Tusu lives in the village of Saradha in Mayurbhanj district of the eastern coastal state of Odisha in India, and recently constructed a farm pond on her land through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This important personal achievement might have gone mostly unnoticed—but through an inspirational video Tusu helped our team make, her story has reached over 6,500 rural Odisha women who now know what women like them can achieve through raising their voices to access key government programs.

The MGNREGA is a national rural public works program that guarantees all rural households 100 days of paid unskilled manual employment at a specified minimum wage. Participants are listed on household job cards; as a result, they are often referred to as “job card holders.” Workers build a range of durable assets on both private and public land—ponds, canals, water harvesting structures, plantations, roads and so on—that are intended to support rural livelihoods and strengthen the natural resource base, thereby building resilience against climate change. 

Importantly, the MGNREGA program chooses projects via a participatory, bottom-up process. Job card holders demand assets—asserting their right to a government entitlement—that would be useful to them at periodic village meetings, or gram sabhas, where collective decisions are made on the set of assets to be built that year. Assets like the farm pond requested and then built by Tusu and other workers in her community—which both replenishes groundwater and supports income generation—are exactly the kind of projects the program aims to support. However, women are far less likely than men to participate in the gram sabha deliberations, suggesting that the assets that get built might not adequately reflect their needs. Recognizing this, we are designing and testing strategies, including the inspirational video, to boost rural women’s voice and agency in the MGNREGA asset selection process.

What makes Tusu’s story remarkable is how rare it is for women to speak up. In April and May of this year, almost two decades since the Act came into force in 2005, Tusu was among 3,426 female MGNREGA job card holders we surveyed across five districts in Odisha. This baseline quantitative survey, along with formative qualitative work, formed the foundation for an ongoing randomized controlled trial (RCT). The surveyed districts were among those in the state where the largest number of MGNREGA assets linked to agriculture or natural resource management had been constructed in the previous five years. And yet, in Tusu’s district, only 56% of the women surveyed said that the idea for the last MGNREGA asset they received or requested had come from them, and only 3.7% had ever successfully received an asset through the MGNREGA program.

To address this issue, one of our planned treatment arms was to develop a role model video to test whether showcasing the stories of women role models from the same communities who had successfully received assets through the MGNREGA could boost individual aspiration and encourage women to demand assets for themselves.

Sample outliers as role models

We faced two significant challenges in planning how to make the role model film. The first was finding relatable female role models when so few women in our study areas had successfully influenced the MGNREGA asset selection process in the past. The second was identifying precisely what information the film should convey. Unlike instructional films that explain how to use a certain tool or cultivate a particular crop, here our qualitative research had shown that there was no single pathway to success. Women who received MGNREGA assets seemed to have done so via different mechanisms. 

With local filmmakers, we visited a small number of these outliers from our baseline survey and qualitative study samples who had obtained assets via the MGNREGA program and asked them a simple question: How did you do it?

We filmed eight women from four districts. While the MGNREGA program has longstanding and well-defined formal processes, functionaries, and roles, each woman had a different tale to tell. Ranjitha first heard about the program from her husband, and they went together to a MGNREGA functionary to make their asset request. Meanwhile, Bhujamati went to the gram sabha, where she built up the confidence to seek MGNREGA resources for a land development project which was ultimately selected through the participatory community process. Another woman worked through her women’s self-help group, which discussed which assets to request as a group. It then brought the requests to the village-level federation of self-help groups, which supported them in the gram sabha. You can see and hear all of their stories here:

Public speaking as the common denominator

The women in our baseline survey and qualitative study reported that information about the program—what assets could be demanded, who was eligible to receive an asset and so on—was insufficient, as was information on how to participate. Our conversations showed that having a support system of husbands, women’s self-help groups or friends helped provide an entry point into the process and power in backing women’s requests. The common formula for success was seeking out a support system, formalizing an idea into a concrete plan, and presenting it publicly via the appropriate local process.

Hearing stories of other women’s successes might help inspire women to demand more from programs like MGNREGA. To provide further support, we thought a formal public speaking training would help provide them the practical skills and self-confidence needed to articulate their demands effectively. Thus, in one arm of our RCT we combined the inspirational video with this public speaking training (here in English, here in Odia).

Trainings across Odisha

To test the effects of both the inspirational video and the public speaking training, we deployed these interventions to a group of 1,400 women from our baseline survey (the number we were budgeted to cover) from 94 communities. In each community, of the 15 women previously selected to be part of our baseline survey, we randomly allocated five to receive a leaflet with basic information on MGNREGA and an unrelated video (the placebo group); five to receive the same leaflet and the MGNREGA inspirational video along with a facilitated group discussion (treatment group 1); and five to receive the same leaflet, MGNREGA video, facilitated discussion, and the public speaking training. During November-December 2023, we successfully recruited 1,333 (i.e. more than 95%) of these baseline “index” women, in each case training the woman plus (on average) five of her friends, thus ensuring that the video reached more than 6,500 women across the state.

These interventions bring us to the next step in our research. In early 2024, we will conduct a follow-up survey how the women in each group differ—in how they think, behave, and participate in MGNREGA asset selection processes. This should also yield insights into the value of the video, which we hope will provide guidance on how to craft better role model videos in the future to reach more women.

Jordan Kyle is a Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI) Unit;  Katrina Kosec is a PGI Senior Research Fellow; Sudha Narayanan is a Research Fellow with IFPRI’s  Development Strategies and Governance Unit, based in New Delhi; Kalyani Raghunathan is a PGI Research Fellow, based in New Delhi. This post is based on research that is not yet peer-reviewed.

Referenced Project Note:

Karachiwalla, Naureen; Kosec, Katrina; Kyle, Jordan; Narayanan, Sudha; and Raghunathan, Kalyani. 2022. Women’s voice and agency in choosing assets: A new study on MGNREGA in India. Project Note December 2022. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136479

Acknowledgments: 

This work was carried out under the CGIAR Research Initiatives on Gender Equality and National Policies and Strategies and the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform. We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/.