The World Bank will give another 100 mil­lion dol­lars to a poverty reduc­tion pro­gram in India. The Andhra Pradesh Rural Poverty Reduc­tion Project has helped to raise the incomes of 10 mil­lion women since 2003.

From The Dec­can Her­ald, this PTI arti­cle tells us more about the pro­gram and it’s new money.

“This pro­gramme has had a remark­able impact on the lives of the rural poor in Andhra Pradesh,” Roberto Zagha, World Bank Coun­try Direc­tor for India, said.

“We have seen incomes increase for close to 90 per cent of poor rural house­holds. This addi­tional financ­ing will help improve effi­ciency and effec­tive­ness of the pro­gramme by adopt­ing new tech­nolo­gies and inno­v­a­tive ser­vice deliv­ery mod­els for achiev­ing full inclu­sion of the poor house­holds,” Zagha said.

The Bank said the project objec­tives will remain the same as the orig­i­nal project, that is, to enable the rural poor, par­tic­u­larly the poor­est of the poor, improve their liveli­hoods and qual­ity of life.
This is the sec­ond addi­tional financ­ing for this project and it will help scale up the impres­sive achieve­ments to date, it said.

“This addi­tional financ­ing will help build capac­ity of com­mu­nity insti­tu­tions to enable them to deal more effec­tively with the com­mer­cial banks, the mar­ket insti­tu­tions, pub­lic sec­tor depart­ments, and devel­op­ing new part­ner­ships with the coop­er­a­tives and the pri­vate sector,“said Parmesh Shah, World Bank Lead Rural Devel­op­ment Spe­cial­ist and project team leader.

“We expect this approach to bring even higher returns on the invest­ments in the insti­tu­tional plat­form of the poor already made. This phase will also work towards achiev­ing sig­nif­i­cant decrease in mal­nu­tri­tion and mater­nal mor­tal­ity for the rural poor,” he said.

The World Bank said the project has mobilised some 10 mil­lion poor women, or 90 per cent of the poor in the project dis­tricts, into nearly 850,000 Self Help Groups. These SHGs have used seed money to pool resources and make small loans to help each other pay for edu­ca­tion, med­ical treat­ment, food, and other small but impor­tant needs.

Like

Unlike