Sreelatha Menon: Teaching them how to fish

NGO Access is empowering villagers by organising them into producer companies and getting them a good price for their produce

Charity is easy and joyful. Even six-year olds in Delhi are talking about the ‘Joy of Giving Week’ which is being organised by a network of NGOs. Schools are also taking part in it.

Recently, for Eid, many Muslim families living in abject poverty were given clothes and money by the wakf authorities as part of zakat in various parts of the country.

Sahida, a single woman in the obscure Hatra village of West Bengal earns Rs 350 a day by weaving a sari. But she neither has access to a loom nor the financial support to get one. She has a hearing impairment and arthritis, and no way to get herself treated. Last week, she got six saris and Rs 1,000 as zakat.

More than charity, what comes in addition is a method to help people like Sahida survive on their own. Livelihood creation is on the agenda of many NGOs mastering the art of aggregating talents and produce of villagers to scale them into big producer companies.

Access, an NGO known more for its advocacy of microfinance, has been at the centrestage of creating producer companies in remote villages and turning their small output of ginger, handicrafts and chillies into lucrative business. In the last three years, Access has set up 26 producer companies in seven states.

These companies access the market and negotiate the right price for the members. Three of these in Baswada and Jharsuguda are already generating surpluses. In the Udaipuria village near Jaipur, for instance, Access has helped people who made jootis from vegetable-tanned leather diversify into notebooks, diaries, folders and even furnishings.

Access also set up a resource unit — the Sparc (small producers assistance resource) centre — with a team leader, a subject expert and a community member to guide the company of farmers.

In Ranthambore, in the villages near the tiger sanctuary, the Sparc centre tied up with hotels and tour operators and helped women make gifts and souvenirs in bulk, with tiger stripes as the main motif.

For the landed farmers, the centre has formed a company that grows vegetables which are supplied to hotels. The NGO has developed all-season seeds of chillies and tomatoes for the project funded by the Hillary Clinton Women Empowerment initiative endowment. Those without land will now form a company that will sell processed chillies as pickle and chilly powder.

The Sparc centre would exit after four years and the producers would then run the company on their own, Access Managing Director Vipin Sharma says. Alternatively, they could also hire Sparc professionals for a fee. In Udaipur, 1,250 tribals in Jhadol have been marketing ginger and soon the landless would start a company for processed ginger. Sharma says the centre has tied up with the likes of Rabo Bank Foundation, RBS Foundation and Sir Ratan Tata Trust for funding.

A producer company is formed by representatives of 25 farmer groups, he explains. These companies grow cashew and kevda in Orissa, ginger in Jhadol (Rajasthan), and rice in West Bengal and Puri (Orissa), in association with Nabard and Basix. Soon, these would also start producing potatoes for a top company that makes chips.

Sharma’s next step would be the advocacy of this model for replication elsewhere.

This model has also been advocated by NGO Pradan, which has been promoting it in various states, especially among tribals, in broadly the same way as Access.