Panel Discussion: Enabling Local Livelihoods | Leveraging SHGs and FPOs to Empower Communities

The panel discussion on ‘Enabling Local Livelihoods: Leveraging SHGs and FPOs to empower communities’ at the India CSR Summit, held on November 16, 2022, explored ways to enable local livelihoods.

This article highlights some of the key recommendations discussed by a diverse panel of experts and leaders from the Indian CSR ecosystem, namely Mr Sanjay Kumar, Founder and Executive Director-Manjari Foundation, Mr ABHIMANYU SAHU - COO- Schneider Electric India Foundation, Mr Anupam Bajpai -DGM-CSR-JK Tyre Industries Ltd., Mr Prashant Mehra , Co-Founder and Chief Architect-Platforms Commons, and Ms Akila Lean , Director-Partnerships and Communications- Industree Foundation.

The session evolved around the panellists citing their individual experiences as to how they were able to empower the communities by leveraging the SHGs and FPOs and ultimately leading to livelihood generation. It also involved the relevance and importance of collectivization (SHGs and FPOs or Cooperatives ), the role of ecosystems, capacity building, technology-driven approaches, scalability and sustainability, and lastly collaborations.

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

Capacity Building, Collaboration and Sustainability

On being asked about the need for collectives, such as SHGs, FPOs and Cooperatives at the grassroots level, Mr Abhimanyu cited an example of a project being run in the states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and West Bengal by?Schneider Electric India Foundation for the past 4 years and has helped set up around 400 solar irrigation systems in the areas where water scarcity was the biggest challenge. The program has directly benefited approximately 8,000 farmers by helping them cultivate three crops and increasing their income by 2X times by linking them to the markets so that they can sell their produce. The project has also been able to train the farmers with modern agricultural practices and has also doubled the income through market linkage.

Capacities of the indigenous people/local members must be built so that they can look after the maintenance and ultimately ensure the sustainability of the project.

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Collectivization, Gender and Equity

There is a need to be at the intersection of equity so that all artisanal communities and producers have an equal stake and equal ownership in everything they are doing. Gender plays a very important role. We fall into the intersection of equity, women and livelihoods. All models work best when we integrate and collectivize women because more hands lead to more production and thus move up the value chain.

The entire process is most effective when collectivized. We have a larger capability of engaging. The communities are also in the position of taking loans for their businesses and we can handhold them in the entire exercise on how to leverage these already existing eco-systematic support systems.

Participation of the community can be ensured by the 6 C model/Framework:

Construct, Capacity building, Create, Channel, Capital and lastly, Connect.

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Digital Collectives, keeping things small and simple, the role of ecosystems, scalability and sustainability

Power dynamics and the ability to manage/lead 1000 farmers is not easy.?We must reimagine people coming together. When groups become too large, there is undue exercise of power and misappropriation of funds. Reimagine collectives as small groups of people coming together on a tech platform, automated finances and the settlements, and auto-split into the members of the group/community. This ensures the management of finances, peoples’ products and access to the market and technology.

We should create opportunity ecosystems, and people will learn by themselves. Ecosystems of buyers, suppliers, logistics providers, financers, knowledge providers, sales partners, etc. When ecosystems are created the group will succeed.

Sustainability before scale- building, ready-to-use micro business models, and configuring the entire business model in apps. We can easily keep a track of the overall business performance and if there is an issue, we can sit and talk about it and find a solution.

The scale comes automatically, it comes from networks. Building networks and ecosystems are expensive. The upfront investment must be made in building networks as well as keeping sustainability in mind. Sharing in the network is important, it brings down the cost of building a network.

The mandate must be made by donors/funders that civil society organizations must work with open data, whatever will be done will be shareable with the community.

Supporting communities, compromises and collaborations

Compromises must be made between the Corporates and the partner NGOs while they collaborate on a project, only then can the target be achieved successfully.

1. If we are going for a project or forming a group, in both the process it has to be like- of the people, for the people, by the people. Only then will it be successful.
2. Collaborations are a must, the project has to be sustainable for scalability.