Jamgoria Sevabrata (JS) is an NGO in West Bengal supporting livelihood development.
PALS livelihood planning tools helped Santali tribal women to plan how they would use a grant from Trickle-Up-US to invest in and increase income from different livestock.
Most of the Santali women Jamgoria Sevabrata work with spoke little Bengali while most of the paid staff were Bengali men who did not speak Santali. The staff said that PALS picture diagram tools enabled them to really communicate with the women for the first time.
Jamgoria Sevabrata staff also drew their own visions and journeys and said they had ‘never felt so liberated’.
Peer learning snowball technique
A key innovation was the peer learning snowball technique so that larger numbers of women could come together and learn to draw in a shorter time.
Most of the women had not held a pen before and could not read and write at all. Facilitation followed a snowballing approach for 60 women in relays of 20. The first relay group were introduced to basic drawing skills and practised for half an hour.
Explain that everyone can draw. All drawings are just different types of lines (straight, curves, wiggly etc) and circles (round, rectangular, squishy, loopy etc). With a bit of thought you can draw anything that way.
Then the first group taught the next relay group basic drawing. That group then taught the third group while the facilitator returned to the first group to do more advanced drawing once everyone was happy. From being very shy and not talking initially, within an hour all the women were confidently laughing, talking and teaching each other.
The women quickly worked out ways of drawing lots of different types of goat – plain ones, stripy ones and foreign ones with bigger horns and needing to be tied with a rope on one leg. Others drew pigs of different types. They used filled dots and circle lines to represent different money to do their income calculations.
The subsequent days then introduced the Trickle Up manual for planning use of their grant. Participants were then followed up later by JS and/or TUP staff to simplify the formats they required for monitoring.
For more recent information and contacts for Jamgoria Sevabrata and Trickle Up see: