Rural Poverty Alleviation

 

Income Generation Activities

In watershed development projects, the landed section of the people who constitute the upper class will benefit the most. A component was developed to enhance the capacity of income generation of poor people in the watersheds by the Government of Karnataka under the Sujala Watershed development programme. This programme is funded by the World Bank and is aimed at bringing equity for the poor and land less people in the watershed development.
IDF has provided its services in this component as a specialist agency to develop the institutional capacities of other specialist agencies as well as providing training, credit and market linkage to the poor people in the watersheds. They have been organized in to Self Help Groups (SHGs).

These services covered ten sub-watersheds covering Kolar, Chikkaballapur, Tumkur, Chitradurga and Haveri districts in Karnataka state.

The services include:

• Induction and Training of Trainers of specialist agencies on Entrepreneurship development. It covered 23 specialist agencies; 170 key personnel.

• Enterprise Resource mapping of the ten sub-watersheds. It is an initiative of IDF
and covered the village markets (sante) and best practices of micro entrepreneurs.

• Micro enterprise Vision building amongst the poor. The SHG members were facilitated to envision their economic development participatively. It motivated them to proactively participate in the training programmes.

• Entrepreneurship Awareness programme (EAP) to the poor. This is a three-day campus training and covered base soft skills, sensing business opportunity and developing small business plan and covered 18713 SHG members.

• Skill based Entrepreneurship Development Programme (SEDP). These campus based trainings with 8 to 50 days duration cover higher level of soft skills, entrepreneurial skills and developing individual business plans. It covered 2662 SHG members.