Can Women’s Self-Help Groups Contribute to Sustainable Development? Evidence of Capability Changes from Northern India

Paul Anand, Swati Saxena, Rolando Gonzalez and Hai-Anh Dang ()

No 402, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: This paper investigates a women’s self-help group program with more than 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural areas of Northern India. The program has four streams of activity in micro-savings, agricultural enterprise training, health and nutrition education, and political participation. The paper considers whether there is any evidence that program membership is associated with quality of life improvement. Using new data on a variety of self-reported capability indicators from members and non-members, the paper estimates propensity score matching models and reports evidence of differences in some dimensions as well as significant benefits to those from the most disadvantaged groups—scheduled castes and tribes. The paper considers robustness and concludes that for some dimensions, there is evidence that the program has contributed to sustainable development through improvements in the quality of life.

Keywords: capabilities; self-help groups; sustainable development; propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 I32 O35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203478/1/GLO-DP-0402.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Can Women’s Self-help Groups Contribute to Sustainable Development? Evidence of Capability Changes from Northern India (2020)
Working Paper: Can Women's Self-Help Groups Contribute to Sustainable Development? Evidence of Capability Changes from Northern India (2020)
Working Paper: Can Women's Self-Help Groups Contribute to Sustainable Development ? Evidence of Capability Changes from Northern India (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().