MANILA, Philippines - With his parents sacrificing their only piece of land so he could attend university and his mother being cheated by moneylenders out of the little that she had, Kulandei Francis of India learned about poverty early in life.
Motivated by his personal experiences, Francis, a recipient of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, vowed to do his share to lift people out of poverty.
Francis initially joined the Fathers of the Holy Cross in 1970.
He found some fulfillment in doing volunteer work among people struck by famine or displaced by war during his novitiate, but he had a life-changing experience when he went to live in Natrampalayam, a remote and impoverished part of Krishnagiri district.
This experience led him to give up being a priest and devote himself wholly to social work.
In 1979, he began the Integrated Village Development Project (IVDP) in Krishnagiri, starting out with small projects like conducting a night school by the light of gas lamps and setting up a first-aid center.
In partnership with development organizations, he also undertook a micro-watershed program which has built 331 mostly small check dams in a span of 22 years.
But Francis wanted to do more – something which he said “could be sustained for the long term, even without external assistance.”
The breakthrough came in 1989 when IVDP began organizing women’s self-help groups (SHGs).
These savings-and-credit groups have grown into an all-women movement of 8,231 SHGs with 153,990 members and a total savings of $40 million, a cumulative loan portfolio equivalent to $435 million, and a reserve fund of $8.9 million.
The micro-savings and credit program for women has fueled successful village programs in health and sanitation, housing, livelihood and children’s education, including scholarships, performance-based incentives for students and schools, a primary school for tribal children and a computer training academy that has, to date, trained some 5,000 children.