Experiences as a Development Practitioner: 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.