What am I doing here?

In this summer I’m working for Imago Global Grassroots, a NGO that helps grassroots organizations  that have proven impacts, co-create the preconditions required to scaling up without loosing their original values.

Imago was created on the belief that the transformation of the lives of the most vulnerable population is only possible if these individuals become agents of their own change. Grassroots organizations empower their members and develop leaders within the community. Some (like the ones that I am directly working with) establish community based social enterprises and generate revenues to increase the wellbeing of their members.

I have the luxury of working with two of the most important non-governmental organizations in India that aim to give women a voice while decreasing poverty: Self-Reliant Initiatives Through Joint Action (Srijan) and Transforming Rural India (TRI).

Srijan is a grassroots organization that seeks to empower poor rural families by creating self-help groups of women and promoting livelihood clusters. It has around 40,000 members and plans to serve 100,000 families by 2020. During this summer, I'm helping Srijan in its first step to scale up: create a minimum viable product that is faster, cheaper and better. In particular, I'm working with the organization to make growth financially viable.  I will start by co-creating an action plan to increase the revenues of its livelihood projects (dairy social enterprise and for the horticulture farmers). While doing so, I'm also training the organization's personnel so that they have in-house capacity to replicate this process with the other livelihood projects.

TRI is a new initiative that also relies on women self-help groups based on Gandhian ideologies. TRI aims to support technical and frontline NGOs to reach the last mile: empower women and improve the welfare of rural india. My work with TRI revolves around building research capacity in the organization, so that they can use their existing data to design better services for their members ad monitor the implementation of their services. 

India: a country of contrasts

India is a city of contrasts. The beauty of its temples and the exciting delicacy of the flavors of its food contrast starkly with the levels of pollution and poverty in the country. For an outsider, the invisibility of women casts a mysterious shadow that is hard to ignore. You can feel it on the streets, while navigating in a sea of males. You can feel it in the meeting rooms, where male presence tends to be overwhelming. As you will read in posts that follow, I'm working with organizations that try to empower women. Even so, I haven't attended one single meeting where the ratio of males to females is more than 1:6 (counting myself).

Source: A street of Old Delhi

Challenge: finding a single woman in the street

Not shockingly, it is also visible it on the statistics. Close to half (48%) of India's population is composed of women (Census 2011). However, in 2014 female labor force participation (LFP) was only 27%, which contrasts with 50% worldwide and 32% in South Asia (ILO). These low rates respond to cultural and social norms. Nonetheless, on a more preoccupying note, it is also reflected in the levels of gender violence. According to the Huffington Post, "Last year, over three lakh [thousand] women were kidnapped, raped, molested --and in some extreme cases, killed- by men across the country". This number has been increasingly steadily since 2009. Intimate partner violence is disquieting: according to a study published by the International Center for Research on Women and UNFPA in 2014, 52% of the women respondents reported that they had experienced violence during their lifetime and 60% of the males said they had acted violently against their wife/partner during their life (for more on this topic, see http://daughtersofmotherindia.com/).