英文文献：Empowering Poor Rural Women In India: Empirical Evidence From Andhra Pradesh-赋予印度贫困农村妇女权力:来自安得拉邦的经验证据
英文文献作者：Deininger, Klaus W.,Galab, Shaik,Olsen, Tore
英文文献摘要：
Even though overall growth in India has recently accelerated, it has largely bypassed rural areas and agriculture; in fact it is agreed that the ratio of rural to urban poverty has increased. As a consequence, some of the marginalized groups in a society that is already characterized by a high level of inequality in opportunities and segregation along lines of, gender, caste, and social status, are widely reckoned to not have benefited from overall growth. To enable women and backwards castes to expand their livelihood opportunities, a vast range of government programs have been initiated and large amounts of resources are being channeled to poor areas. An increasingly popular approach to do so relies on the concept of Community Driven Development (CDD) whereby resources are made available to encourage formation of savings groups at the local level and, once they have attained a certain degree of maturity, the channeling to such groups of funds (either as a credit or a grant) which they can use for small projects aimed to improve their livelihood. This paper uses one of the earliest projects of this type, the Andhra Pradesh (AP) District Initiatives Project, a US $ 250 Mn intervention that was started in 2000, to provide an initial assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the CDD approach. One of the interesting characteristics of the CDD approach is its desire to combine interventions to increase food security and deal with immediate needs with social mobilization to overcome long-standing patterns of discrimination and prejudices and attention to longer-term economic needs. Two interesting aspects of the AP program that greatly facilitate assessment of impact is the fact that only women's groups were eligible and that even in cases where it built on pre-existing group structures, the project aimed to establish second-tier organizations at the village and mandal (county) level which, by pooling the resources of individual groups aimed to significantly expand their ability to respond to shocks. It is therefore possible to compare between women and men in the project area, as well as between pre-existing groups in areas affected by the project and in areas that were not eligible, to assess project impacts. To do so, we rely on a comprehensive set of surveys that included 2,700 households (with separate questionnaires being administered to men and women in the household), 2,200 self help groups, and 200 village organizations in both project and control areas conducted in mid-2004. In addition to the standard issues, the questionnaire elicited retrospective information on most issues so as to be able to compare differences in differences between project and control areas. It also contained an elaborate section on social empowerment, participation in groups, and actual as well as hypothetical borrowing capacity. The issues to be addressed are, first, to what extent the project succeeded in improving the governance structure of the community organizations involved;, second to what extent women have been empowered to overcome social barriers that have traditionally stymied their economic advancement, and finally to what extent the project has led to an increase in levels of income and productivity. We use simple t-tests of differences in differences to assess whether areas or groups (women) targeted by the project have advanced significantly more than others. For such differences to translate into significant improvements for the poor, it is necessary that the program is able to target poorer segments in the overall population or those who are organized in self-help groups. Participation regressions indeed confirm that, by focusing on the poorest areas and by aiming to include poorer parts of the population, the project has been able to significantly expand the range of households organized in self-help groups and to target support for institutional strengthening towards the most needy. Comparison between pre-existing groups in intervention and control areas points towards significantly different rates of improvements in terms of group management and internal controls (e.g. members being fined for non-attendance, internal bookkeeping being of high quality). These, together with the federated structure, appear to have allowed groups in intervention areas to significantly expand the availability of credit to members and to access loans by other financial institutions. Second-tier institutions in self help group federations were able to take on completely new activities (e.g. taking over distribution of subsidized food grains from "fair price shops" which were had often remained out of the reach of the poor) that significantly improved participants' ability to smooth consumption. This is supported by evidence from the household level suggesting that, even though the incidence of shocks was higher for households in treatment areas than outside, households were able to deal with such shocks more easily than they had been able to in the past. The hypothesis that the improvement in access to credit can be attributed to the project is supported by the finding that the unambiguous and significant increase in the amount which women in areas eligible for the project as compared to those that were not, were able to borrow both from the formal and the informal sector is not matched by a commensurate increase in credit availability for men. To the contrary, credit access for men was higher in areas not eligible for the project (marginally significant) as compared to areas that were eligible. The logic of the project to use improved access to resources to empower women and overcome social barriers is corroborated by the fact that the change in the share of women who receive high respect in their family and who were not subject to domestic violence was indeed significantly lower in control than in intervention areas where women also have significantly higher participation in family matters relating to income generating activities, debt and savings, as well as family planning and the number of children. In fact, the improvements in women's participation seem to transcend the realm of the family and extent to the community level: the change in the share of women who always know of or participate in village assemblies, who are aware of other types of community institutions, and who are able to freely interact with government officials and villagers of other caste or religion is significantly higher in intervention than in control villages. While all of this suggests that the project has not only improved access to credit and risk diversification but also significantly increased women's empowerment, these significant effects were, however, not matched by increased beneficiary savings, possibly because the resources generated by productive activities initiated under the project are yet to mature. To explore this, a closer look at the extent to which the project has increased access of the poor to resources and/or enabled them to use these resources more effectively. Even though productivity of resource use is similar between areas eligible and non-eligible for the project, there is clear evidence that the project has helped to significantly expand the share of households who own productive assets. The key challenge to ensure sustainability and replicability of the intervention is thus to match the rather impressive performance in terms of social empowerment with an equally significant transfer of technical skills that would, by facilitating more productive use of such assets, put participants economic basis on a stronger footing. The ability to use the federated structure to provide effective technical assistance and to liaise with line ministries to ensure that services are available to the poor, the feasibility of which has been demonstrated in a number of individual cases, is likely to be a key issue in doing so.

赋予印度贫困农村妇女权力:来自安得拉邦的经验证据。尽管印度的整体增长最近有所加快，但它在很大程度上绕过了农村地区和农业;事实上，人们一致认为，农村贫困人口与城市贫困人口的比例已经增加。其结果是，在机会不平等和按性别、种姓和社会地位划分的隔离程度很高的社会中，一些被边缘化的群体被广泛认为没有从整体增长中受益。为扩大妇女和落后种姓的生活机会，政府启动了一系列项目，并向贫困地区输送了大量资源。日益流行的方式这样做依靠社区主导型发展(CDD)的概念,资源可用来鼓励储蓄的形成组织在地方层面,一旦达到一定程度的成熟,这些组织的引导基金(作为信贷或资助),他们可以使用小型项目旨在改善他们的生计。本文使用了这类最早的项目之一——安得拉邦(AP)地区倡议项目(2000年启动的一项2.5亿美元的干预项目)，对CDD方法的优缺点进行了初步评估。CDD办法的一个令人感兴趣的特点是，它希望将增加粮食安全和处理眼前需要的干预措施与克服长期存在的歧视和偏见的社会动员以及对长期经济需要的关注结合起来。AP计划的两个有趣的方面,极大地促进评估影响的事实,只有妇女团体是合格的,甚至在这种情况下,它建立在已有的组织结构,该项目旨在建立二级组织在村庄和mandal(县)级,池资源的个人团体旨在大幅扩大其应对危机的能力。因此，可以比较项目地区的妇女和男子，以及受项目影响地区和没有资格的地区的现有群体，以评估项目的影响。为此，我们在2004年中进行了一套全面的调查，包括2700户家庭(分别向家庭中的男性和女性发放问卷)、2200个自助团体和200个村组织。除了标准问题之外，问卷还引出了对大多数问题的回顾性信息，以便能够比较项目和控制领域之间的差异。它还详细地载有一节关于赋予社会权力、群体参与以及实际和假设的借贷能力。需要解决的问题,首先,该项目在多大程度上成功地改善了社区组织参与治理结构;,第二个女性能够在多大程度上克服传统社会壁垒,阻碍经济发展,最后这个项目在多大程度上导致的收入水平和生产力的增加。我们使用简单的差异t检验来评估项目所针对的地区或群体(妇女)是否比其他地区进步得更多。为了将这种差异转化为对穷人的显著改善，该方案必须能够针对总人口中较贫穷的群体或那些被组织成自助小组的人。参与回归的确证实，该项目以最贫穷地区为重点，并以包括人口中较贫穷的部分为目标，因此能够大大扩大以自助小组形式组织的家庭的范围，并以机构支助为目标