A BIG Idea by Shrey Goel

Adapted from one of two winning essays from the UC Berkeley Blum Center for Developing Economies’ 2014 Finding Big Ideas Essay Contest. The original essay can be found here.

This summer I had the privilege of working with the UHRC as a part of my Global Poverty and Practice Minor. This post attempts to outline how the UHRC operates, as I came to understand it, and why I found it’s operational philosophy to be a “big idea”.

The UHRC focuses on urban poverty by entering into slum communities and holding discussions with community members, proposing the idea of forming community women’s groups. These conversations aim to stimulate the women in slums to think about whether or not collective community action can help them confront the challenges they face. In my conversations with Dr. Agarwal, the Executive Director, he explained that an important aspect to this process is not pushing group formation on communities – if community members do not express interest, the UHRC steps back until interest grows because in the absence of an organic investment by the people, the initiative will simply be unsustainable. Once a group has formed, the first step is basic training surrounding health outreach and advocacy. Trainings cover tracking and surveying vulnerable groups (such as pregnant women) in slums as well as reaching out to government, private, and volunteer health providers to run camps in communities.

After groups are well-established, they pursue higher-level activities with the support of UHRC field workers as new needs emerge. For example one need that became evident early on was financial resilience to health exigencies and other similar events. When this need emerged, the UHRC began helping women’s groups establish collective insurance funds by providing trainings on how to collect member contributions, keep records, and administer loans. These collective insurance funds are different from microfinance loans because the seed money comes entirely from group members and loans are granted for home improvement initiatives and health emergencies in addition to microenterprise. Rules[1] are established and enforced by women’s group members who decide on conditions together, rather than following the mandates of an external institution. 

Another need that emerged early on in the UHRC’s operations was infrastructural improvement in communities and knowledge about applying for government schemes and programs. To address this, the UHRC began facilitating trainings on petition writing to local municipal authorities, discussing with groups the best ways to write collective appeals and document all their communications. Groups also began learning to write reminders to local officials when their requests for things like street paving and drain installation were ignored.

What I have outlined thus far is how the UHRC works in the field, but not why the UHRC has elected to approach urban poverty in this fashion. India’s trajectory of urbanization has led many families from poor rural and peri-urban areas into city-centers, but they arrive faster than the planning process can incorporate them. They are relegated to informal and often illegal occupations of whatever free space they can find, where they erect impermanent housing units or occupy existing run down units. The allure and pursuit of better economic prospects pits poor urban families in slums in competition, thus leading to fragmentation as families are not incentivized to work in solidarity towards mutual upliftment. These oppressive factors result in decreased household and community-level social cohesion in slums. Therefore, helping communities build stronger bonds through collective action is the goal that underlies the UHRC’s initiatives.

According to Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, an individual’s belief in their ability to accomplish a task influences their actual capacity to accomplish it. Applying this concept to groups, Gibson has theorized that just as individuals have self-efficacy, so do groups have group efficacy. In a conversation with Dr. Agarwal, he explained to me that both forms of efficacy depend upon small instances of success early on in order to build confidence for more ambitious endeavors later because they enhance people’s belief in their own ability. This is why the UHRC begins with basic health outreach activity, which lends itself to higher success rates than petitions for infrastructural improvement, which require greater persistence and higher degrees of organizing. However as groups slowly progress, they develop the confidence to interface with municipal authorities and local officials, and this confidence has led to huge improvements in many UHRC program slums, such as paved roads, covered drains, and regular street and garbage cleaning.

What I believe differentiates UHRC from other NGOs is it’s underlying ethos. The UHRC has elected to pursue what Dr. Agarwal calls a “deprojectized” model of development. The organization has no intention of leaving the communities it operates in, and in many cases, other NGOs have come to Agra and Indore to run short-term programs, offering employment to UHRC women’s group members who are able to serve as a high-capacity work force. The women’s groups have become a platform for future development, but the UHRC doesn’t just strap women with responsibility and then leave – it stays and provides continual support through field workers and field offices.

            The UHRC’s approach aims to tackle poverty at a fundamental level. It is highly resource efficient, and effective, relative to costly multi-national aid initiatives. In bringing community knowledge and expertise to the forefront, this approach challenges the current centers of poverty knowledge generation (such as research institutions and global development banks); it asks poverty experts to recognize community knowledge as legitimate. But this is why the UHRC’s methods have so much potential. I remember one day speaking with some women’s group members in one of the poorest UHRC Agra slums called Indra Nagar. For most of its history, Indra Nagar has been a tent colony, home to nomadic merchants and craftsmen. One of the women explained that before the UHRC, nobody would even come into their slum. Nobody would loan them money and women could barely even leave their homes due to highly conservative gender dynamics. Recently, however, she was able to take out a 10,000 Rupee loan from her Federation[2]. She was able to open up a storefront and is currently paying back her loan at a rate of 1,000 Rupees per month. It is because of this high degree of community member investment that I heard many women this summer talk about going to yet unreached slums to establish women’s groups throughout my stay in Agra.

            I believe it all comes down to something basic – what Dr. Agarwal frequently called trust. What he meant by that is that by putting trust and faith in slum community members, an iterative process of mutual learning is able to take place. It’s a process that allows slum residents to cultivate their faith in their ability to navigate urban institutions and to build a stronger social fabric. It’s also a process that demonstrates the urban poor can and must be given an active role in the upliftment of their communities. And that to me is a big idea.

Shrey Goel
Environmental Science, Pre-Med (Global Poverty and Practice Minor)
4th Year Undergraduate, University of California, Berkeley

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[1] Such as monthly per-member contributions, late fees, and repayment interest rates, which rarely exceed 3%

[2] A Federation is a collective of women’s groups in a particular region that runs a higher level collective savings program and pursues larger-scale initiatives