Climate resilience is not always a solar panel or a drought-resistant crop. Sometimes it is a concrete floor, lifted 30 centimetres.
When the floods came
Hansaben Budhabhai Prajapati runs a retail shop in Viramgam, a town in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad district. She sells imitation jewellery and household items — her main customers are the women of the neighbourhood, though stocking household goods brings in men too. The business turns close to ₹60,000 a month. It works. But it nearly did not.
Her shop sits on low-lying ground. A few years ago, heavy flooding inundated the area. She lost around ₹4,000 in stock. Whatever the water did not take had to be scrapped as waste. The business stalled.
With funding from Pahal Financial Services, her microfinance institution, Hansaben raised the shop floor. The water now runs past, not through. She has not lost stock to flooding since.
Resilience built before the disaster
The physical fix mattered. But Pahal had already helped Hansaben build a less visible layer of resilience.
Early in her relationship with Pahal — now 14 years long — loan officers ran training sessions on financial management. The core message was straightforward: save a portion of income before you need it. She took that advice. When the floods came, she had a buffer. The combination of savings and access to credit meant the business could absorb the shock and recover.
“By the grace of God and help from Pahal we really don’t have any challenges right now.”
That is not passivity. It is the outcome of a decade of deliberate financial behaviour, reinforced by an institution that stayed close enough to matter.
What the Oxfam Novib Fund makes possible
Pahal is part of the Triple Jump-managed Oxfam Novib Fund (ONF) — a €44 million fund built around a single thesis: that climate change is not a future risk for low-income communities, it is a present one. The fund backs microfinance institutions that serve markets most investors avoid — rural communities, small-scale agricultural producers, and women borrowers — and that have the operational depth to support clients through climate shocks, not just before them.
Pahal fits that profile precisely. Its client base is predominantly women. Its reach extends into semi-urban and rural Gujarat. Its lending is paired with training that builds financial literacy alongside credit access. When flooding hit Viramgam, Pahal had the tools and the relationship to respond.
The compound effect of one loan
Hansaben’s climate resilience story is inseparable from the longer arc of what Pahal’s support has made possible. Her first loan, taken 14 years ago, did not go to her shop. It went to her daughter — who used it to start a tailoring business.
Subsequent loan cycles funded additional sewing machines. At peak, the family ran four machines. When her eldest daughter married, the family sold the machines and reinvested. Her husband put the proceeds into a lathe machine for his workshop. Today, that workshop runs three machines.
“What began as a small loan from Pahal has today flourished into two successful businesses and three settled lives.”
Hansaben Budhabhai Prajapati — Pahal Financial Services client, Viramgam, Gujarat, India
Why this matters beyond one family
Inclusive finance and climate resilience are not separate agendas. Families like Hansaben’s face compounding risks — economic, environmental, social — that interact in ways no single intervention addresses. What changes the equation is an institution that stays, that trains, that lends again when the first loan works, and that has the capital to keep doing so even as climate shocks become more frequent.
The Oxfam Novib Fund exists to be that capital. Through institutions like Pahal, it reaches the people most exposed to climate risk — and least served by conventional finance. Together, the goal is straightforward: foster climate resilience and female leadership, one small business at a time.
