Our Impact

Women

In 1987, PRADAN pioneered the model of organizing women into self-help groups (SHG) as an approach to mobilize poor communities and improve their livelihoods. Today, our program to link SHGs with banks is the world’s largest microfinance movement, with more than 70 million women having their bank accounts for their businesses. It is also now the central strategy of many grass-roots NGOs and public programs.

We engage with more than 848,000 women organized into 70,614 SHGs, making it one of the largest civil society efforts in the world.

These SHGs have cumulatively disbursed credit of nearly Rs 4.5 billion (~US$60m). PRADAN supports 98 Women Federations, an associative tier of self-help groups. These Federations give strength to their members to raising their voices against exploitation and violence.

Food Security

PRADAN has assisted nearly 411,908 rural families with crop selection and access to modern markets, enhancing their productivity by three to four times and ensuring year-round food security. Some 15,000 farmers are organized into 50 Agriculture Production Clusters to better participate in markets. Nearly 150,000 families grow cash crops, such as tomatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, broccolis, chillies that not only add to their incomes but also help the participating farmers augment nutritional benefits from.

Water

PRADAN has worked with more than 45,700 families to assure irrigation in 10,174 hectare (ha) and has improved soil-moisture availability in an additional 8,462 hectare (ha).

Every year, PRADAN directly supports these families in adopting the models of water conservation, which increase household incomes by 75-100%

Managing Natural Resources

PRADAN supports more than 54,000 small-holding farmers with integrated natural resource management to build resilience to water variability caused by climate change. We have designed methods ranging from small-scale on-farm water control measures to selecting crops that utilise residual moisture and are more adaptive to water stress and water surplus conditions.

Farmers adopt eco-friendly technologies and use weather prediction tools made available by PRADAN to diversify production risks and adapt crop choices.

Income

PRADAN optimises the resources available to the poor by helping them access funds and build their assets and capabilities so they can earn a decent living.

PRADAN has helped nearly 412,000 people participate in income generation activities like agriculture, fruit orchards, tasar silk and poultry. For example, our home-grown chicken initiative is the largest of its kind in India. We promoted National Smallholder Poultry Development Trust (NSPDT) which supports 11, 351 women poultry farmers, across 23 cooperatives, reaching a cumulative turnover of Rs. Rs.3.9 billion (~US$ 53 m). We have also developed one of the largest organised tasar silk productions in India. Tasar Development Foundation worked with 20, 000 farmers rearing the seed cocoons needed to make in Tasar silk. At par in quality with the Central Silk Board’s standards, the seed cocoons produced by these farmers were enough to cover the entire year’s requirement at their local levels. This helped the rearers earn an income of Rs. 430 million (~US$ 6 m) during the last year.

Grassroots Governance

PRADAN enables isolated and excluded women to build their skills on grassroots governance by mobilizing, motivating and training them. This builds their capacities for accessing entitlements and participating in different institutions like Gram Sabha (village council), block level and district level forums. Community engagement ensures relevant public investments and efficient delivery of public services.

In 37 of India’s poorest districts, communities have started accessing their rights and entitlements, making claims on constitutionally guaranteed provisions, and holding local village councils accountable. .