Professional Assistance for Development Action PRADAN

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Professional Assistance for Development Action
(PRADAN)
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PRADAN Overview

• PRADAN is a Voluntary Organisation registered as
  a Society in 1983
• Mission Impacting livelihoods to enable the
  rural poor
• Core belief Well educated motivated people
  need to work at the grassroots to bring about
  holistic transformation
• Target Rural poor with emphasis on women,
  Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, Other
  backward classes
• Operational districts among poorest. Subsistence
  economies with weak markets and other
  infrastructure

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Criteria for selection of operational area

• Degraded natural resources
• Adherence to traditional technologies and modes
  of production
• Low productivity of labour and capital
• Lack of access to or control over productive
  assets
• Lack of access to financial services, business
  support services, knowledge resources and markets
• Lack of social and economic infrastructure

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Client identification and support

• Approach of area saturation
• Identifying poverty pockets
• Attempt to cover the whole of the poor and very
  poor populations there
• Identification more through excluding the visibly
  better off
• Building an area based perspective
• Mapping needs and opportunities
• Mapping potential activities and developing a
  proposed course of action in each area
• Provide livelihood support training, marketing

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Microfinance for Livelihoods- role of PRADAN

• Promoting SHGs as Mutual Aid Associations
• Building robust, autonomous groups, small savings
  and credit
• Developing SHGs as Financial Intermediaries
• Build capabilities for leveraging loans from
  banks
• Livelihood Planning
• Assist women in planning to optimise their
  resources - land/water, labour, livestock,
  forests
• Sectoral Interventions
• Identify and develop potential sectors to
  generate large scale livelihoods for the poor -
  tasar, poultry, dairy, vegetable cultivation,
  intensive agriculture
• Credit, other business development support
• large scale credit to SHGs, training, marketing

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The CGAP Study

• Done in Jharkhand
• 3000 of PRADANs 4500 Self Help Groups exist
  there
• PRADAN works in 14 out of 20 districts
• Survey done between August 10 and October 15,
  2002
• State divided into 4 regions for sampling
• 6 villages, 144 sample in each region, 24 from
  each village
• 432 non-members, 144 members
• Rationale - more variety in non-members than
  members - pilot in early August before study
• Questionnaire based on the CGAP tool, but adapted
  to include household debt, access to govt.
  services and programs, social networks

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Proportion of people Below Poverty Line

• 1993-94 National Sample Survey, rural population
  below national poverty line ( 0.23 per day)
• India 33
• below international poverty line ( 1 per day)
• India 44
• below national poverty line
• Jharkhand 57
• below 1 a day 80

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Results of Assessment

• PRADAN villages look similar to the rest of the
  villages in Jharkhand
• Villages in the study look more developed than
  the average PRADAN village, reason may be they
  are new villages, and larger
• Study Village Average PRADAN village
• Literacy rate 31 28
• Primary School 83 64
• Paved roads 21 12
• Households 190 118
• There is exclusion at the bottom 5 and top 10

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Results of Assessment

• Comparison of survey villages and rural Jharkhand
  

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Results of Assessment

• Selected variables for SHG and non-SHG members

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What PRADAN seeks to achieve

• Develop entrepreneurial capabilities
• Ensure access to and control over improved
  production technologies
• Leverage financial resources for programme
  investments
• Ensure sustainable access to marketing and
  technical services

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The future

• Understand clearly the causes for exclusion of
  bottom 3 to 5
• Study if they also drop out, individually or as
  groups
• Incorporate methodologies such as social mapping
  and PWR for targeting
• Incorporate tracking of the very poor in the ILS
  workbooks of staff
• Explore possibility of having a separate panel
  sample of the very poor clients to be tracked
  using ILS member books