The Change I am Taking Back

At the start of this fellowship, I had many mixed emotions and thoughts. I kept thinking about how it would be, what it would look like, and how everything would work, the community, the project, the implementation, and the impact.

But after almost completing one year, I have realized that many outcomes did not match my initial expectations. These thoughts are coming to me now for two reasons. First, because the fellowship is about to end. Second, I feel a lot of pressure to write relevant blogs thatare meaning ful and connected to my project. This is making me reflect on what I believed before starting the project and how it has actually unfolded over time.

When I joined the fellowship, I believed that the livelihood project would help women earn around 10k to 15k per month, enough to support a family of three to five members. However, even after almost one year, the highest monthly income we have been able to provide is around 5k to 6k.
The image of the livelihood in my mind was that it will be like such that, a family can survive on it, but 8 months in to the collective still we are not able to provide that much of the money.

Because of this, my earlier belief that livelihood creation would quickly make women financially strong has changed. The reality is very different.
I now understand that the process is time-consuming, and the impact is slow and gradual. For example, one woman we supported increased her income from 1.5k to about 6k per month. While this is a significant improvement and shows progress, it is still not enough for proper survival and supporting a family.

This has made me question the definition of livelihood. If it means earning enough to sustain oneself and one’s family, we may need to rethink whether we are truly achieving it.

Another key realization has been about community engagement. I initially thought that if we reached 100 people, at least 85-90 would stay connected. In reality, the numbers drop significantly.

In my case, it was somewhat easier initially because many entrepreneurs were already known to my organization. New community engagement happened in the last two to three months of the fellowship, often through existing connections.

Even though people come, listen, and show interest, very few continue. In one village, we reached out to 10 women 8 attended the first day, 6 the second, and 4-5 by the third. Now, only 1 woman is actively producing crochet products. So, from 10 to just 1, the number reduced to about 10%. This has been a strong reality check.

The another thing I learned was, how to portray the community in your project, and in this regard my PoC has a great influence on that, though we have very different approach in terms of implementation and style of working, still I learned from him how to portray the community in a respectful manner, and it becomes a really important learning also because in the social sector we often push the dignity and selfrespect of people when we talk about them, the word like “Poor”, “Needy”, “Illiterate” becomes very common.

When he saked me to make the inswtagram channel for the Hamrai Bakhli Collective, the first thing he said whatever you are putting on the channel make sure it is not protraiying women as “Bechari”, show them as artist who are earning through threi art. As scshpere said what’s in a mane, but there is lot in the name hence we replaced the word “Labour” cost from the cost sheet with “Artisan cost”.

To sum up there are lots of changed perspective that, I am taking back with me from here. And would like to end this with a line that someone told to Anjali Ma’am (Co- founder of Udhyam) and she shared with us that “In socisl sector we don’t say how we change the lives, but we say how we touched the lives”.