#InternationalDayofRuralWomen: Can encouraging self-employment help ultra-poor women break free from abject poverty?

#RuralWomen play a vital role in ensuring the overall wellbeing of households living in abject poverty, but they also face the harshest structural and discriminatory obstacles to a better life. Can facilitating self-employment help them break free from this trap?

Evidence from randomized evaluations suggests it might.

This #InternationalDayofRuralWomen (October 15), we explore Bangladesh NGO BRAC 's Graduation Approach—a livelihoods program providing ultra-poor women with a "big push" of consumption support, productive assets, banking services, and mentoring support—which has lifted millions out of extreme poverty in 50 countries all over the world.

A "big push" to support sustainable livelihoods for ultra-poor women

The program puts ultra-poor rural women on the path to self-reliance by:

1. Transferring productive assets—which can include livestock or supplies for small businesses—to women to enable them to start their own enterprises.
2. Providing mentoring to build confidence, business, social, and life skills as well as awareness of social and health issues.
3. Encouraging savings behaviors among the women to help integrate them into existing community savings groups.

Randomized evaluations across the world have found that the Graduation Approach has improved the lives of those receiving the program who earned more, ate better, and were healthier as a result.

In some cases, positive results have persisted for almost a decade.

Based on these results, the program has been scaled up across India, reaching more than 200,000 ultra-poor women-headed households in the country.

Graduating from ultra-poverty in Bihar?

The Government of Bihar's flagship livelihoods scheme, the Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana (SJY) is an ongoing, on-ground example of how encouraging self-employment is transforming the lives of ultra-poor rural women in India.?

Launched in 2018 by the JEEVIKA, Rural Development Department, Government of Bihar and Bandhan-Konnagar , SJY has enabled almost 150,000 women to break free from poverty in the state.

An adaptation of the Graduation Approach, SJY targets women living on less than 0.50US$ a day in Bihar. Surveys also show that the scheme was able to insulate them from #COVID19's worst economic shocks because of the businesses they were able to set up.

For many ultra-poor rural women in Bihar, businesses started under JEEViKA's SJY have doubled average annual earnings in less than two years; many women are also reinvesting profits in their businesses to expand them.

SJY also offers insight into designing effective anti-poverty policies more broadly:

1. Individuals living in poverty are not a homogenous group and therefore, anti-poverty policies should take their living conditions into account.
2. Self-employment offers a promising path for ultra-poor women to secure reliable and sustainable livelihoods.
3. Benefits from self-employment among women can also accrue to future generations.

Learn more about our work with JEEViKA and Bandhan Konnagar in Bihar and these on-ground lessons for alleviating abject poverty among ultra-poor women in the state.