Can Women’s Self-help Groups Contribute to Sustainable Development? Evidence of Capability Changes from Northern India

Abstract

This paper offers an evaluation of a supported women’s self-help programme with over 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural regions of the world (Uttar Pradesh, India). Methodologically, it shows how indicators from the direct capability measurement literature can be adapted for programme evaluation in a low-income country setting. Unique data on capabilities across a range of dimensions are then developed for some 6000 women and used to estimate a number of propensity score matching models. The substantive empirical results of these models indicate that many of the capability indicators are higher for programme members, that the difference appears robust, and that there are significant benefits for those from scheduled tribes and lower castes. The discussion highlights two points. First, human development improvements offered by multi-strand programmes can help to explain the paradox as to why nearly 100 million women (in India alone) have participated in self-help programmes despite modest global research evidence for micro-finance impacts on nominal incomes. Second, results argue strongly for the use of capability measures over agency measures focused solely on household decision-making to assess women’s empowerment when structural causes of disempowerment, external to the household, are present and significant.

Keywords:

• Capability measurement
• self-help groups
• sustainable development
• propensity score matching
• Sen
• poverty
• female empowerment

Jel:

• I31
• I32
• O35

Acknowledgements

The authors are particularly grateful to colleagues at the World Bank for comments on the paper and related discussions on quality of life measurement: Jeni Klugman, Uppamanyu Datta, Dean Joliffe, Jed Friedman, Francisco Ferreira and Santhakumar Sundaram. We are also grateful to James Heckman and Amartya Sen for supporting the project of which this is part and to the Leverhulme Trust for funding questionnaire design on which the paper draws (Grant No, F00269AB). Finally, thanks go also to workshop participants in Delhi and Tokyo for a number of useful comments on earlier drafts, the Oxford Foundation for Knowledge Exchange for additional funding and Columbia University in New York for a Visiting Research Scholarship to the first author during which time the research was written up. The usual caveats apply: in addition, the paper does not necessarily reflect World Bank policy.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2020.1742100.

ORCID

Rolando Gonzales Martinez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5401-780X

Notes

1 Datta’s study is perhaps the closest to ours though there are two significant differences. JEEVikA is funded by the World Bank and operates by saturation and so offers a best-case but difficult to replicate study of self-help. From a methodological perspective, his paper depends on recall: while he argues plausibly for the approach, no such requirements were made of subjects in this study.

2 For relevant background research on female empowerment, see Brody et al. (2015), Doepke and Tertilt (2014), Ganle, Afriyie, and Segbefia (2015), Prennushi and Gupta (2014) and Trommlerová, Klasen, and Leßmann (2015). Garikipati (2008) is interesting in the current context for the use of vulnerability and empowerment indicators and which are used in a study that concludes women might be disempowered if loans are used for purposes by male household members. In our pilot work, this concern did not emerge as a significant issue – rather women tended if anything to have stories which showed how men came to support the programme when they could see the potential benefits for the household that it brought. Further related discussions of self-help groups can be found in Alemu, Van Kempen, and Ruben (2018), Fafchamps and La Ferrara (2012), Hasan (2017), Parida and Sinha (2010), Seebohm et al. (2013), Vinayagamoorthy (2017) and Weber and Ahmad (2014).

3 Greco, Skordis-Worrall, and Mills (2018) have recently reported on the testing of psychometrics of a capability index in Malawi and were the first to do so. See also Kanbur (2016) on problems arising from the need for direct measures of potential and their confusion with other indicators. See Coast et al. (2008) and other related papers for health economics and psychometric work in higher income country contexts.

4 In English its full title is The Rajiv Gandhi Trust Women’s Development Project.

5 Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust (2017).

6 Here we emphasise that self-help is facilitated and structured where each group is, in effect, a social franchise. Greaney, Kaboski, and Van Leemput (2016) also high-light the importance of not seeing self-help in terms that ignore facilitating structures and organisations.

7 It is not possible to quantify programme exits clearly, as women may reduce the frequency of their meeting attendance, but rarely deregister completely.

8 Gamson (1992) provides a useful overview and highlights collective identity, solidarity, the mesh between cognition and culture (consciousness) and micro-mobilisation acts of organizing, divesting and reframing as being important. These processes are clearly present and relevant to self-help groups in India although political alignment tends to be with independents.

9 As Anderson (2014) negative impacts or unintended consequences are rarely studied though in principle our empirical results are able to identify such findings – which in the case of health limitations we think is an important consequence of greater movement and activity outside the house.

10 The list is useful because whilst it shares common features with several other such lists as it is relatively comprehensive and therefore provides a useful starting point for mapping out life quality of life issues without making any claims about what a state should do about them. OCAP comprises some 50 items which and so to produce a short form version, Lorgelly et al. (2015) developed a consultation process based on focus group interviews. The refinement developed subsequently by Simon et al. (2013) drew also on this shortened version produced by Lorgelly and colleagues and produced psychometric data for capability indicators in Vergunst et al. (2017).

11 It is worth noting that this approach could be seen as alternative to those studies that follow a traditional in development of measuring empowerment in terms of agency – see for example recent work by Alkire et al. (2013). Our approach helps to identify the areas of life in which a person’s capabilities have changed and therefore offer a complement to measures of agency or empowerment that focus on delivering an overall judgement about whether someone is empowered or otherwise.

12 There are some similarities also with capability indicators used in Tesoriero (2006) though he does not include data on controls and focusses his discussion on what he describes as modest contributions to community strengthening.

13 To obtain a balance of experience across SHG members, the sample was further divided in equal proportions into those who had been members for less than three years, three to five years and more than five years (i.e. 1500 observations in each category). Because the programme targets the poorest women, non-members tended, on average, to have slightly higher incomes than SHG members. Finally, it is worth noting that by oversampling on members within the programme, we are able to deal more precisely with the issue of any potential for self-selection bias. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for inviting us to comment on this aspect.

14 The consent protocol and written summary of instructions to the surveyors are available from the authors on request. PSM analysis uses dichotomised indicators.

15 The difference might not be entirely surprising as the programme seeks to target for participation those who are worst off. Income data is often missing, not surprisingly, so the household type is perhaps a better indicator of household asset values. The propensity score matching technique chooses the controls on a statistical basis so this evidence suggests that it does so from a reasonable pool of potential controls.

16 Ses are not reported in one case where standard formulae are known to be biased and an implemented correction is not available.

17 It is also worth recognising that we did not attempt to identify any “spillover” effects: if there any such positive effects, then our results will, in that respect, err on the side of being conservative. We thank a referee for encouraging us to make the point.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding questionnaire design on which the paper draws via Grant No, F00269AB. Additional funding in support of analysis was provided by the Oxford Foundation for Knowledge Exchange.

Notes on contributors

Paul Anand

Paul Anand is Professor of Economics at the Open University and a Research Associate at Oxford University and CPNSS at Oxford University. He has for two decades led the Capability Measurement Project which has received funding from AHRB, the Leverhulme Trust, UNDP and the European Union. Currently, he is on the editorial board of several journals and lives in Oxford.

Swati Saxena

Swati Saxena is Research Lead at Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana, a non profit poverty alleviation initiative working with the women of Uttar Pradesh, India by organising them into Self-Help Groups. In this role, Swati is contributing towards building the research capacities of the institution and exploring the interface between praxis and theory. She is interested in expanding research on community mobilisation programmemes, rural health, gender issues and political participation at local levels. Swati holds a PhD in Public Health and Policy from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London where she did her thesis on “The Introduction of Hib/pentavalent Vaccine in India: A Case Study of Politics, Science and Public Health Policy.” Prior to this, she did her MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include vaccines, immunisation policies, health policies in developing countries and medical anthropology.

Rolando Gonzales Martinez

Rolando Gonzales Martinez is a PhD(c) researcher at the University of Agder (Norway), as well as a consultant for the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI, Oxford University) and a part-time Deputy Manager in the Risk Division of BCP Bank (CrediCorp). Previously, he has been a consultant for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). His research interests include socio-economic development, finance, artificial intelligence, machine-learning, Bayesian methods and epistemology.

Hai-Anh H. Dang

Hai-Anh H. Dang is an Economist in the Analytics and Tools Unit, Development Data Group, World Bank. He has contributed to more than 60 World Bank's projects and flagship reports covering different countries around the world. His main research is on international development, poverty, inequality, human development topics, and methodology to construct synthetic (pseudo) panel data from cross sections. He has published in various development journals, including Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Development Studies, World Bank Economic Review, World Development, and chapters with books published by leading academic publishers. He is a Research Fellow with IZA, GLO, and Indiana University O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and a non-resident Senior Research Fellow with Vietnam's Academy of Social Sciences. He also serves as a co-editor of Review of Development Economics and on the editorial boards of other journals. He received his PhD in Applied Economics from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.