village councils or district offices, and 5 percent more likely to know if anyone in the village had paid a bribe to gain access to water for farming or to public officials. As with the farmers participating in Gujarat producer associations, SEWA group members in Rajasthan did not experience any increases in employment or wage income. Evidence from behavioral games with the participants,
however, suggested that self-help group participation may have changed mind-sets and behaviors of participants: repeated social interaction increased trust and fostered cooperation, making it easier for the SEWA women to organize themselves than for those in control villages.
Can NGOs help improve rural livelihoods and strengthen accountability?
The evaluations of the two interventions suggest that NGOs can play critical roles in linking unorganized and marginalized populations to state-led antipoverty efforts and public goods and services. The NGOs’ main effects appear to be organized communities, better informed participants, greater intragroup cooperation, and lowered costs of participating in collective decisionmaking. Impacts on income, employment, and household consumption are modest. In achieving scale, therefore, it may be that indirect, behavioral
effects on program participants outweigh direct effects on income, consumption, and employment. In both the Gujarat and Rajasthan programs, the strongest effect of the interventions was seen in terms of empowerment of women, including greater control over household finances, greater ability to make decisions regarding the health and education of children, and greater autonomy. Behavioral evidence from the Rajasthan program further shows that self-help groups lower collective-action costs at the village level. Strong self-help groups may thus be in an ideal position to demand transparency as well as accountability and thus improve the performance of poverty-alleviation programs and the provision of public goods. However, in neither the Gujarat nor the Rajasthan programs is
there broad evidence of improved political agency among members. Nor are there extensive improvements in service delivery or better public goods provision (with the exception of water in Rajasthan). While the membership groups may have overcome coordination problems among the poor, they have not effectively mobilized these groups to take the next, crucial step: more access to and representation in local decisionmaking circles in order to strengthen the accountability of local government to its citizens.
Potential political constraints for NGOs at scale
Program dynamics that operate at the village level may be quite different than those that are salient at scale. This is especially the case with NGO programs that acquire extensive reach and membership. SEWA’s experience reveals the dilemma that NGOs may face as their programs reach scale and as their organizational resources are seen as politically valuable. SEWA’s leaders claimed that the Gujarat state government—which had partnered with SEWA in several projects—wanted to use SEWA’s network for political purposes. As SEWA resisted, it began to face charges of financial irregularities, found itself the subject of a series of audits, and for several years had state grants withheld. Ultimately, SEWA withdrew from all projects in which the Gujarat state government was a partner. The National Rural Livelihoods Mission will significantly invest
in developing institutional arrangements to enhance the access of poor, rural households to public services and to promote sustainable improvements in local governance by giving the poor, women, and other vulnerable groups greater representation in village-level government. To do this on the expected scale will require that NGOs avoid or overcome antagonistic relationships with local and state governments and enter into dialogues with these institutions in order to shape official development policy and deliver basic services.
Conclusion
NGOs such as SEWA that support village-level membership organizations can play valuable roles in supporting the scaling up of rural livelihoods programs. They empower local communities, especially women, but their direct impacts on livelihood improvements are limited and they do not appear to increase the political agency of the rural poor more generally. When they operate at a large scale they may become exposed to political tensions that limit their ability to support national strategies of rural poverty reduction. Their ability to effect indirect, behavioral change among participants, however, may be a resource in scaling-up efforts.
For further reading: E. Bhatt, We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India (London: Oxford University Press, 2006); M. Chen, R. Jhabvala, R. Kanbur, and C. Richards, Membership-Based Organizations of the Poor (Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 2007); R. Datta, “On Their Own: Development Strategies of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India,” Development 43 (4): 51–5; N. Srivastava and R. Srivastava, “Women, Work, and Employment Outcomes in Rural India,” Economic & Political Weekly 45 (28): 49; K. C. Suri, “Political Economy of Agrarian Distress,” Economic and Political Weekly 41 (16): 1523–9.
Raj M. Desai (
desair@georgetown.edu) is an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Shareen Joshi (
sj244@georgetown.edu) is a visiting professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
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