Rajasthan Grameen Aajeevika Vikas Parishad (RGAVP)

We partnered with the Rajasthan Grameen Aajeevika Vikas Parishad (RGAVP) in 2016 to establish financially sustainable community institutions that would result in higher access to funds for communities.

By 2016, RGAVP, under the National Rural Livelihood Mission, had promoted more than 350,000 SHGs. However, the challenge was to set up and strengthen Cluster Level Federations (CLFs) as apex institutions of the three-tier institutions working for social, economic, and financial intermediation among their stakeholders.

Since CLFs oversee the management of SHGs and VOs, access to funds, and members’ livelihood investments as well as convergence with other schemes, we adopted a two-pronged strategy across the 42 CLFs in 10 districts that we intervened in:

• Improve public delivery systems through good governance.
• Establish CLF-driven livelihood models to improve financial sustainability.

The success of our intervention was evidenced by the endline that showed a 55% increase in income, in two years, across 160,000 households. Additionally, CLFs were able to generate enough operational revenue. World Bank acknowledged the enhanced operational viability of these institutions and tapered down its financial support to half.