avail such government cash and in-kind transfers, they either don’t have the required identify proof or the awareness of the schemes to pursue them. Our facilitation here allows them to see immediate, tangible benefits of engaging in the program as they begin to gradually access and experience the much-needed services that are rightfully theirs.

Understanding the mindset and the conditioning of a lifetime of chronic depravity of our clients is one of the most challenging aspects of this work. We, with our immense worldly exposure, an education, urban, modern lifestyles, and access to an abundance of amenities, are almost at a disadvantage. These luxuries suddenly become our greatest limitations, as practitioners, to relate to and understand a very different reality—that of the majority of our world’s population. A few visits allow one to skim the surface of this reality. And, it is a painful one, more so according to our perceptions than it is for these individuals, as this is all they know. We, however, compare it to our own conditionings and biases. In their case, I wouldn’t say ignorance is bliss; it simply relieves them of an awareness of their own, comparatively harsher reality. To live amongst them, or, at the very least, interact with them on a daily basis for an extended period of time provides us, practitioners, a window into their daily life challenges and garners our own understanding of their needs, the context in which they live, and the rationale behind the difficult daily decisions they must make such as how to feed themselves and their families, what they must forego for the survival of their children, and the sacrifices that must be borne by the entire household, irrespective of age. Designing a methodology, products, and services to create “livelihood pathways for the poorest,” as the project is aptly named, will be a process of trial and error these next 2 years.

One such household is that of Sunita Devi. Sunita is a 35-year old widow with 2 children in the village of Pali. She is the only breadwinner in her household, with an annual income of 21,600 Indian rupees, which is equal to 41 US cents per person per day. While Sunita’s ASHG is thus far one of the weakest ones, we hope through continued household visits, engagement with male members of the village, and concentrated mentoring services, her group will gradually catch up with the more quickly progressing groups. To help meet immediate consumption needs, we are linking households, like Sunita’s, to various government welfare schemes, such as NREGA discussed above, which will provide Sunita 100 days of employment or the equivalent minimum wage payment. As a widow and a BPL head of household, she will be eligible to receive cash and other transfers that she was not able to avail on her own. We are gradually working with her ASHG to begin internal savings on a monthly basis so that in urgent times of need, she will understand how savings can become a risk management tool. More advanced groups have been given a savings box, held by the Treasurer, and as a cost share, the members will purchase a lock and 2 sets of keys, to be guarded by the President and Secretary of the group. This balance of powers allows no single person access to the group savings. In September, we hope to provide Sunita and her peers training in kitchen gardening practices and agarbatti (incense stick) rolling. These two supplementary income-generating activities, combined with government linkages, should hopefully provide immediate relief for Sunita and her children, from both a financial and food security standpoint.

Mud and Other Stuff


Child of an ASHG Member in Shivrampur Village


Collecting Savings During the ASHG Meeting

Counting Her Change


Individual savings are noted in the individual's passbook as well as in the group savings register

Taradevi, an ASHG Treasurer, proudly holding the register she safeguards

Another sort of field work

Sunita Devi with her 2 children

Beautiful children of Pali Village

Once our households have stabilized and ASHGs are further strengthened, we will then begin training and introducing them to more high-skilled activities that generate stable, year around income. We’re hoping this gradual transition will lend to a more effective and committed uptake of entrepreneurial activities and a very different approach to life itself. To ensure this, the final key design will be of livelihood financing products, such as credit and microinsurance. But, how to customize these for such a poor population without adding to their indebtedness and daily strains? This past week has been one of stimulating financial product design, through discussions with some of BASIX's greatest minds and visits to local livestock markets. This process has developed in parallel with the final design of livelihood development services. Important questions we've been pondering and answering include: How should the introduction of supplemental income-generating and entrepreneurial activities be sequenced? Which elements of shariyat (Islamic) banking can actually be applied to vulnerable and poor populations? How can repayment be structured to sync with projected income cycles? What aspects of traditional systems can be embedded in the product design that will lend to greater understanding and acceptance of the financial products by our households? The answers to these are shaping some very innovative, finely blended products that we're looking forward to testing out over the next year.

Child in Shivrampur Village

Mesmerizing expressions

Children lingering after the week's meeting

No words, at least for me

Raginidevi places her passbook into the savings box

ASHG members finish depositing their savings for the week/month in Shivrampur Village

End of the meeting and time to start the day's work

Seeing is Believing*

*Written for the Grameen Foundation blog, Creating a World Without Poverty: http://grameenfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/seeing-is-believing/.

After what seemed would be a third year of dry spells during the critical monsoon season, the rains have finally come in Gaya district of Bihar, India. Agriculture is one of the primary revenue sources for both farmers and wage earners, like the 200 households that the Grameen Foundation is reaching through the Integrated Livelihoods Model for the Poorest (ILM) pilot project being implemented in partnership with BASIX/The Livelihood School. The rains bring increased wage earning opportunities, which, translates into enhanced income and food security for most rural poor households here.

To mitigate the risks of volatile and erratic income generating opportunities, the Solutions for the Poorest (SfP) team aims to gradually enhance the skill sets of the primary breadwinners of our households and link them to more stable livelihood activities. These activities include daily wage activities, which are often seasonal and low skill, and entrepreneurial or productive activities, which lend to higher income generating potential and often require increased skill sets and start-up capital. Through our project, livelihood promotion will be sequenced to first enhance existing or introduce new daily wage activities that can rapidly increase household income while enhancing clients’ self-confidence and trust in our project team and partners. Subsequent to this is the introduction of new, productive livelihoods that generate higher incomes and can sufficiently fill gaps in income flows throughout the year. Examples of these include goat rearing, poultry farming, and vegetable vending. This approach moves away from creating an immediate dependency on credit to meet daily consumption needs and avoids disrupting clients’ existing livelihood patterns.

Over the past month in Gaya, we’ve engaged our clients in exposure visits as a means to enhance their understanding of new livelihood activities- both wage-based and entrepreneurial. Exposure visits entail visiting actors and observing processes along entire supply chains of the activities we will link households to. This deepens their understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with each activity and better informs their decision to commit to the “right” livelihoods for themselves and their households.

This past week’s exposure visit was to the neighboring village of Orr, where our clients met with women of the same socio-economic background and have successfully engaged in kitchen gardening, a method of small scale vegetable production that involves very little or no land and mostly organic inputs. Home grown vegetables significantly increase nutritional levels while also contributing to income through the sales of excess produce. Our clients also received a demonstration on gunny bag gardening, which is essentially a garden in a bag that grows along creepers against the walls and roof of the house. Prior to the visit, our clients expressed self-doubt in their capacity to start new activities, but after seeing how their peers have engaged successfully in these, they claimed, “Now that we have seen them do it, we know we can do it too! And, we are ready to start!” Seeing really is believing.

Our members touring the kitchen gardens of the women in Orr village**

Despite the heavy rains, the women stuck through the entire visit

Our lovely hosts of Orr village bid us goodbye

**Unfortunately, due to the heavy rains, supporting photos are limited.

A Sunday Outing in Gaya

“Ma-jee, paisa dedo, ma-jee, paisa…” “Mother, please give us money,” was the pleading, out of habit and necessity at the same time, of the children and the elderly on the way up to the temple. The children had the energy to follow me up the 400 plus stairs, so halfway up in the scorching heat, when their pleading became an added weight, I succumbed and gave them a 10 rupee note, demanding that the recipient evenly share the money with the second boy, 5 rupees for himself and 5 rupees for the other. I was drenched in sweat as I reached the very top of the hill to the place where Buddha gave his third sermon after attaining enlightenment in Bodh Gaya. The sermon at Brahmayoni is referred to as the Adittapariraya Sutta or the Fire Sermon and was preached to a thousand former fire-worshipping ascetics on the subject of liberation from suffering through the detachment from the five senses and the mind. However, the temple there existed much before this sermon and derived its name from a natural fissure on the mountaintop, giving the appearance of a yoni, symbolic of the female energy. Believed to be the yoni or the female force of Lord Brahma, the temple became known as Brahmayoni. The main deity worshipped is a 5-headed goddess, Savitri, and before the shrine is the synthetic footprint of Brahma. The view of Gaya town, the sacred Falgu River, and the many other religiously significant sites of the area from atop the temple is marvelous.

Earlier this Sunday morning, after passing through several paddy fields in my somewhat flashy, white Amabssador, the glorious car of India’s past, we reached the Mangala Gouri temple, atop another of the many hills that pepper Gaya’s landscape. The temple is believed to have been constructed in the 15th century, but the location is believed to be the same mentioned in several puranas and various tantric texts dated much older. Many believe that this is another Upa-Shakthi Pitha, or one of the places where a body part of Shakthi fell to the earth. I had visited another Pitha in Kathmandu last year, dedicated to the yoni, so while a strange concept, it was not foreign to me. Here, Shakthi is worshipped in the form of a breast, a symbol of nourishment.

The Ambassador

In my 7 visits this past year, this is the first time I've seen the cursed Falgu River with water

Women clearing the paddy fields for sowing

Vimanam of the Mangala Gouri temple

A hazy view of Brahmayoni from below

Savitri temple

The 5-headed goddess

'Matha Yoni' shrine along the way up

After only a half a day’s outing, I was drenched in sweat and exhausted from the heat and hiking up to the hilltops. After picking up pomegranates and mangoes at the tail end of their season, I headed home for a nice shower, lunch, and preparations for the week ahead. Stay tuned for an upcoming post on this week’s “field trip” planned for some of our members, where they’ll be observing and learning about the techniques and benefits of kitchen gardening, an easy, low cost way to grow vegetables at home to enhance food security and even make a small income from selling excess produce.

Lady clearing the paddy fields

Preparing for sowing the fields

By the Grace of the Rains

The rains have come. India undergoes two monsoons- one from the northeast and another from the southwest. Bihar, falling within the former zone, has not been so lucky the last three years. Dry spells have diminished the rains of the monsoon season, beginning in mid-July and concluding around end August, and for a substantial rural population whose income patterns reflect seasonal needs, this has been massively detrimental. As discussed in previous posts, people like our clients in Gaya, Bihar, rely entirely on daily wage activities to generate irregular and nominal incomes that barely allow them to feed their families. Households can typically afford only pulses or vegetables for their daily meals- both would be too costly. Imagine then, as they wait for the monsoon, the period during which they generate the largest portion of their annual income from working the fields of the wealthy farmers, which is then staggered to help them survive throughout the remainder of the year, and it fails them. After two months away from Gaya, I returned two days ago to immense rainfall that has finally come after a harsh dry spell. Our clients may not be as focused and engaged, for the time being, in our interventions to mitigate these risks in the long run by gradually building their skills and linking them to more productive, stable income generating activities, but we are glad to know that opportunity, albeit small and precarious, has come knocking on their door to enable them to find food security today.

During the prior two months in Gaya, our work was primarily focused on five larger pieces. The first is what we call institutional development services, or more simply, forming the women heads of households into adapted self-help groups (SHGs), a proven model of aggregating skills, finances, and support for the greater benefit of each member. The other pieces involved assessing appropriate livelihood activities to link households to, preparing the training modules to build their skills to successfully engage in these, designing the financial products to help finance the activities, and finally, developing a monitoring and evaluation plan that would help us to track impact and changes in the households over time to inform whether we are essentially doing our jobs correctly.

SHGs are typically comprised of 8-10 women of homogenous social and economic backgrounds who come together on a weekly basis to deposit small scale savings (which may later be used for inter-lending) and serve as a means for peer to peer support and learning and effecting change in the community (or the household) cohesively, natural resource management being an example of such change. The SHG also serves as a platform for providing external technical support such as financial literacy and accounts management and facilitation with other external services such as government welfare schemes and bank linkages.

Facilitating the forming of these groups has been an immense challenge for the project team over the last few months. Building the social capital and diligence to engage in such a group for extremely poor women who have been neglected by all sides their entire lives is something we’ve learned cannot be done in six months to a year as has been proven with better off communities. Skepticism is still rampant as women (and their male counterparts) remember the bad taste that exploitative moneylenders have left in their mouths (and pockets). Time is money, and naturally our clients want to know the value of the outputs of their time and efforts to engage in the program. During our poorly attended meetings in scorching hot schoolhouses, male members would storm in with their rods and rocks in hand, threatening to beat their women for not being home to tend to meals and the children. We would turn these into exercises for empowering women, knowing that many would bear the brunt of their husband’s ignorance and wrath that evening. Can we view this as the price to pay now for greater empowerment and stronger income earning capacity in the long run?

Members collecting savings during an SHG meeting in August

Using audio and visual aids to conduct SHG meetings in August

To mitigate such responses, we’ve changed our approach to further engage male heads of households through ongoing dialogue on the benefits of their counterparts’ engagement and helping build their understanding that the entire household benefits through the woman. This has certainly helped, and we realize that ongoing dialogue with the women, both at the SHG as well as household levels, can help to clarify their misconceptions and skepticism of the services the program offers and build their trust in us as service providers. I think the most valuable lesson for me was realizing that this is a psychology program more than a development one, and our support should be sought by the women based on their own ability to articulate their situation and needs, rather than it being supplied by external parties such as ourselves, based on our own biases. We can add value by helping the people we serve to preserve their identities as citizens, as one very brilliant and wise practitioner advised me, so that they can access the government and private services that are rightfully theirs.

I love photographing this village elder every time I visit Raili village in Gaya

Singing school children back in May


Peeping into the SHG training session where his mother sits

SHG trainings in May

Children often sit or play among the mothers during the trainings

Children of clients

Happiness

Over the following two months, I’ll try to keep up with my blog posts on the story of these women. Keep reading!