In relation to other sector organizations, positive associations are particularly
strong for women’s organizations in Karnataka, but less so in
Madhya Pradesh, where only staffing improves with an increased number
of linkages and M&E actually deteriorates. This finding raises interesting
questions about the value of federating women’s SHGs—a cornerstone of
much of the work in this sector, which requires more investigation. In the
water and sanitation sector, linkages with other organizations have a positive
association with external coordination and M&E. In the watershed
sector, linkages to other organizations primarily have a negative or indifferent
impact on performance.
Context
Two clusters of variables are used to test the importance of context to organizational
performance. The first cluster, which focuses on the internal environment
of the organization, concerns attributes of member households
and includes household caste, poverty ranking, landholding, gender of
household head, and the respondent’s meeting attendance. The second cluster
focuses on the external environment in which an organization operates
and considers a range of village attributes, the sector in which an organization
is located, and the state in which the study took place.
Internal Environment
Looking first at member characteristics in the women’s development sector
(table 23), backward caste membership associates with better performance
in financing, provisioning, and M&E, and forward caste membership associates
with better provisioning and external coordination. The importance
of caste in the women’s development sector is reinforced by experience in
Karnataka highlighted in box 8.
Caste is not particularly significant in the water supply and sanitation
sector, although a small pro–scheduled caste bias is apparent in relation to
community-based action and information sharing. It is more significant in
watershed, but findings—while not favoring scheduled castes—appear to
be slightly less skewed in favor of high-caste status in this sector than in
the women’s sector.
The poverty status of members does not seem to affect organizational
performance (annex table A14). The exception is in the watershed sector,
in which there is a positive association between capacity building and
poverty rank. The landholding status of members also has little significance
for performance, with the exception of a positive relationship with capacity
building and information sharing in the water supply and sanitation
sector (annex table A15).