Professional

Assistance for
Development Action
(PRADAN)
 PRADAN: Overview
• PRADAN is a Voluntary Organisation
registered as a Society in 1983
• Mission: Impacting livelihoods to enable
the rural poor
• Core belief: Well educated & motivated
people need to work at the grassroots to
bring about holistic transformation
• Target: Rural poor with emphasis on
women, Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled
Castes, Other backward classes
• Operational districts among poorest.
Subsistence economies with weak markets
and other infrastructure
 Criteria for selection of
operational area
• Degraded natural resources
• Adherence to traditional technologies
and modes of production
• Low productivity of labour and capital
• Lack of access to or control over
productive assets
• Lack of access to financial services,
business support services, knowledge
resources and markets
• Lack of social and economic
infrastructure
 Client identification and
support
• Approach of area saturation
• Identifying poverty pockets
• Attempt to cover the whole of the poor and
very poor populations there
• Identification more through excluding the
visibly better off
• Building an area based perspective
• Mapping needs and opportunities
• Mapping potential activities and developing a
proposed course of action in each area
• Provide livelihood support – training, marketing
 Microfinance for Livelihoods- role
of PRADAN
• Promoting SHGs as Mutual Aid Associations
– Building robust, autonomous groups, small savings
and credit
• Developing SHGs as Financial Intermediaries
– Build capabilities for leveraging loans from banks
• Livelihood Planning
– Assist women in planning to optimise their
resources - land/water, labour, livestock, forests
• Sectoral Interventions
– Identify and develop potential sectors to generate
large scale livelihoods for the poor - tasar, poultry,
dairy, vegetable cultivation, intensive agriculture
• Credit, other business development support
– large scale credit to SHGs, training, marketing
 The CGAP Study
• Done in Jharkhand
• 3000 of PRADAN’s 4500 Self Help Groups exist there
• PRADAN works in 14 out of 20 districts
• Survey done between August 10 and October 15, 2002
• State divided into 4 regions for sampling
• 6 villages, 144 sample in each region, 24 from each
village
• 432 non-members, 144 members
• Rationale - more variety in non-members than members
- pilot in early August before study
• Questionnaire based on the CGAP tool, but adapted to
include household debt, access to govt. services and
programs, social networks
Jharkhand – India – comparative statistics
Proportion of India Jharkhand
villages with
Primary schools .73 .51
High Schools .08 .03
Post office .22 .08
Primary Health .03 .01
Centre
Paved roads .37 .14
Bus services .34 .15
Domestic power .64 .14
supply
Piped water .18 .01
 Proportion of people Below
Poverty Line
• 1993-94 National Sample Survey, rural population
below national poverty line (~ $ 0.23 per day)
•India 33%
• % below international poverty line (~ $1 per day)
•India 44%
• % below national poverty line
•Jharkhand 57%
• % below $ 1 a day 80%

•
 Results of Assessment
• PRADAN villages look similar to the rest of the
villages in Jharkhand
• Villages in the study look more developed
than the average PRADAN village, reason may
be they are new villages, and larger
Study Village Average PRADAN village
Literacy rate 31% 28%
Primary School 83% 64%
Paved roads 21% 12%
Households 190 118
• There is exclusion at the bottom 5% and top
10%
 Results of Assessment
Comparison of survey villages and rural
Consumption good Jharkhand
Survey Village Average
PRADAN village

Cereals (Kg/capita/day) .36 - .66 .46

Clothing expenses 38.5 23.5

Education Expenses 6.4 5.18

Bicycles 58 42
 Results of Assessment
Selected variables for SHG and non-SHG
members
Literacy rate .39 .41
Per capita grain cons in scarce months .34 .37
No of rooms in dwelling 3.06 3.35
Land owned (ha) 1.24 1.21
Land cultivated 1.03 .82
Self employed non-farm .14 .16
Value of durable goods 1922 2703
Per capita exp on clothes, footwear 527 553
Fraction below official poverty line .55 .53
 Comparative Analysis of indicators

Indicator Poorest Middle Richest

5% 90% 5%
Meals in past 2 days 3.8 5.5 5.6
No of days/month not enough 5.2 3.4 0.4
food
rooms in dwelling 1.2 3.1 9.2
land owed (Ha) 0.2 0.6 2.9
value of durables, livestock 495 7335 47601
kg/day – grains normal times 0.5 0.65 0.81
kg/day - grains – bad times 0.25 0.36 0.44
per capita annual exp on edn 5 68 324
per capita annual exp on 243 534 1076
footwear/clothes
Indicator Poorest Middle Richest
5% 90% 5%
share of children attending 0.34 0.48 0.61
school
share of literate adults in 0.22 0.40 0.66
household
fraction owning radio 0.07 0.26 0.68
fraction owning bicycle 0.2 0.6 2.9
participation in informal 1 1.3 1.5
village organisations
share that has ever 0.07 0.27 0.46
approached a govt. officer
share voting in elections 0.93 0.99 1
 What PRADAN seeks to
achieve
• Develop “entrepreneurial capabilities”
• Ensure “access to and control over
improved production technologies”
• Leverage financial resources for
programme investments
• Ensure “sustainable access to marketing
and technical services”
 The future
• Understand clearly the causes for
exclusion of bottom 3% to 5%
• Study if they also drop out, individually or
as groups
• Incorporate methodologies such as social
mapping and PWR for targeting
• Incorporate tracking of the very poor in the
ILS workbooks of staff
• Explore possibility of having a separate
panel sample of the very poor clients to be
tracked using ILS member books