Pudhu Vaazhvu Project Phase 1 "Retrospective" Evaluation - Household Survey Data from Tamil Nadu, 2011

A Retrospective Impact Evaluation of the Tamil Nadu Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation (Pudhu Vaazhvu) Project This is a one period survey with retrospective questions of changes on changes over time, collected to do a "quick" evaluation of PVP Phase 1 project in Tamil Nadu. Collaboration: World Bank Social Observatory Team, with Govt of Tamil Nadu's Pudhu Vaazhvu project. Community based livelihood interventions, which focus directly on increasing income and employment, have become an increasingly important component of large-scale poverty reduction programmes. We evaluate the impact of a participatory livelihoods intervention- the Tamil Nadu Empowerment and Poverty Reduction (Pudhu Vaazhvu) Project (PVP) using propensity score matching methods. The paper explores the impact of PVP on its core goals of empowering women and the rural poor, improving their economic welfare, and facilitating public action. We find significant effects of PVP on reducing the incidence of high cost debt and diversifying livelihoods. We also find evidence of women’s empowerment, and increased political participation. Our data come from a survey implemented by PVP, in collaboration with the World Bank during the period December 2012-March 2013. This survey covered ten districts, out of the 16 total districts where PVP had implemented its interventions over the period 2006-2010. The sample districts were chosen to ensure representation from different geographic regions of PVP’s operationv. Since this survey was designed and implemented after this evaluation was designed, our data was collected from households in matched project and non-project block pairs in these districts. Within each district, the survey covered the matched block pair, and matched VPs within these blocks. As mentioned earlier, 12 to16 VPs that had the closest match on propensity scores were sampled. The lower bound of this range was defined at the number of VPs at which our sample would in effect have picked a census of VPs within the block, that is, we saturate the treatment VPs within a block. In each VP, we sample two villages, at random. In the case of VPs with only one village, our sample covers that single village. In each village, a household questionnaire was administered to a sample of 12 households; and to the elected president of the VP. In order to measure the impact of the project, which targets the disadvantaged poor, the household sample was drawn using stratified random sampling. Stratification