Building resilience
Janani Dham focuses on building resilient livelihoods particularly by supporting communities to adapt, and to be prepared for any emergencies that may threaten their livelihoods and well-being in the future. Janani Dham resilience framework integrates livelihoods, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation approaches under a single assessment framework.
This includes enhancing employability, leadership skills and capacities to take multiple ways of income to diversity risks, increasing awareness about public schemes and climate information and improving access to markets and information. Second, by building assets such as enabling women to own and manage community based microfinancing of productive assets such as machinery, livestock and land, and rehabilitating degraded natural resources. Third, by collectivization where women are encouraged to practice group-based savings to finance their livelihood and demand land and forest rights. This is followed by developing participatory value chains, a method that helps enhance women’s capacities to take up new and non-traditional roles in agricultural and forestry value chains. The fifth approach is to engage with men and other influential actors to sensitize them on the role of women and the issues they face in practicing resilient livelihoods.
These approaches that cover both household and community in terms of helping build resilient livelihoods are integrated within nine of Janani Dham's livelihood projects. One of them is Pathways, a program that seeks to better the lives of poor women farmers by increasing their opportunities while addressing their social, economic and environmental constraints in agriculture. During 2015-16, the program resulted in 13,000 poor households having additional economic opportunities and income, improving their access to food and household food-security, a 27% increase in paddy yields and 31% increase in diverse food groups at household levels. The program also resulted in more than three times as many women accessing agricultural extension as compared to the baseline period and nearly all women expressing satisfaction with extension services.