Panchvada, Jasdan, Rajkot
From no income of her own to ₹8,000 a month
Shitalben Desani could not work outside the home. She now has two incomes inside it — as a Krishi Sakhi and as an artisan.
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Livelihoods & Empowerment
A skill on its own does not change a household's income. It has to come with a group to belong to, credit to start with, customers to sell to, and enough standing at home to keep the earnings. We work on all four.
The problem
For years, skill training in rural India has been measured by the number of women trained. It is the wrong number. A tailoring certificate in a village with no customers and no working capital produces a certificate, not an income. The national picture makes the same point: rural women's participation in work has risen sharply, but mostly into unpaid work inside the family enterprise. So we build backwards from the sale — who will buy, what it costs to start, and who in the household controls the money afterwards.
- 42.3%
- of rural working women in India are unpaid helpers in household enterprises Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2023-24
- 57.4%
- of self-employed rural women are unpaid family workers — down from 67%, but still the majority Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2023-24
What we do about it
Train for a market that exists
We plug women into local value chains already running — imitation jewellery, tailoring, food production — rather than inventing a new one and hoping buyers appear.
Never train someone alone
Women trained alone tend to stop; women trained as a self-help group keep going, because attendance becomes social. Groups also carry the credit linkage.
Aim at ownership, not employment
A parlour, a tailoring unit, a food business. Small, and it matters because the owner keeps the margin instead of a wage set by someone else.
Where we work
Amreli, Gir Somnath, Rajkot, Junagadh and Bhavnagar. Figures to March 2025.
- Self-help groups
- 240
- Women trained
- 3,000+
- Enterprises running
- 87
- Districts
- 5
What this covers
- Vocational training — tailoring, beauty services, handicrafts, Gruh Udhyog
- Self-help groups and financial linkage
- Digital and financial literacy for rural women
- Dairy and livestock livelihoods
- Household income in remote villages — irrigation, soil and cattle together
- Micro-enterprise and entrepreneurship support
- Youth employability and rural management exposure
What changed
A number on its own is not an outcome. Each one below says what it actually altered, and where it comes from.
1,016
women given imitation-jewellery workstations and toolkits
The work was already being done, on the floor and bent over a low table. A workstation and proper tools raise what a day's piece work earns and take the back pain out of it, which is what decides whether she is still doing it in five years.
SSKK Annual Report 2025-26
₹4L → ₹7L
turnover of the mandap business run by five men from the Junagadh leprosy colony
It secured a ₹2.05 lakh government loan, built ₹13 lakh in assets and fed seven families. The families said the income mattered less than this: the business gave them a place in the local economy that people had to deal with them through.
Sasakawa India Leprosy Foundation programme, 2013-2018
40
women trained by Payalben Malvi, herself a trainee
She shared her own client base so they had work from day one, and lent them her equipment until they could buy their own. One trained woman became forty earning ones without us running a second course.
Better Cotton skill component, Dhokadva
72
women-run enterprises still trading, counted in March 2025
Started since 2022-23 and still going — input centres, tailoring units, beauty parlours. Survival two and three years on is the number that matters, because starting a business is the easy half.
SSKK Better Cotton monthly report, March 2025
1,048
women farm workers trained on their rights at work
810 of them are seasonal, 137 are migrants — the workers least likely to know the minimum wage or be able to insist on it. Training covered equal pay, harassment, sanitation at the workplace and safe pesticide handling.
SSKK Better Cotton monthly report, March 2025
2,300
individuals linked to health and insurance schemes
Every one of them was already eligible and had never claimed. The change is not new money into the village — it is money the village was entitled to and was not getting.
SSKK programme records, to March 2025
How we know — and what we do not
Numbers trained and groups formed are easy to count, which is exactly why the sector over-reports them. What we do not systematically track is income twelve months after training, or how much of the earning a woman still controls a year on. Both are harder and both matter more.
Results so far
- Women trained in trades and financial literacy Cumulative to March 2025
- 3,000+
- Women engaged in livelihood activity Reliance Foundation programme, Rajkot
- 3,400
- Self-help groups supported
- 240
- Women given digital literacy training
- 1,350
- Individuals linked to health and insurance schemes
- 2,300
- New rural enterprises established 87 enterprises running in total
- 44
What comes attached to the training
More than 3,000 women have trained in tailoring, beauty services, handicrafts and Gruh Udhyog. What makes the difference is what comes with it: 240 self-help groups; credit linkage so the first equipment purchase is not funded by a moneylender; 1,350 women trained in digital and financial literacy, because taking a UPI payment and reading a loan statement is now part of the trade; and social security linkage for 2,300 people.
In Rajkot district, 3,400 women are engaged in livelihood activity and 450 in imitation jewellery work.
IADLE — five villages on the Gir Somnath coast
Since April 2025 we have run Integrated Agricultural Development and Livelihood Enhancement (IADLE) with the Azim Premji Foundation, under a three-year grant of ₹2.67 crore to March 2028. The target is the income of 1,100 small, marginal and landless households in Khajudra, Khatrivada, Dudhada, Khan and Simbar, in Una block.
Year one went on the unglamorous foundations. We surveyed all 2,486 households in the five villages — 100% coverage, not a sample — profiling 14,228 people at an average of six to a household. That baseline is what any later claim about income will have to be measured against, and it is the reason we can say now what we will be able to prove later.
The programme works the whole household economy rather than one input: drip irrigation and well recharge for water; gypsum, soil testing, mulching, IPM and INM for soil; coconut and vegetable trellis as new crops; animal health camps and artificial insemination for livestock; and bio-input centres so supplies stay locally available. Cluster committees and lead farmers carry it between visits.
₹77.9 lakh of the ₹1.17 crore released for year one was spent.
No outcomes yet — the first year built the team, the baseline and the systems. One finding is worth stating early: uptake is not automatic. A large share of the farmers offered drip in year one turned it down, most often because their water is too unreliable to justify the investment, or because their share of the cost is out of reach. That is the real constraint, and it has to be answered before any income effect can be claimed.
Dairy
For many households the cow or buffalo is the only asset that generates cash weekly rather than seasonally. We run animal health camps with BAIF through the SSS-AI programme and work on breeding, feed and productivity. Not glamorous, and one of the most reliable ways to raise a rural woman’s income.
The leprosy colonies
Between 2013 and 2018, with the Sasakawa India Leprosy Foundation, we worked with families in the Junagadh and Bhavnagar leprosy colonies — communities shut out of ordinary economic life by stigma. Five young men from Junagadh trained in shamiyana and mandap decoration; five women from Bhavnagar in sewing and ready-made garments.
One person
What the numbers above look like from inside a single household.
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Helping 30,000 farmers cut input costs, repair their soil and stay solvent through bad years.
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Environmental Sustainability & Climate Resilience
Farm ponds, check dams, 1.4 lakh trees and 30 trained disaster-response volunteers — rebuilding the water table and the village's capacity to withstand a bad year.
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Health & Well-being
Screening camps that find cancers early, in villages where women rarely see a specialist.
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