Network of Entrepreneurship & Economic Development (NEED) - India

NEED's approach involves supporting marginalised people by linking them together in groups and building their capacity to effect change in their own lives and communities. The organisation has 4 areas of focus:

• Forming Self Help Groups (SHGs) for credit and social mobilisation: NEED works at the grassroots level by helping poor women form SHGs - specifically, by introducing a system of micro-finance and promoting entrepreneurial activities. NEED goes beyond generating economic wealth by mobilising the community to speak out, challenging social ills and creating community institutions that work to meet the needs of citizens.
• Microenterprise Development: NEED has defined a training model called Entrepreneurship Linked Income Generation for Self Employment Program (EIGSEP). This programme is a series of 6 flexible modules that can be adjusted to meet the needs of village women and men who desire advanced entrepreneurial training. This model focusses on helping people recognise - and use - the traditional wisdom and human resources that exist among them. This strategy represents a movement away from managing quantifiable mechanisms such as credit, thrift, and SHGs to issues of developing human capital. NEED also offers micro-finance lending directly to deprived and marginalised members of rural society (women, farmers, artisans, micro-entrepreneurs, etc.).
• Environmental Sustainability: NEED facilitates ecological development through projects to reclaim waste land. Organisers say that many village communities have lost their capacity to use land for agriculture due to industrial pollution. NEED has created partnerships between villages and government organisations in which stakeholders can work together toward land reclamation. Through a series of interventions, beginning with growing targeted crops, NEED works with the stakeholders on ways to improve marginal land and farm in a sustainable manner. NEED's focus on market-led livelihood, with an emphasis on conservation, has led to the formation of approximately 9000 units. Operated by rural entrepreneurs, these units employ about 15,000 youth.
• Capacity Building: NEED publishes learning documentation and conducts training programmes for the functionaries of other NGOs, governmental departments, banks, and leaders of the formed SHGs. Trainees spend extensive amounts of time "in the field" in an effort to understand the grassroots realities of village life. Training is offered in the following fields: micro-credit, micro-enterprise, rural and natural resource maximisation and sustainable development, and human resources. The training modules are not defined by a fixed period of time but, rather, are designed in accordance to the day-to-day functioning of the group or individual being trained. For these programmes, NEED has permanently rented a training venue in Lucknow, where facilities for the participants' lodging and boarding are available as well.

Drawing on these approaches, NEED has launched specific projects in over 350 different villages in 6 different districts of Uttar Pradesh. To cite only one example, in September 2002, NEED launched the PACS (Poorest Area Civil Society) Project called "Empowering the Rural Poor, especially Women, through building local 'Women Owned' Organizations, Creation of Network Platforms and Opportunity and Enhancing Human Resource Development in a Sustainable Manner." The project focussed on mobilising the women through SHGs. Because Panchayats (village councils) mainly work in isolation instead of planning, executing, and reviewing their work in collaboration with the local community, NEED has set up two Panchayat Information Centres (PICs) at the village level for distillation and dissemination of information. The goal is to urge Panchayat officials to work in a more community-driven way. Also as part of this project, to address the fact that girls under 10 were doing domestic work rather than attending school, NEED opened 'Remedial Centres' in an effort to equip the girls with the skills needed to directly enter the next level in the formal primary school system. The project is also organising Family Life Education programmes to provide information to girls and women on child marriage, girls' education, and reproductive health.

One ongoing NEED programme uses the Internet as a marketing tool. As part of its effort to form and strengthen grassroots groups, NEED trains SHGs to produce and sell their own handicrafts by building women's vocational and marketing skills. NEED provides training in various crafts based on a woman's existing skills, talents, interests, and resources. These women are primarily from poor, dispossessed, marginalised, or unreached sectors. Photos of products marketed by these women are pictured on the NEED website.

Economic Development, Women, Environment, Education, Political Development.

Organisers claim that approximately 30,000 micro-groups have been formed through NEED's facilitation.

NEED claims that, of India's one billion people, 84 million of them are considered to be very poor. In the past years, the number of women living in poverty has increased disproportionately to the number of men living in poverty due to women's limited access to power, education, training and productive resources, and the rigidity of socially ascribed roles. Uttar Pradesh is the most populated state in India and therefore has the highest number of poor people.