ABSTRACT
Livelihood and microfinance programmes for women in developing nations became popular to strengthen women’s economic rights by improving financial literacy, livelihood options, employment, and earning opportunities. This chapter presents what worked for the Jeevika programme, an initiative of the Government of Bihar under the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), in poverty alleviation and economic empowerment of poor women through Self Help Groups, and the challenges faced. We applied the narrative synthesis method and descriptive statistics for our analysis and used secondary evidence from already published literature, audits, and annual reports of the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project (BRLPs) and the World Bank from 2006–07 to 2021–22. Secondary evidence suggested that the programme achieved a significant scale during the past decade, and the average per-beneficiary implementation cost declined significantly because of the scale effect. The programme fulfilled the primary objective of financial inclusion for women by linking them with formal banking loans at a cheaper rate compared to high-interest informal debt. However, the second layer and longterm objectives, including livelihood activities, market linkages, earning opportunities, and health interventions, are still nascent. Longitudinal empirical studies are also scarce on the impact of the Jeevika programme on the empowerment of women and poverty alleviation because of data limitations.
