FOR most of Sabita Devi’s life, her world was very small. When she wasn’t toiling on the family’s tiny farm, trying to eke out a meagre income, she rarely had opportunities to leave the four mud walls of her low-ceiling house in Sundari, a rural village in northeastern India. Even in her own community, hardly anyone knew her name. When I met Sabita last month during a visit to Sundari, she told me that she used to ask herself: “Who is Sabita?”
Today, many people know the answer, because Sabita’s world has grown much bigger. In fact, her entire village knows her name, as do the people in neighbouring towns and at the local bank where Sabita has opened an account, so that she can save the new surplus income from her farm.
What changed and when? Sabita can tell you the exact date: Dec 20, 2001. That’s the day she joined a self-help group run by Professional Assistance for Development Action, an innovative Indian non-profit also known as Pradan (www.pradan.net).
The theory behind self-help groups like Pradan’s is simple, yet powerful: if you bring women together to explore ways that they can improve their lives and the lives of their family members, you’ll help them unlock their potential to drive progress for their entire communities.
On one level, self-help groups are gatherings where women can learn skills that will help them save money, secure loans and increase crop yields. But, the best groups do more than just empower women economically; they also help women see themselves and each other as agents of change — as people who have the power to shape their own lives.
To understand why self-help groups can be so transformative, it’s important to understand the cultural context in which they operate. Like Sabita, many of the world’s poorest women live and work in extreme isolation due to the strictures of patriarchy, caste and class. They have access to none of the social institutions — clubs, religious congregations and professional associations — that people elsewhere take for granted, which means that they have no one to talk to about the challenges they face and nowhere to get information from.
Even if such women are legally entitled to social services, like medical care and food vouchers, many don’t know how to access them. And, since these women often don’t believe that they are worthy of being heard, it’s easy for local officials to cheat them of their benefits or ignore their complaints.
These are the kinds of barriers that Pradan seeks to overcome in its work with nearly 19,000 self-help groups serving hundreds of thousands of women in farming communities across India.
Women meet weekly, in groups of between 10 and 20, to discuss ways to improve their livelihoods and increase their incomes. They learn about diversifying into new crops, setting up irrigation systems and improving the productivity of their livestock.
And, they save small amounts of money each week to invest in their farms or use for other essential needs, like medical emergencies. In the short term, women and their families gain tangible benefits, such as higher crop yields, that put more food on the table and, perhaps, a surplus that can be sold at the local market. Equally important are the intangible benefits gained from participating in a group. Women start to believe — many of them, for the first time in their lives — that a better future is possible and that their actions can help get them there.
When I visited Sabita and her self-help group members in Sundari, they spoke passionately about how the meetings had changed their lives. One woman told me that in the past, she had only one sari, which she would wash with an ash mixture to keep clean. Another woman told me that when she had no food for dinner, she would drink water to dull the hunger pangs before she went to bed. Today, these women grow enough food to feed their families three meals a day, every day. Most have surplus crops to sell for extra income and they’re investing that money back in their families — paying their children’s school fees or buying chickens to start poultry businesses.
Now that the women of Sundari are able to meet their families’ basic needs, they are turning their attention to other community issues. They recently asked local officials to build the village’s first public toilets and they have joined women in neighbouring towns to address the area’s growing alcohol abuse problem. In addition to calling on officials to better enforce the law, they have worked to help women, whose livelihoods depend on alcohol sales, find other sources of income.
Self-help groups have put hundreds of thousands of women across rural India on the path to building healthier, more prosperous lives. We know that these groups work; now, we need to extend their impact by looking at the obstacles to social change in other countries and create locally relevant programmes that dismantle these barriers. The strategies that have worked so well in India will almost certainly look different in communities outside the country. In other words, creating lasting social change is more complicated than other, more straightforward development efforts.
But, we can’t let complexity be the enemy of action. For every Sabita whose life has been transformed, there are many more women whose potential remains trapped within their home’s four walls. The world can’t afford to let that potential go to waste. The simple act of bringing women together is the first step to unlocking one of the strongest forces for progress that the world has ever known. Women like Sabita are pushing their communities in the right direction. Our job is to stand behind them.
The writer is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation