Development programmes often ask the poor to invest time, capital, learn how to manufacture a specific product and then leave them to struggle with markets and through the initial challenges of starting a business. Government and banks also focus only on skills rather than working backwards from market demand. This often leaves the poor with livelihood options that are not market-driven and therefore unsustainable.

BPF has created a major livelihoods innovation called MOVE (Market Oriented Value Enhancement) which won an award from the World Bank-ILO-YEN MarketPlace. BPF’s innovation branch in Dharwad has worked for two decades on livelihoods with a fair degree of success. The innovative elements of this model include:

• MOVE, popularly known as an experiential, gamified desi-MBA, was created for well-established self-help groups (SHGs) to research the market themselves, choose activities based on their research, upgrade their skills and finally enter the market as entrepreneurs.
• Adaptability: MOVE has been successfully tailored in the past to many vulnerable populations including quarry workers, beedi workers, MSMs, sexual minorities, slum youth and self-help group rural women totalling 365 successful businesses. Thus far, every batch of MOVE trainees has seen an immediate return of profits within the first year of establishing businesses, where incomes have doubled and even quadrupled.
• Handholding: Businesses are nurtured to the point where they break even, make reasonable profits and become self-reliant and sustainable.
• Inclusivity: MOVE is an inclusive livelihood intervention and has expanded to include participants from diverse backgrounds and identities such as gender and sexual minorities, sex workers, Dalit populations, etc.

Organisation’s Goal: BPF aims to create at least 20,000 businesses over the next 5 years and to scale up MOVE by partnering with METSCON to create a Centre of Excellence.

In the last three decades, government agencies and civil society organisations (CSO) have created community-based organisations (CBOs) to implement their programmes. BPF through a multi-stakeholder partnership with other like-minded organisations have come together to further the efforts of 12 federations in four states of Assam, Bihar, Karnataka and Telangana.

The current need is to build on the existing strength of these CBOs and federations and work towards creating models of autonomous, sustainable organisations that can be used by agencies working with CBOs nationwide. If these federations and CBOs can liaison with the gram panchayat and government departments to access entitlements, they can help these programmes achieve their targets. This will also enable CBOs to mobilise members, strengthen existing programmes, revive defunct collectives, form new federations, and build their capacity to take their work forward. Skilling CBOs would include training on book-keeping, managerial skills, communication, proposal writing and documentation. Along with inculcating leadership abilities to run programmes independently, we equip them with the skills to manage meetings, handle conflict, and also undertake visioning exercises.