SAFANSI The South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative jeevika in rural bihar : social mobilization and cultural transformation The process of economic development is for examining how a development intervention culturally transformative. It has fundamental can have an impact on culture and cultural effects on traditional norms and values and on identity. Bihar is one of the poorest states in the how members of households and communities country, and its rural areas are characterized view themselves and one another. What has been by severe caste hierarchies, patriarchy, less clear is the extent to which a development and inequality. It is an exceptionally “hard intervention can be instrumental in bringing context” in which to introduce a project that about cultural change, or if an intervention purposefully targets women’s empowerment, can effectively induce social change that has both individually within their households and important cultural effects – especially in very publicly within their communities. traditional, remote rural settings. Gender roles are often pointed to as being hard-wired into traditional societies and resistant to change, let alone redefinition. Yet recent practical experience from the Indian state of Bihar strongly suggests that the immutability of gender norms in these contexts may have been seriously overestimated. The project in question is the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project, locally known as Jeevika, translated variously as “livelihoods” or “livelihoods expansion.” Jeevika is a very large- scale, community-based poverty reduction operation which began in six districts in 2006 and which will cover all 38 districts in the state by 2022. It is implemented by the state government of Bihar with a concessional loan and technical assistance from the World Bank. The Project’s principal intended targets have been very poor women whose participation entailed organizing into self-help groups of between 10 and 15 members. The settings in Women from a JEEViKA SHG group conducting their book keeping activities which the Project is carried out is all-important for the week (Photo Credit: Shruti Majumdar) January 2017 South Asia Region The self-help group is the vital initial forum in traditional caste and gender identity with a which an egalitarian ethos is cultivated between new one which is defined by activism and the members – something that often takes membership in a group of peers who are focused time to achieve between women from different on mobilizing for purposes like gaining access castes and backgrounds. But collective action to credit. The process of federation, through can be effectively used to overcome traditional which groups of the 10 to 15 member self-help patterns of behavior and to develop a sense of groups are themselves assembled into 10 to common purpose. It begins with savings within 15 group village organizations, and then into the group, accumulated at regular meetings cluster level federations consisting of between on a weekly basis, where the members each 35 and 45 village organizations. The experience contribute 10 rupees. Once a sufficient amount of participating at these levels of collective has been accumulated, individual members may action and civic engagement broadens the obtain loans from the pot and repay them with a perspectives of the women well beyond their small interest rate. This is called “interloaning,” own households and makes them active agents and the pooling and use of the members’ of social change. This is a fundamental change own resources provides the fundamentals of where traditions assign women’s gender collective financial planning and lending. It is identities firmly to the domestic sphere. the beginning of collective action, all of which takes place at the communal level, and its What do the women require in order to make affects are more than just economic. this happen? First of course is the organization itself, principally the self-help group and the The women belonging to a self-help group village organization. They also need what the effectively displace a major part of their Project’s planners and implementers refer to as “symbolic resources,” which enable them to identify with the mission and objectives of group membership and to define themselves in these terms alongside, and to a large extent, in place of caste, kinship, or religious identities. And they need access to physical and financial resources, including the identification cards and passbooks that participation in public life requires. Once they have these, they are in a position to network with others with different experiences who they otherwise never would have interacted with, including those who live and work in other villages and who are from different caste and religious backgrounds. These expanded horizons lead to some very real and practical results, including exposure to new knowledge systems that can challenge and overwhelm traditional belief systems, and Project staff speaking to JEEViKA SHG women (Photo Credit: Shruti majumdar) the development of new competencies that 2 transcend the boundaries those old beliefs both women and men see what women’s tend to define and reinforce. This is very much gender roles consist of differently. The nature what ethnographers and other social scientists and scale of that change point to the practical mean when they call a development process significance of broad social mobilization. The “transformative.” impacts were not a function of subtle changes to gender roles at an individual level, but rather Analyses of Jeevika outcomes as of 2014 the product of social activism and movements corroborate roughly similar findings from within participating villages and groups of the evaluation of an earlier project involving villages. Gender equality became a social women’s self-help groups elsewhere in India cause, the results of which directly challenged which influenced the design of Jeevika – the the patriarchal power structures characteristic Andhra Pradesh District Poverty Initiatives of these communities, and which did so further Project better known locally as the Indira as it was scaled up to cluster level federations Kranthi Padham or IKP. There too, participating of multiple village organizations. The definition self-help groups consisted of both those of a woman’s “place” had expanded from the already existing and those established through household, to the community, to society. the Project. Yet the social empowerment of women was not limited to those participating in the IKP, the benefits spread to non- members as well. Informed by that practical experience, Jeevika very purposefully targeted objectives entailing the mobilization and the empowerment of disadvantaged and vulnerable women. The women elected their presidents, treasurers, and secretaries from within the self-help group. Where there was insufficient financial literacy or numeracy, they could avail themselves of the services of a Jeevika project community mobilizer to monitor and maintain the collective pot and loans from it, and to teach basic accounting skills to the members. Once these accounting practices became internalized as a natural part of the self-help groups’ operations, the groups’ federation into village organization enabled them to join the formal sector, establishing bank accounts and procuring loans from local banks. However deep the norms surrounding gender roles in rural Bihar may be, analysis of Jeevika’s An SHG women creating a Madhubhani painting, a tribal art-form impacts found that the project had indeed traditional to Bihar (Photo Credit: Shruti Majumdar) induced widespread cultural change that saw 3 The empowerment of women participating in Jeevika was measured by a number of criteria, including escape from high interest debt and the ability to access and use credit for productive purposes once longstanding loans had been paid off. This debt relief did not just apply to the women themselves of course, but to their households, within which their central role in achieving this newfound financial freedom is likely to have greatly increased their voice in making decisions about how the families’ resources should be spent. Investment spending in children’s education is typically a strong indicator that women have assumed a greater role in this decision making, and the analyses found clear evidence of this even in the relatively limited three-year window of time examined. The results also pointed to increased mobility on the parts of the women concerned, which is a vital element of empowerment because it is a necessary condition to their civic engagement, and ultimately to their participation in political SHG women on the way to a meeting (Photo Credit: Shruti Majumdar) processes, which had been unthinkable before. Read the full report, Recasting culture to undo gender: a sociological analysis of Jeevika in rural Bihar, India Partners SA FANSI Administered by: This results series highlights development results, operational innovations and lessons emerging from the South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative (SAFANSI) of the World Bank South Asia region. Disclaimer: The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply any judgment on the part of The World Bank concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries.