World Bank Launches First Women-Only Project In India

The World Bank is funding a women-only project for the first time in its history and has focussed its efforts on India as a test case. The bank has granted a $19.5 million concessional loan for a $52 million project on rural womens development and empowerment targeting women below the poverty line in selected blocks in several states.

Using established non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like the Self-Employed Womens Association (SEWA) in Gujarat and other experts as consultants, the project hopes to build Self-Help Groups to strengthen the institutional framework for extension of credit to poor women.

The project hopes to help these women build income-generating activities using the credit received for getting trained. The goal is to make the groups sustainable for the future and withdraw support to the local groups upon project completion in five years.

 

The project will be under way in a month, though some preparatory activity has already started with a grant given under a World Bank facility to give the project a head-start.

The project covers six states and two districts in each state in the pilot stage. The states to be covered are Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Gujarat. It is a very challenging project. Each state is going to be a challenge in and of itself.

The Bank has woken up late to an avenue of development selected by several other organisations, observers said. Earlier, a controversy on the gender issue within the World Bank had led to the victory of those who believed in integrating women into larger projects.

I guess it was mainstreamed into other activities so far, conceded Shreelata Rao-Seshadri, co-Task Manager for the latest project.

The World Bank had no experience with doing free-standing women-only projects. It has generally been a position at the bank even with the gender people to mainstream this aspect of development, she conceded.

The project was initiated by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), an organisation that goes in for small and somewhat risky projects. The bank agreed to back the project based on IFADs past experience and on the success of organisations like SEWA. It was a cumulative kind of knowledge that led to choosing to fund this project, Rao-Seshadri emphasised.

The highlights of the project are we are finally talking about not only providing credit to women but also empowering them. For the bank, that is going further than usual giving women the self-confidence and the tools they need to control not only their money but also their lives, she stressed.

But this empowerment, Rao-Seshadri qualified, was not exactly political empowerment, an area the World Bank has tried to steer clear of in its public image. Its empowerment within the family. So that women begin to play a bigger role in the decision-making within the family, Rao-Seshadri contended.

The poor women are first expected to save, Rao-Seshadri maintained, as the project money was not going to be used as credit or loans to the Self-Help Groups created. Project money was going to be used to fund experts and other NGOs who would provide the training and backup as well as the network for the Self-Help Groups to grow.

The whole thing devolves around the women recognising the value of saving, she said. With this small amount of money the women are expected to approach banks to get loans to start income generating activities.

No money goes into any of these income starting activities from the project itself. But support services that will help them begin income generating activities will be undertaken by the project, for example: market studies, training and linking with local organisations.

The NGOs are expected to facilitate the Self-Help Groups interaction with the bank.

Indias network of rural banks are expected to lend to these Self-Help Groups and past experience has shown a high rate of return from such loans, Rao-Seshadri said.