World Bank gives $100 million to Andhra Pradesh project

The World Bank will give another 100 million dollars to a poverty reduction program in India. The Andhra Pradesh Rural Poverty Reduction Project has helped to raise the incomes of 10 million women since 2003.

From The Deccan Herald, this PTI article tells us more about the program and it's new money.

"This programme has had a remarkable impact on the lives of the rural poor in Andhra Pradesh," Roberto Zagha, World Bank Country Director for India, said.

"We have seen incomes increase for close to 90 per cent of poor rural households. This additional financing will help improve efficiency and effectiveness of the programme by adopting new technologies and innovative service delivery models for achieving full inclusion of the poor households," Zagha said.

The Bank said the project objectives will remain the same as the original project, that is, to enable the rural poor, particularly the poorest of the poor, improve their livelihoods and quality of life.
This is the second additional financing for this project and it will help scale up the impressive achievements to date, it said.

"This additional financing will help build capacity of community institutions to enable them to deal more effectively with the commercial banks, the market institutions, public sector departments, and developing new partnerships with the cooperatives and the private sector,"said Parmesh Shah, World Bank Lead Rural Development Specialist and project team leader.

"We expect this approach to bring even higher returns on the investments in the institutional platform of the poor already made. This phase will also work towards achieving significant decrease in malnutrition and maternal mortality for the rural poor," he said.

The World Bank said the project has mobilised some 10 million poor women, or 90 per cent of the poor in the project districts, into nearly 850,000 Self Help Groups. These SHGs have used seed money to pool resources and make small loans to help each other pay for education, medical treatment, food, and other small but important needs.