We, as a country, have come a long way in meeting the financial needs of the poor. We are witnessing a transformation of micro-finance as a growth industry. More and more women are mobilized into SHGs all over the country. They are further mobilized into higher order federations. Bank linkages are growing rapidly. Some banks have started to offer cash credit lines of Rs.5 lakh per group. Credit Cards to farmers, weavers etc., are not uncommon now.  While a lot more poor still need to be reached out with access to microfinance services, and some more services can be loaded onto microfinance bandwagon, many a poor and their organizations are struggling to find ideas to invest the funds in remunerative activities. The problem moves from the lack of funds to the lack of ideas to invest the funds. The sector moves from the microfinance to microfinance plus all across. Each one is exploring the ‘plus’. The ‘plus’ may include insurance, loans and repayments in kind, food loans, businesses by the groups and federations themselves, public services for fee etc.
Most of us, who are and continue in the development sector, are essentially livelihoods workers and their intent is to ensure that everyone including the poor have a decent portfolio of livelihoods. The livelihoods are a play of six capitals – natural, physical, social, human, financial and spiritual, within the four contexts – ecological, techno-economic, patterns of distribution of capitals and patterns of investment and expenditure, resulting in four arrows – income, expenditure, employment and risks. The livelihoods interventions are at the level of one or more arrows, capitals, contexts and/or a combination thereof. Thus, the intervention resulting in enhancing livelihoods may happen with information, knowledge, skill development, infrastructure, access to finance, collectivization, access to storage, technology, value-addition processes, direct reach out to the market/consumer, risk diversification, minimum assured returns, etc. Therefore, the livelihoods interventions range from extremely simple actions to extremely complex sets of activities. Thus, microfinance activities are a small subset of the large livelihoods domain. Microfinance plus ways are expanding this subset to an extent. Microfinance activities have become fairly systematic and the processes have become ‘standard’ for easy replication and scaling-up. The communities have responded well to these processes and are endorsing them with 99% repayment rates. The investors and the bankers are responding with increased investments for microfinance. It is able to attract a good number of human resources into it. The remunerations, it is able to pay, are comparable with the corporate sector. Bright and young minds are getting attracted to give a try.
Livelihoods activities are too large in number to attempt any standardization and/or systematization. For example, a small village of 100-200 families may have a number of crops, some once a year, some twice a year and sometimes thrice a year. It may have some plantation crops and some horticulture crops. It may have some trees and some fruit-bearing trees. It may have fisheries and produce a variety of fishes. It may have livestock including sheep and goats, cattle, buffaloes etc. It may have handlooms and handicrafts. It may have stone cutting, bidi rolling, and other miscellaneous activities. There may also be some support services like transport, trade, education etc. The people may be casual labour, skilled labour, self-employed, enterprise owners etc. Some may be full-timers and some part-timers. Some may not be engaged in direct income generation activities. |
