Economic vulnerability and social exclusion reinforce each other. When a family has no income, children leave school. When a woman cannot earn, she cannot negotiate. When a community depends entirely on daily labour with no savings and no assets, every crisis sets them back years.
Jan Vikas Sansthan works to build economic resilience from the ground up, by forming and strengthening women’s collectives, developing practical skills among women and youth, and creating lasting connections to livelihoods, markets, and government economic schemes.
Self-reliance is not a gift we give. It is something communities build, and our role is to support that process.
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Self-Help Groups active with 547 members across the region
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new small businesses started by women through collective support
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people connected to government welfare and livelihood schemes
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rupees in documented income growth across member households
Women’s savings and credit groups are at the foundation of our livelihood work. We support their formation and ongoing strengthening, creating spaces where women save collectively, access credit for productive purposes, and build the kind of mutual support that makes individual economic risk more manageable. Over time these groups become more than financial collectives. They become community institutions through which women develop voice, confidence, and the capacity to engage with broader economic and governance systems.
We facilitate access to vocational training and skills development for women and adolescent girls, including those who have left school. Training is oriented toward real economic opportunity, not just certification. For young people who have dropped out, we work to identify pathways to income that are viable within their communities and circumstances, so that leaving formal education does not mean abandoning economic possibility altogether.
Many women in our programmes have used collective savings, new skills, and peer support to start small income-generating activities of their own. We provide guidance on sustaining and growing these enterprises and connect women to markets and resources they would not otherwise reach. Alongside this, we help families navigate government schemes across agriculture, rural employment, and enterprise support, bridging the gap between what communities are entitled to and what they are actually able to access.