Mothers' livelihoods
The mothers keep their own books
We fund the facilitator and the audit. The fund itself is theirs.
- Reach
- 310 women this year
- Where
- Nine savings groups and two tailoring units across Hadapsar and Kharadi
- Who
- Mothers and elder sisters of children enrolled at a centre
This programme exists because of a spreadsheet we did not enjoy reading.
In 2019 we went back through eight years of enrolment records to work out which children stayed in school past Class 8. We expected our own attendance figures to be the strongest line. They were not. The strongest line was whether the child’s mother earned money of her own.
What we do and what we deliberately do not
We run a twelve-week tailoring course, and we pay a facilitator and an auditor for nine savings groups.
We do not hold the money. We do not lend it, guarantee it, or administer it, and we do not take a cut of it. Every rupee in those groups belongs to the women in them and sits in an account with their names on it, not ours.
That distinction is the whole design. A microfinance programme run by an NGO ends when the NGO’s grant ends. A savings group that was always the women’s own carries on whether we are there or not, and two of ours now run with a facilitator they pay for themselves.
The part we cannot prove
Children of group members stay in school longer. We can show you that.
What we cannot show you is that the group is the reason. The mothers who walk into a savings group in the first place may simply be the mothers who were always going to keep a child in school. We have no control group and we are not going to manufacture one.
How it runs
What actually happens
- 01
It started as a question we did not want the answer to
We looked at which children stayed in school past Class 8 and which did not, and the strongest single line in the data was not our own attendance record. It was whether the mother earned anything herself. So we started doing something about that instead of arguing with it.
- 02
Twelve weeks of tailoring, then a certificate that means something
Machine time, thread, a trainer and a certificate the garment units in Ramtekdi actually recognise. Without the certificate the same skill only gets piece-rate work at home at about a third of the price.
- 03
The savings group is theirs, not ours
Twelve to twenty women, meeting fortnightly, keeping their own ledger and setting their own lending rules. We pay for the facilitator and the annual audit of their books. We do not hold, lend or administer a single rupee of the fund, and we never will.
- 04
The meeting is at the centre, at the hour the children are in class
This is the whole trick. A programme scheduled at eleven in the morning gets attended by nobody who works. Six to eight in the evening, in the room next to where their children are studying, gets attended by everyone.
- 05
No group is started without a woman who wants to run it
We have refused to start groups in two neighbourhoods where there was interest but nobody willing to hold the book. A group run by our staff is our group, and it stops the day we stop paying for it.
How we are judged
The measures,
including the flat ones
Women earning an independent income twelve months on
18% at intake44% after a yearPLACEHOLDER. Self-reported, which is a real weakness — replace with the client's follow-up survey data and say how it was collected.
Savings groups still meeting after two years
Nationally, many collapse in year one7 of our 9 groupsPLACEHOLDER. The two that stopped are named in the annual report along with why.
Children of group members still enrolled at Class 9
52% catchment average81%PLACEHOLDER, and note the direction of causation is genuinely unclear. Mothers who join a savings group may already be the ones most likely to keep a child in school.
What has not worked
We cannot show that the savings groups cause children to stay in school. The two things move together in our data, and the mothers who join are probably not a random sample of mothers. We keep running it because the women want it and because it costs us very little, not because we have proved the link.
In this programme
What a rupee buys here
- ₹4,200
A three-month tailoring course for a mother
Machine time, thread, a trainer, and the certificate that lets her take work from the units in Ramtekdi rather than piece-rate at home.
PlaceholderPLACEHOLDER. Confirm against the client's course costing.
- ₹12,000
A year of running one savings group
Twelve to twenty women, meeting fortnightly, keeping their own books. We pay for the facilitator and the audit, not the fund — the fund is theirs.
PlaceholderPLACEHOLDER. Confirm against the client's facilitator costs.