Building Skills, Building Confidence: Ultra Poor Women in India Are Taking a Step Toward Self-Reliance

Until our households are able to build their skills to engage in more productive livelihood activities that can help them to generate increased income, through the Livelihood Pathways project, we have identified ways to help households meet their immediate consumption needs in the interim. The first is to link households to government welfare schemes that provide them with a minimum guaranteed wage employment or the equivalent wages, food rations, and other cash tansfers. The second is to train members of the household to engage in low skill activities, such as kitchen gardening and incense stick rolling, and link them to these local markets to generate relatively small but immediate and stable incomes. Avinash Kumar, our project manager in Gaya, blogs about these activities here. Special thanks goes to Julia Arnold for her immense editing contributions.

Building Skills, Building Confidence: Ultra Poor Women in India Are Taking a Step Toward Self-Reliance

Asha Devi’s eyes sparkled as she rolled agarbatti (“incense sticks” in Hindi) for the first time. Asha is a member of an adapted self help-group (ASHG) in Pali, a village in India’s Bihar state, where the Livelihood Pathways for the Poorest, a joint project of Grameen Foundation’s Solutions for the Poorest group and BASIX/The Livelihood School, is being implemented. The sparkle in Asha’s eyes reflects newfound self-confidence and pride that by selling handmade agarbatti, she will be able to supplement her family’s income.

Women from the program hold up their newly-rolled agarbatti (incense sticks) during training

Nearly 100 women from six village ASHGs participated in our week long training. Agarbatti rolling, which is a common activity in almost all of the villages in the Gaya district of Bihar, is one of two income-generating activities being promoted through the project. These activities require simple skills and provide modest increases in income to help households meet their immediate consumption needs. As the clients’ confidence levels and skills increase, the project team will transition them into entrepreneurial income generating activities, such as poultry farming and goat rearing, which require higher initial capital investment and skill sets but can significantly help fill income gaps throughout the year.

The agarbatti rolling training was unique not only because it was the first time women from the poorest families were receiving it, but also because it was the first time local women were given a leadership role to train their fellow community members. The experience of having a local woman train them in this skill helped increase the participants’ confidence, leaving them optimistic about their prospects and ability to contribute to their families’ income. While agarbatti rolling is common in the region, many of the households participating in our project had never done it because they live in relative isolation, making it more difficult for them to access agarbatti agents and vice versa. Instead, they have depended largely on wage labor from agriculture production, construction work, and road building.

Faced with very unpredictable and insecure income sources, these families have not had the luxury of time nor the opportunity to experiment with an entrepreneurial activity. In fact, these households often lack the necessary self-confidence to take up and learn a new activity, even such low-skill ones as agarbatti rolling. One of the aspects of the project is building the self-confidence of the members and, which, thus far, has been successful.

This training is the beginning of a change in this aspect of these women’s lives. As their self-confidence grows and they see their income rise, this positive change cycle will encourage them to seek out other opportunities. As they move forward, our team will work with them to continue on this path.

Take A Walk In Her Shoes

The Livelihood Pathways for the Poorest project was featured in this month's Grameen Foundation newsletter. The piece can also be viewed on the Grameen Foundation website.

We all know the old adage: you don’t really know someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. This has taken on greater meaning for the Grameen Foundation team helping to build income-generating opportunities for poor people in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. Together with colleagues from The Livelihood School at BASIX India – a noted livelihood-development organization – they have been slogging (sometimes barefoot) through muddy fields and monsoon rains to meet with clients of our Integrated Livelihoods Model project. One of team’s most challenging tasks involves understanding and working through the daily challenges of clients, who have faced a lifetime of chronic poverty, as well as the sacrifices that everyone in the household has to make to survive, irrespective of age.

The project’s goal is to identify and build immediate and long-term support for these households, which have been organized into groups. Over the past few months, the team has been working with the local government to link households to existing support programs that are available to them, such as child and women’s healthcare and short-term employment. These state services, which many of the poor did not even realize they were eligible for, help the households meet their immediate needs, while the livelihoods team develops and tests products and services that will offer long-term support.

In addition, we are working with groups to create an internal savings process that will give members access to funds in cases of emergency. Some of our more advanced groups have a savings box with a lock, which is held by one elected member, often the treasurer. There are also two sets of keys that are held separately by other elected members, typically the president and secretary of the group. This balance of powers allows no single person access to the group savings.

Two months ago, our team visited the group of Sunita Devi, whom you met back in April. The 35-year old widow and mother of two young children is her family’s sole breadwinner. Her sporadic work as a laborer earns her 21,600 Indian rupees (about $462) per year. Though her fledgling group still needs a higher level of support, she is already benefiting from our work with the local government. As a widow and head of household of a family living below the poverty line, she is eligible to receive a stipend and other services she didn’t know about. Our team will continue to make household visits, hold meetings with the village and provide concentrated mentoring to help strengthen her group, and will continue working with them to start their group savings plan.

Once our team’s target households have stabilized and the groups are further strengthened, we will begin training and introducing them to more high-skilled activities that generate stable yearly income. We hope this gradual transition will lead to a more effective and committed uptake of entrepreneurial activities and a very different approach to life itself. To ensure this, the final piece of our project will focus on financing products that support livelihood development, such as microloans and microinsurance.

Luckshmi Sivalingam, our program officer for the Integrated Livelihoods Model project, has been working on our project in Bihar since April 2010. Read her blog to learn more about her experiences living in and traveling through these poor communities.