October 2013. Field trips were made to Jaipur, as well as to districts where the RRLP program was being actively scaled up during the months of our study: Dausa, Tonk, Alwar and Dungarpur.<sup>18</sup> A series of in-depth individual interviews were conducted with various stakeholders including the facilitators from four organizations, facilitators who were working for the RRLP under direct contracts, women participating in SHGs, and RRLP project staff who were involved in all aspects of the program’s design. At RRLP headquarters, we interviewed the project director, the deputy director, the monitoring and evaluation specialist, the Resource Block coordinator and the Intensive Block coordinator. Within the Intensive Blocks, we interviewed the senior staff of the NGOs who were present in the district offices. Within the Resource Blocks, we interviewed the most senior project officer in the state of Rajasthan, who was in charge of coordinating SERP activities along with the government.<sup>19</sup> Three facilitators at each NGO were randomly selected from project rosters to be privately interviewed. All interviews were conducted in a secluded area, respondents were assured that all information would remain confidential, and they had the opportunity to terminate the interview at any time. The open-ended interviews were subsequently recorded (in audio files), then transcribed and translated.

The insights achieved during the qualitative analysis were then used to design a quantitative survey of facilitators.<sup>20</sup> In May 2014, we interviewed 349 RRLP facilitators from the same four districts studied in the qualitative phase. Within the blocks we aimed to interview _all_ active PRPs in the month of our survey. Interviews were conducted by the Indian Marketing Research Bureau (IMRB) at the RRLP field offices. The study was intentionally designed as a comparison of CRPs from SERP versus local NGOs, (PRADAN, PEDO and federations of SHGs).

In Dungarpur, we interviewed 120 CRPs from PEDO. In the three districts of Dausa, Alwar and Dholpur, we interviewed CRPs from PRADAN as well as local federations. In each of these cases, as an incentive to complete our survey, we provided PRPs a small remuneration (Rs. 100) for travel costs. Despite these efforts however, we were unable to interview approximately 10-15

> 18 We chose the four blocks in our survey because this is where the key organizations were scaling up their efforts at that particular time. Balance tests of these areas suggest that they were similar to each other, and also similar to other RRLP districts of the state. This was checked extensively prior to launching the survey in May 2014.

19 We originally planned to interview the SERP workers back in their home state of Andhra Pradesh, after they returned from deployment. An entire research team at IMRB was hired and trained to make this possible. On the Friday evening before the interviews began, however, we were informed that the senior officials of SERP had decided against conducting the survey. Since the study was already underway, we decided to wait till the next cohort of facilitators arrived in Rajasthan and interview them there. We received permission from the Government of Rajasthan for our study, but given the late hours kept by the facilitators we had to conduct many of our interviews by phone.

20 This was done in a two-step process. In July 2013, the authors and the research team prepared preliminary questions in a structured questionnaire for facilitators with open-ended responses possible for many questions. The interview transcripts were read, analyzed and compiled into a report that was circulated for deliberation within the research team. This was then used to refine and revise the survey questionnaire, which was then translated into Hindi and Telugu by the survey firm. In March 2014, the questionnaire was pretested by the authors on facilitators from SERP as well as PRADAN. Further edits were made prior to training the survey enumerators.

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