Executive Summary
The Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) aims at eliminating rural poverty through promotion of multiple livelihoods for rural poor households. The program is designed to reach out to all ‘eligible’ rural poor households and positively influence their livelihoods by the year 2024-25. The program is expected to enable a plethora of livelihood activities by enhancing the accessibility of such poor rural households by providing capacity building and facilitating access to financial resources through community-based organizations (CBOs) and formal financial institutions. In line with the evidence from across the globe that unequivocally endorses the significance of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) in employment generation and economic growth of developing countries, one of the primary objectives of DAY-NRLM is to enhance the availability of rural livelihoods by promoting enterprises within rural households.
Executive Summary
Multi-sectoral development interventions have intricate design elements and theories of change. These initiatives aim to engage numerous change agents and incentivize them to achieve desired developmental goals. The DAY-NRLM program exemplifies such a development initiative as it intensified the self-help group (SHG) approach to human development and aimed to empower the less privileged by granting them access to credit, skills, social capital, and leadership prospects. While SHG-based interventions are not novel, the DAY-NRLM stands out due to its unique incorporation of local histories and the subsequent integration of crucial on-the-ground realities during the implementation phase
Abstract
Can increased women’s relative bargaining power within households improve household level resilience to large-scale covariate shocks such as COVID-19? Evidence suggests that enabling women to access market-linked-value chains significantly increases their relative bargaining power within households. In this paper, we estimate the extent to which a given stock of market enabled relative bargaining power of women (as measured in a laboratory experiment a few months before the rollout of COVID-19) can enhance the resilience of rural households to COVID-19 shock. We make use of a unique data-generating process that combines data from two rounds of household surveys with the data from a laboratory experiment conducted with spouses inside rural dairy households. Evidence from the Bartik-like instrumental variable specification shows that a unit improvement in women’s bargaining power led to 3.82% reduction in the vulnerability of households to food poverty during COVID-19 lockdown. The paper also models the role of food and nutrition decisions as pathways to reducing household vulnerability to food poverty during the pandemic.