Jeevika Development Society was set up in 1994 to promote livelihoods for youth and women in the area just south of Kolkata city on both sides of Diamond Harbour road. It began with three major activities – microcredit among village women, promotion of the traditional craft, Kantha and various forms of animal husbandry.
Over the next five years, while interacting with village women, it became clear that there needed to be certain intervention to work on organizing the microcredit group members into groups that would promote and fight for women’s rights. Jeevika’s strategy was and continues to be to involve the members into programmes which are unquestionably useful to the community (such as the provision of credit and vocational training and income generation opportunities), combined with women’s rights-related interventions through general awareness programmes combined with the promotion of and support to issue-specific trained women’s groups. The microcredit groups formed a platform for this activity, which over the years metamorphosed into the member-governed democratic rights-based microcredit institution, Swayam Sampurna.