| Location: Baliapal, Orissa |
| Number of Fellows: 1 |
| Language: Oriya |
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Baliapal is the ancestral village of Rajendra Kumar Rana (Rajendra Ji), founder of Alternative for Rural Movement (ARM). From his early childhood, he has seen the destruction caused by Baliapal’s annual floods. Rajendra Ji grew up participating in relief work; through seeing varied approaches, he began to understand the importance of sustained long-term efforts for community improvement. Rajendra Ji began his long-term commitment to community improvement with educational reform. He and a few other social reformers founded ““Education for Rural Poor” in 1984 to improve literacy in the area. In 1989, Rajendra Ji established ARM as a more holistic approach to rural development encompassing health, education, and economic development.
Education:
ARM’s comprehensive educational intervention over the last ten years has contributed to a drastic reduction in primary school dropout rate from 66% to 30% in the Baliapal area.
ARM – together with a staff of five teachers, three part-time instructors and two teacher’s assistants – runs a “Model School.” This primary school (standards 1-5), founded in 1997, educates economically-disadvantaged students. ARM has also started evening classes on dance, music, singing, drama, visual arts, and craft. From time to time, ARM organizes health camps, science exhibitions, and various competitions. ARM also periodically invites experts from the area to speak about child rights, health, environment and other issues.
With the help of the government and private institutions, ARM has created need and merit-based scholarships for primary school students. ARM administers a scholarship examination and awards 100 children every year with study materials, a school uniform, and a bag.
In addition, ARM assisted 30 government primary schools to train teachers, to form children’s clubs, to develop youth leadership skills, and to engage parents in their child’s education. ARM has created the School Child Resource Development Centre (SCRDC) that manages the teachers training program. Over the past three years, SCRDC has trained 90 government school teachers on the use of visual aids, participatory methods of teaching, classroom discipline techniques, leadership skill training, and health/hygiene of children.
Women’s Empowerment:
ARM has organized 300 women’s self-help groups (SHGs) to develop leadership skills, raise legal rights awareness, and assist economic improvement.
SHG members primarily engage in saving and loan activities for personal and business use. ARM has mobilized a total savings of Rs. 10 million and credit of Rs. 54.2 million through its rural savings and credit endeavors. In the past two decades, ARM has assisted more than 1,300 women through its women self-employment initiatives and helped start micro-enterprises in vegetable cultivation, groundnut cultivation, petty shops, basket making, bamboo crafts and rice processing.
The SHG monthly meetings are also forums for discussions on members’ issues such as domestic violence or marital problems. SHG members participate in discussions and decision-making processes about local issues at the Gram Sabha (Village Council). SHG members help one another in finding resolutions.
For two decades, ARM has been committed to improving women’s literacy. ARM’s literacy campaigns have vaulted the women’s literacy rate from 5 % to 40%.
Village Health Committees:
ARM has formed a Village Health Committee (“Committee”) in 60 villages around Baliapal, to serve as a local council on health. The Committee consists of a local SHG leader, villagers, and government trained health workers to administer medicine for common ailments and provide consultation. ARM arranges information camps to educated villagers on health, sanitation, and care for pregnant women. The Committee provides information on combating recurrent illnesses such as diarrhea, malaria, respiratory tract infections, and communicable diseases.
In conjunction, ARM has been running a Primary Health Center (PHC) in village Paschimbad with two doctors, a pharmacist, an auxiliary nurse midwife, a lab technician, a project coordinator and an attendant. Every day, over 100 patients are treated at the center. The PHC also has emergency and delivery wards for critically-ill patients and pregnant women. The PHC organizes various information seminars and awareness programs such as focus group discussions, behavior change communication seminars, reproductive child health sessions, and information sessions for other government health service.
The Committees collaborate with and often refer patients to the Paschimbad PHC.
Need for Project:
In past two decades, ARM has helped SHG members launch over 500 micro-enterprises such as vegetable cultivation, groundnut cultivation, petty shops, basket-making, bamboo crafts and rice processing. ARM has disseminated information through the SHGs on savings plans, loan activities, and new investment activities. ARM supports over 300 SHGs in over 60 villages.
ARM seeks to improve the leadership, managerial, and investment skills of SHG members to facilitate better utilization of funds to start new ventures or to expand existing one.
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As an August 2010 Indicorps Fellow, you will assist SHGs in their entrepreneurial ventures by helping them make informed decisions about investments. You will diversify the venture portfolio of SHGs by helping them access outside information, marketing, quality control, cost benefit analysis, etc. A starting point will be to attend SHG meetings, build trust with their members, and understand current activities. It is important to engage leaders within these communities and to use their experiences to help guide your plan for the project.
Concurrently, you will want to build upon ARM’s base of information with new enterprise ideas, information from Micro-finance Institutions (MFIs), and opportunities to scale up existing ventures. You should arrange trainings on leadership, and on managerial and investment capacity-building of the SHGs. In documenting knowledge from the ARM staff, you should think about ways to creatively increase the organization’s reach and improve operations. How can best practices be shared with community? How can new ideas be disseminated across this broad network?
You will establish best practices and document insights from the field to ensure continuance of the effort after your departure.
Target Community:
Your target community will be women from marginal and landless farmers in the Baliapal area between the age of 20 – 45. Women pull weeds, cut grass, water fields, feed and care for the animals, as well as manage the house. More than 50 % of the women have no formal schooling.
Objectives:
• To build the capacity of women’s self-help groups
• To diversify the micro-venture portfolio of ARM
• To support skill trainings to scale up existing ventures
Challenges:
• Building confidence in women to scale up operations of ventures
• Fulfilling this broad capacity-building mandate
Team-Based Model:
Each project is designed as a three-way partnership between you, Indicorps, and a partner organization. Each grassroots partner organization – in this case ARM – will be hosting two to four Fellows. Consequently, the August 2010 Fellowship will have both an individual and a team component.
As a team of Indicorps Fellows, your focus is to improve the effectiveness of the ARM’s programs in education, health and livelihood. Team members will focus on different areas including strengthening primary education, improving preventative health care and awareness, and supporting SHGs in better utilization of resources.
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