By Arun Kumar
Washington, Dec 23 (IANS) The World Bank has approved an IDA credit of $100 million in additional financing for a poverty reduction programme in Andhra Pradesh that has raised incomes of some 10 million rural women since its inception in 2003.

This is the second additional financing for this project and it will help scale up the impressive achievements to date, the Bank announced Tuesday.

The credit is provided by the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s concessionary lending arm, and has 35 years to maturity and a 10-year grace period.

The objectives of the Andhra Pradesh Rural Poverty Reduction Project will remain the same as the original project approved by the World Bank in 2003.

The project is aimed at enabling the rural poor, particularly the poorest of the poor, improve their livelihoods and quality of life.

“This programme has had a remarkable impact on the lives of the rural poor in Andhra Pradesh,” World Bank Country Director for India Roberto Zagha said.

“We have seen incomes increase for close to 90 percent of poor rural households. This additional financing will help improve efficiency and effectiveness of the programme by adopting new technologies and innovative service delivery models for achieving full inclusion of the poor households.”

The project has mobilised some 10 million poor women, or 90 percent of the poor in the project districts, into nearly 850,000 Self Help Groups.

The self-managed institutions of the poor have collective savings of $805 million, and leveraged commercial bank linkages of $4.3 billion. This means that every $1 invested by the project has leveraged $12 from the commercial banks.

Meanwhile, the project’s community managed sustainable agriculture programme has led to aggregate annual cost savings of $69.5 million and the employment generation programme has created 185,748 jobs for the rural youth.

“This additional financing will help build capacity of community institutions to enable them to deal more effectively with the commercial banks, the market institutions, public sector departments, and developing new partnerships with the cooperatives and the private sector,” World Bank Lead Rural Development Specialist and project team leader Parmesh Shah said.

“We expect this approach to bring even higher returns on the investments in the institutional platform of the poor already made. This phase will also work towards achieving significant decrease in malnutrition and maternal mortality for the rural poor.”