PRADAN - Professional Assistance for Development Action

This document talks about PRADAN’s initiative to create the Kandhamal Women's Leaf-plate Cooperative Limited.

It describes how the organisation went about giving shape to a self-help group of women, provided training and technology to increase quality and facilitating market linkages improving turnover by 100% for the poor rural women involved in the making of leaf plates out of the leaves of the Siali plant.

It is an attempt of the organisation to find out the extent that alumni from PRADAN has impacted organisations and the social sector across the country.

The programme which included this study tries to find out which sectors got benefitted the most from the PRADAN way of working.

A handbook compiled specifically for poor farmers involved in the TASAR silk agriculture.

The book guides the reader through the various aspects of Tasar sericulture for poor farmers, including the livelihood viewpoint of Tasar sericulture, along with minute details of initiating and managing the activity in a sustainable manner.

The result of a research is another hand book which focuses on important aspects of small poultry farming business.

The hand book talks about processes such as training of producers, intensive production support and market to help ensure production efficiencies comparable to industry standards.

Its report on the The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) describes various provisions of the act creating awareness on its legalities, executing agencies and the responsibilities of State Governments and Panchayat institutions in implementing it.

PRADAN works to organise underprivileged women into self-help groups so that these groups can be formally linked to banks to access financial assistance. The groups also empower these marginalized women to raise their voices collectively against exploitation and violence.

The organisation helps rural families to enhance their access to markets and crop selections. It promotes the cultivation of cash crops like tomatoes, chillies, cabbages, cauliflowers and broccolis ensuring a sustainable income throughout the year in addition to food security.

It works with rural communities and families to encourage water conservation models leading to better irrigation outcomes and increasing incomes to an extent of 75% to 100%. It also promotes the cultivation of crops that use less water, installs water control measures and encourages eco-friendly technologies resulting in enhanced weather prediction to diversify risks through growing different crops.

PRADAN promotes the participation of underserved people in income-generation activities like agriculture fruit orchards, Tasar silk and poultry. It has helped develop and set up many trusts and foundations which enable and empower the poor through sharing of relevant knowledge and provide specialised assistance in these professions.

It helps excluded and neglected women upgrade their skills, access their rights and participate in village and district forums through mobilising, training and motivating them. This has led to many communities asking for their entitlements and claiming their rightful places in society also leading to increase in accountability of village-level institutions.

Strengthening capacity of SHG federated structure for Livelihoods and Health” is a BMGF funded three-year project initiated from November’2019. The project aims to demonstrate a prototype for creating Model Cluster Level Federations across 3 states namely Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in 31 Cluster Level Federations. The project also aims to influence the larger NRLM structure, by feeding in the knowledge, learnings, process and protocol emerging from the interventions in these CLFs to NRLM, for large scale roll-out in the “1000 Model CLF Strengthening Program” being implemented by NRLM in 600 NRETP CLFs and 400 NRLM CLFs.

This was second phase of the project with the focus of intensification of intervention in selected project blocks. The project aims to (1) Increasing household income through large scale social mobilization focusing on block level impact using a saturation model to augment income level (2) Women led Economic Growth- Multi- dimensional change by strengthening women collectives to facilitate individual woman’s access to government programme and schemes.

The Augmentation in Small Holders prosperity through Agriculture Production Cluster (ASHA) program (2020-2024) is being implemented by Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN) and its partners in 40 blocks across 12 districts. The program is supporting the existing Agriculture Production Cluster (APC) program launched by the Government of Odisha’s (GoO) Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment (DA&FE) in November 2018. The program is developing production clusters in which female self-help group members form farmer producer groups (PGs) that synchronize production of horticulture crops with high market demand. These PGs are aggregated into FPCs. The program is also supporting the development of livestock production. It is coordinating closely with the GoO to deliver complementary infrastructure, including irrigation, farm mechanization, livestock sheds, and post-harvest infrastructure.

The project aims to support 100,000 Rural women from small and marginal households to attain 125% increase in gross annual income on a sustainable basis

1200 women SHG’s will be supported to cover 16000 women. And engage with 50% (7500) of them under intensive livelihoods intervention to ensure year round food security and enhanced incomes Rs 25,000 – 50,000 leading by the women of the community through their community institutions.