Impact evaluation of Partnership for Women’s Empowerment & Rights (PoWER)

PoWER is a multi-stakeholder project that aims to increase HH income of 3.5 Lakh households by Rs. 15,000 by impacting their lives and livelihoods. This is primarily being done by strengthening farming system-based livelihoods dovetailed with financial services, access to markets and government entitlements, including access to land. Some of the key features of the project are mobilizing women into Self Help Groups (SHGs) and building their capacity around financial literacy for group functioning including savings, lending and book keeping. The project also aims at establishing and promoting women entrepreneurs in agriculture and allied sector to link the rural farmers with both input and output markets through means of agricultural entrepreneurs and support towards business growth. The project is also working towards developing pilot level working intervention models integrating water, sanitation, hygiene and nutrition with agriculture development; which are conceptualized and spearheaded by women’s grassroots level groups and their associative tiers. The project plans
to build on existing expertise of PRADAN and other strong civil society organization around the core issues of nutrition, WASH, gender, etc. addressed in the project areas. The project also plans to work with committed local NGOs and flagship government programmes like NRLM to build their capacities to replicate similar livelihood action with the communities they
work within the poverty regions of the target geographies.

Sambodhi had earlier carried out the baseline for the program. In this assignment Sambodhi is building on the baseline and is performing the midline and end line assessments over a period of three years. The tasks undertaken are finalization of the research design and indicator framework followed by finalization of the sampling design and research questionnaires. Sambodhi will also be providing support towards training of field staff and data collection also incorporating a component of in-depth discussions with key stakeholders and community. This will be followed by synthesis of findings and development and submission of detailed report on findings of the study.