South Asia Agriculture and Rural Growth Impact Note Series OCTOBER 2019 Are we listening? 1 Results from a World Bank study on the effects of SHGs on deliberative political institutions This note is based on the paper Unheard Voices: The Challenge HIGHLIGHTS of Inducing Women’s Civic Speech, authored by R. Parthasarthy, V. Rao and N. Palaniswamy,1 What is the impact of women Self Help Group (SHG) programs on ‘bottom up’ political participation at the grass roots CONTEXT level? Results from the impact evaluation of one such long running program - Pudhu It has been widely noted that women’s participation in political and Vaazhvu Project (PVP) in Tamil Nadu economic processes leads to significant improvements in quality of indicate: life, and in the creation of a more equitable society. However, despite • Significant improvement in women’s formal guarantees of political equality and mechanisms to improve participation in the gram sabha by participation, women across the globe continue to be systematically doubling attendance. under-represented in politics at every level. • Significant increase in speech and In a country like India, this presents an especially acute challenge given floor time. entrenched gender inequalities and persisting low representation of • Increased social capital and women’s women in high tiers of elected office. Despite 30% reservation in Gram sense of political efficacy and identity. Sabhas, they constitute 9.7% of parliamentary candidates and 14% of • No evidence that improved elected Members of Parliament. At the local level, women are even less participation leads to improved likely to attend political gatherings, participate in community resource agenda setting power of women, management, and run for local office. Furthermore, women often face nor of eliciting a response from social costs for speaking in public and are usually less educated or government officials. informed. • Discussions on issues of importance to Various public sector programs have tried to increase women’s SHGs may crowd out issues that the participation in political processes, broadly using two methods – first gram sabha is more inclined to focus on such as infrastructure, budget allocation and beneficiary selection for public programs. 1. The original paper is available at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/216591498569537722/pdf/WPS8120.pdf Impact Note 1: OCTOBER 2019 Box 1: Local Governance in India The 73rd Amendment of the Indian constitution set up a three- tier system of local government, of which the village council, or the gram panchayat, is the lowest. In order to provide an institutional check on elite dominance (i) 33% of seats in the village council are reserved for women, and a number proportional to their population for disadvantaged castes and (ii) frequent village assemblies or gram sabhas provide citizens the opportunity to deliberate and advise the village council. by guaranteeing the representation of women at the lowest level of local government, and second, more recently from a ‘bottom up’ perspective by building women’s organizations through a system of Self Help Groups (SHGs), aimed largely at providing credit and livelihoods to rural women. While these initiatives have had strong positive outcomes, the mere presence of women in the gram sabha does not seem to have a discernible effect on the women’s participation in the council or the gram sabha and evidence of impacts on women’s participation in decision making at the local level is required to inform policies and programs. Box 2: Cultural Context on women in the state of Tamil Nadu Women’s status in the state of Tamil Nadu is marginally better than other parts of rural India. However, studies suggest that a relatively higher degree of female autonomy may be confined only to extended family interaction, rather than interactions outside the family. Census data also confirms that recent improvements in education and labor market opportunities have benefited men much more than women. Labor force participation rates for rural Tamil Nadu are 59.3% for men and 31.8% for women. INTERVENTION Self Help Groups (SHGs) have been a major coping strategy for the rural poor in Tamil Nadu since the early 1990s and had seen noteworthy success under various central, state and development partner initiatives. However, while most initiatives were successful in mobilizing and forming SHGs of the poor and empowering village institutions, challenges of exclusion of the truly poor and disadvantaged remained, along with the ability of these groups to sustainably reduce debt and support livelihood diversification. To address this exclusion and existing economic inequality, the GoTN envisaged the development of village level organizations that represented the poor and worked synergistically on shared development goals within the framework of the gram sabha. In this context, the Tamil Nadu Empowerment and Poverty Reduction Project (TNEPRP) Pudhu Vaazhvu Project (PVP) was rolled out in 16 selected districts. To implement the various interventions, the village organization – the Village Poverty Reduction Committee (VPRC) - was designed as the core institution and comprised federated SHGs whose Impact Note 1: OCTOBER 2019 representatives were democratically elected. While the VPRC’s core participation factors alone were examined. mandate remained credit and livelihoods support for SHG women, However, when the deliberative influence PVP would facilitate linkages with local governments (VPs) to improve of women in the PVP gram sabhas was access to welfare benefits and improve local accountability. A three- considered, the researchers found more tiered project structure - district, block and cluster (of villages) – was complex results. instituted to support the implementation of the project. Lastly, a Social The team found no improvements in the Audit Committee comprising 3-5 people nominated by the village was agenda setting power of women. Given that setup to monitor all project activities. gram sabhas are a forum for citizens to Within each district, blocks were chosen on the basis of a poverty and demand accountability, failure to respond “backwardness” score that included the number of households below the to women suggests that they remain poverty line and the population of socially disadvantaged groups, Scheduled unheard. Despite not having substantive Castes and Tribes. All villages within selected blocks were eligible for the influence, women feel more empowered in PVP program, and within each village, a set of households was identified the PVP villages, with 25% more likely to through the participatory identification process. state that they would take some form of action to address issues of family and village Figure 1: PVP's institutional model and integration with local governments concern, than their counterparts in non-PVP villages. Functions Mavatta The study indicated a decline in the discussion District Level Magamai District federation of customarily identifiable women’s issues Four sub-committees to related to domestic matters such as water monitor and supervise the Sub-district Vattara Magamai Cluster collection and education in the gram sabha, following: Level (Federation) Forum in favour of discussions on matters of project 1. Savings and credit 2. Institutional strengthening administration and activities, loan audits and job 3. Livelihoods training. This indicates that women in the PVP 4. Community Professionals Local Government - Village Level program are fundamentally shifting the content SAC & VPRCs of the conversation that they engage in. Monitoring and decision making integrated with the PLF CLG local government VPRC (Federation) (Federation) Livelihoods groups Common-interest Box 3: Equality of Participation livelihoods activities SHGs and PLFs Social Audit Savings Savings Liveli- Liveli- 60 Bank linkages and Committee Groups Groups hoods hoods 55 savings (SACs) (SHGs) (SHGs) Groups Groups 50 41.5 40 38 35 30 EVALUATION DESIGN 20 10 The study aimed at measuring whether and how PVP’s focus on public action and inclusion affects the quality and character of participation in gram 0 Incident of any Citizen speeches - sabhas and accords citizens an opportunity to influence local governance. It women’s speech (%) female (%) represents one of the first attempts at a quantitative analysis of SHGs that Pre-PVP Post-PVP measures objective outcomes rather than self-reports. The research team reconstructed the PVP selection process (regression discontinuity design) by creating a matched sample of comparable Length of speaking (avg. words) 120 112% treatment and control villages. Full audio recordings of the gram sabha, and a standardized questionnaire collected information on the attendance 100 of citizens and local officials, on the nature of issues raised by citizens, 78% 82% 80 and demographic data on who raised these issues. Using the Structural 62% Topic Model (STM), a set of 25 topics discussed within the gram sabhas 60 were identified and used to understand how these topics vary with the 40 identifiable characteristics of speakers and villages. 20 KEY FINDINGS 0 Male Female Female Female Control Pre-PVP Post-PVP Post-PVP PVP was found to be immensely successful, with significant increases Citizen Speeches in women’s attendance, frequency and length of speech (Box 3), when Impact Note 1: OCTOBER 2019 POLICY LESSONS CONCLUSION The results point towards the success of “bottom up” Achieving gender parity in the political sphere, particularly interventions in significantly improving women’s participation in local government, is a complex process. The substantive in politics - women were speaking up, more confidently and gains made under the aegis of the PVP program suggest about matters more related to administration in PVP villages. that similar policy interventions can have a positive impact However, whether elected officials in the village council on challenging gender norms and empowering women. were hearing their voices is another matter. The negligible However, challenges remain. Although women are speaking improvement in state responsiveness to, and agenda setting significantly more in the civic sphere it appears that they are by women in the gram sabhas points to a deeper difficulty in still not being heard. improving deliberative equality. While the PVP may help amplify the voices of women in rural Over time, there is a need to cautiously monitor programs governance, it should be recognized that this change could that alter the organic processes of the gram sabha to assess also shift discourse away from the topics raised by other whether empowering one group could inadvertently lead to citizens and towards PVP-specific activities. Given the limited unintended consequences for others. While the dominance amount of time to conduct gram sabhas, this may crowd out of men in the gram sabha may be diminished, it may become other issues of relevance to the wider community. Honing dominated by some vocal PVP participants. our ability to listen will require a long-term commitment and continuous fine-tuning. Lastly, the methodology used in the PVP study is significant as it provides a more rigorous foundation for conclusions drawn from studies based on self-reports, where concerns about responses being biased by project goals remain. ABOUT THE Impact Note SERIES This note is part of the South Asia Agriculture and Rural Growth Impact Note Series, that seeks to disseminate research and analysis focused on World Bank financed rural, agriculture and food systems programs in India. Series editors: Abhishek Gupta and Gayatri Acharya. Photographer: Ritayan Mukherjee. We are grateful for the generous support from The South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative (SAFANSI), Gates Foundation, Ministry of Rural Development and various state rural development departments. This note was prepared by Deepti Kakkar (Consultant, World Bank) and published by the Food & Agriculture Global Practice at The World Bank, 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 USA. Website: www.worldbank.org. For further information or copies please email: galex2@worldbank.org. Disclaimer: The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this note are entirely those of the author(s) and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations or to members of its Board of Executive Directors or the countries they represent. REFERENCES C. F. Karpowitz and T. Mendelberg. The silent sex: Gender, deliberation, and R. Ban, S. Jha, and V. Rao. Who has voice in a deliberative democracy? institutions. Princeton University Press, 2014; P. Paxton, S. Kunovich, and M. M. Evidence from transcripts of village parliaments in south India. Journal of Hughes. Gender in politics. Annual Review of Sociology, 33: 263–284, 2007 Development Economics, 99(2): 428–438, 2012 J. Dreze and A. K. Sen. India: Development and participation. Oxford University R. Parthasarthy, V. Rao, N. 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Princeton University Press, 2014; P. Paxton, S. Kunovich, and M. M. Hughes. Gender in politics. Annual Review of R. Ban and V. Rao. Tokenism or agency? The impact of women’s reservations Sociology, 33: 263–284, 2007 on village democracies in south India. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 56(3): 501–530, 2008