The challenge
India, with 1.13 billion inhabitants, has about 830 million people living on less than $2 per day and 270 million on less than $1 per day (at PPP, according to the World Bank). Despite the high growth of the Indian economy, little is changing for the poorest. Tamil Nadu is one of the Indian states that have benefited most from this growth. Still, 21% of its 62 million people live below the poverty line and many of these live in the rural areas where self-employment is the only way towards a better future.

The organization
Hand in Hand helps poor women and their families in 14 districts of Tamil Nadu to enhance their livelihoods by investing in productive assets and creating microenterprises. For the past six years, Hand in Hand has organized almost 400,000 women into self-help groups, trained them in financial literacy and entrepreneurship, provided them with microcredit ($39 million), and assisted them in setting up and sustaining microenterprises. The families invest in livestock, irrigation, bakeries, citizens’ centers (IT-kiosks), and many other farm and non-farm activities.
Link: www.hihseed.org

The program that Voxtra supports
Voxtra supports Hand in Hand with $3 million over three years to expand their program into four more districts of Tamil Nadu with a combined population of 7.1 million people. The target of the program is to organize 90,000 women in self-help groups and support them in setting up 42,000 family-based enterprises, enabling each family to increase its income by an average of an estimated $200 per year. An estimated $7 million in microcredit will be disbursed. Because of the continued support from Hand in Hand, the added income is again invested in more productive assets, which increases the income of the families further. In addition, Hand in Hand will contribute to establishing 325 “medium-sized” enterprises (with 5 employees per enterprise on average) and 225 citizens’ centers. The citizens’ centers will offer services such as computer education, access to government schemes, and other ICT related services to one million people. The program was launched in November 2008.

Why Voxtra selected this program

• The direct socio-economic benefit of Voxtra’s philanthropic investment, consisting mainly of increased incomes to family-based enterprises, is conservatively estimated at 9x the investment (27x when the benefits are valued at PPP). There are several other social benefits such as women empowerment, pro-poor political influence, computer literacy, access to information etc that have not been quantified.
• The program reaches the poor: Hand in Hand focuses on the rural areas of Tamil Nadu and uses its Participatory Rural Appraisal method to map the most disadvantaged people in the villages.
• Hand in Hand is an excellent grassroots organization with decentralized operations, well-developed systems for financial management and operations monitoring, and a results-oriented and pragmatic approach. Even though the organization is young, it has proven an impressive ability to pilot and rapidly scale up successful projects in a short period of time, which is partly due to its excellent management with decades of experience. Hand in Hand is also a role-model in creating partnerships with various stakeholders, such as local and national governments, civil society organizations and the private sector.