Jeevika Livelihoods Project, Phase 1 Evaluation. One round "retrospective" evaluation. Household Survey Data 2011

Socio-Economic Effects of a Self-Help Group Intervention: Evidence from Bihar, India This is a one period survey with retrospective questions of changes on changes over time, collected to do a "quick" evaluation of Phase 1 of the Jeevika Project Bihar. Collaboration: World Bank Social Observatory Team with Government of Bihar. Multiple discussions with the JEEViKA team revealed that project personnel considered the Census 2001 data to identify villages with high populations of SC/ST, regarded as target population. Such villages would always get the highest priority for intervention. Grassroots personnel would then enter the village and identify the hamlets where the SC/ST populations live. The spearhead team from the project would then hold a meeting in the center of such hamlets and inform the villagers about the project, the benefits of regular saving and arrange an exposure visit to a project village. Mobilization would start when 10-15 women from such communities commit to a weekly savings amount and federate themselves into an SHG. The discussions with the JEEViKA team pointed out that for each block, prioritizing villages for entry was contingent on the number of total households & target (or low-caste) households in the village, as per Census 2001. Once the block-level plan had been formalized and the sequence of village entry finalized, the field team would conduct some initial scoping to look at the priority villages more closely. Specifically, they would consider the number of women in the village who are functionally literate, as JEEViKA mobilizes community members to perform as book- keepers and act as resource personnel to handhold the community institutions of SHGs and VOs. Additionally, the scoping team would also look at the number of people who are working in the village or locally; this information would be helpful when the VO becomes mature enough to conduct the interventions for various livelihood options. In light of these discussions, the research team considered village level data from Census 2001 in 18 administrative blocks across 6 districts of Bihar, namely, Gaya, Khagaria, Madhubani, Muzaffarpur, Nalanda & Purnea. Out of these 18 blocks, 12 blocks were marked for the JEEViKA program in October 2007. Field operations in 5 of the remaining 6 blocks had started in early 2007. The remaining block, Bochaha in Muzaffarpur, was the pilot block for this program and field work had started here in late 2006. In these 18 blocks, the research team considered 200 villages that were entered by the JEEViKA project at various points during 2008. For the purposes of this study, these villages were considered as the treatment units and all surveyed households in a treated village were considered beneficiaries of the JEEViKA program. To look for counterfactuals, we consider villages in a separate set of 21 blocks in 5 of these 6 districts (excluding Khagaria). When the retrospective survey instrument was administered in early 2011, the JEEViKA project had just brought these blocks under its ambit; the block management offices had been set up and some initial scoping had been done to understand the logistics behind future interventions. After the retrospective survey was completed, the project scaled into 26 blocks, including all the 21 blocks containing the control villages. To identify the proper counterfactuals for the 200 treatment units, we consider village level data from Census 2001. The details on the variables that were used to match villages are provided in Table 3.1 (in the cited paper). The hope behind this matching was to construct a set of non-project villages from the 21 non- project blocks, which were reasonably similar to the set of project villages from the 18 project blocks. However, there is a potential problem that may invalidate this ‘reasonable similarity’. Recall that JEEViKA targeted villages (in the 18 blocks) for entry based on data from Census 2001; once the village was scoped in 2008, it is possible that the field personnel found out that due to migration, the caste profile of the village had changed. This creates the possibility that the project would change the intensity of mobilizations drastically, especially given scarcity of resources at its disposal. We have the potential of a bad match if a village that is selected as a counterfactual unit, on the basis of 2001 data, does not retain the required demographics for JEEViKA to intervene in 2008. To address such issues, the survey was administered to 10 randomly selected households from the target hamlets in all 200 project and 200 non-project villages; we can assume that had caste compositions changed significantly since 2001 in either the selected project or non-project villages, this should be reflected in the sample statistics. It is to be noted that the survey team did not have a beneficiary list for the treatment villages; thus the selection of interviewed HHs were truly random, and not a sample of...