Keya Sarkar: Income generation and more

OUT OF FOCUS

It was many months ago that Vijay Mahajan had mailed me a copy of the Jimmy Memorial lecture that he delivered. It had made me revisit my understanding of microfinance and appreciate how insignificant it was as compared to what he termed "livelihood finance".

At the beginning of this month, I attended a conference of the Livelihood Learning Group sponsored by the Ford Foundation, organised by the Indian School of Livelihoods Promotion, and hosted by Kolkata-based SASHA Association of Craft Producers, which had on me a similar effect.

Although the theme of the conference was to deliberate on successful marketing efforts of NGOs, the deliberations actually reiterated for all participants how successful market linkage was only a small part of effective livelihood promotion.

The livelihood learning group has as its members all NGOs that have specific livelihood initiatives funded by the Ford Foundation. Started last year, this year was the second year that the group was meeting to deliberate on livelihood intervention issues.

In order to give the discussions a clear focus, four case studies were done to derive learnings from market-led interventions. The four cases which were studied are:

*Janarth, which works in over 100 villages in Gangapur, a drought-prone tehsil of the Aurangabad district in Maharashtra and intervenes in the local commodity auctions to help farmers receive higher prices.

*Dhruva, a part of the Bhartiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF) family of development organisations, working in the Vandsa area of the Valsad district of Gujarat to turn erosion-prone tribal land into mango and cashew orchards and then interlink sapling growers, vermin compost suppliers, and other service producers at the local level.

*Agrocel, registered as a for-profit company, which has been set up jointly by Excel Industries and Gujarat Agro Industries Corporation Ltd. Based in Mandvi, Kutch, it engages in supplying inputs to farmers and selling the organic farm produce through the Fair Trade channel.

*SASHA, based in Kolkata, a leading craft-marketing organisation which sells in the domestic market as well as in Europe through the Fair Trade channel to benefit over 5,000 poor craft producers in West Bengal, Orissa, and Chhatisgarh.

There was little doubt at the end of three days that for the 40-odd development professionals who attended the conference, it was immense learning.

Little wonder that they all voted at the end that the Livelihood Learning Group should have an annual gathering. Given the aggressive, articulate bunch of professionals that the group had, the Ford Foundation's decision to make the deliberations available in the public domain would certainly benefit all development interventions at large.

Ford Foundation's Programme Officer Rekha Mehra said: "Livelihood interventions currently are work in progress", implying that although there are successful interventions, there is no simple formula for addressing the wide range of issues that must be tackled to improve livelihoods of low-income people.

And as in micro finance, so also in livelihood interventions, Indian organisations are at the forefront of research and development. Given the inadequacy of literature on the subject, conferences such as these would augment world learning on dealing with poverty.

While India now sees a huge variety of successful projects both in the farm and the non-farm sector, documenting these efforts are of recent origin.

Those who stand to benefit from such knowledge are of course development professionals themselves, donors, bankers and now the corporate sector too (as companies like Hindustan Lever and ITC plan their rural marketing thrust through self-help groups painstakingly set up by NGOs).

Most importantly for the increasing number of livelihood-promotion training institutes which are coming up across the country, such documentation efforts would constitute the syllabus.

It is hardly surprising that Mehra, along with Sankar Datta, the dean of the Indian School of Livelihoods Promotion, put in so much effort to first document the four marketing case studies and then structure a very effective conference.

As is happening elsewhere, so also in the NGO sector, all participants are realising that the donor-funding of projects and initiatives are getting stretched and even social projects aimed at the poor have to be self-sustaining.

So it was interesting to see how development professionals too have changed their jargon and words like "income generation" and "market linkage" now hold centre stage in discussions.

But what made the conference really worth the time and the battling against the torrential rains in Kolkata that week was the group's reiteration that marketing orientation had to be in the context of reality.

In the opinion of the group, which comprised men and women who had put in an average of fifteen years each in the hinterlands of India, the jury was still out on: whether livelihood promotion means income generation maximisation, subject to meeting other objectives like health and education, or it essentially means increasing the quality of life for which one of the critical ingredients is increasing income.

To the uninitiated it may seem like a mere juxtaposition of words or semantics, but a little careful reading will reveal why it is important for a development professional to appreciate the consequences of each before embarking on any.