WOMEN'S SELF-HELP GROUPS IN INDIA - PROSPECT AND RETROSPECT
Sunvistas
Overview
The past two decades have demonstrated the growing role of SHGs in advocating women’s empowerment Long before the Beijing Platform for Action identified access to credit as a critical contributor to women’s economic empowerment, micro-credit – defined as “credit for the poor without a collateral” – was established as a mainstream development intervention. The World Bank has set a target of reaching 100 million of the world’s poorest people with micro-credit by 2005, and has placed micro-credit at the center of its global strategy for poverty alleviation. SHGs Abroad: Typically underpinning the evolution of women’s SHGs the world over is a pronounced “voluntary” element”.
Micro-Credit Empowers: In most developing countries, where poverty is endemic, the emergence of women’s SHGs is traceable more to a pervading need to combat poverty to deliberate policy interventions. Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, one of the micro-credit pioneers, serves 2.4 million borrowers among the poorest groups, of which 2.28 million, or 95 percent, are reported to be women. Some 90 percent of the Country Women's Association of Nigeria's 1,26,000 poorest borrowers are women, while 65 percent of the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Union's 4,00,000 poorest clients are women. Among other notable efforts are Rating Credit Unions in Guatemala; "Papa" and "Mama" Cards in Zaire; Mobile Banks in Western Africa; FlashCash - a form of finance in Cameroon; Women's Bank in Sri Lanka; production credit for rural women of Nepal; and Money Shops in Philippines, and more recently “Courier Services on Bi-Cycles” back home in Tamil Nadu. Prominent among the internationally recognized SHG success stories is the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh pioneered by Mohammad Yunus, who started it with an experimental project in Chittagong in 1983. Later on, several NGOs had taken up micro-credit as a central strategy. Fuelled by the World Bank-sponsored micro-credit summits, the potency of micro-credit has grown to a point where it is being hailed as the ultimate answer to poverty and underdevelopment. To its proponents, micro-credit has everything – participation, flexibility, community ownership and, best of all, women’s empowerment. To its critics, it is a Band-Aid solution to poverty, an easy way of side-stepping structural issues and making the poor responsible for finding solutions to their own problems Poverty is a multi-faceted problem, involving finance, food supply, housing, infrastructure, education, health & hygiene, war, politics, self-regard and more. Poverty thus has a ”domino effect” as a women’s issue.
“There can be no one single solution to poverty” is the major conclusion emerging from a Survey (April 2003) prepared by the Sub-Committee for Eradication of Poverty of the NGO Committee for Social Development for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). Many issues must be addressed and a variety of approaches made to eradicate poverty among the peoples of the world. An attempt has been made in this Paper to explore the problems of women SHGs in India in the contemporary socio-politico-economic milieu in which they operate, and strategize solutions for sustaining such groups.
WOMEN SELF HELP GROUPS IN INDIA
"Self-help” and “micro-credit” connote a magic mantra in gender empowerment discourse today. Almost every non-Governmental Organization (NGO) worth the name in India has a micro-credit tie-up where major donors including national financial institutions are involved. Woman power in India has primed Self Help Groups (SHGs) as effective platforms for economic and political empowerment, bringing womenfolk together to protect their legitimate rights as well as fight for social causes. Formed from time to time over the past two decades by NGOs, these groups draw support from national schemes such as the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh, the Indira Mahila Yojana and other poverty alleviation programs, or from bilateral and multilateral donors including the UN Agencies and the World Bank. In certain states, -- notably Andhra Pradesh, women’s SHGs, -- majority of them initiated under the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) program --, are now the vehicle of choice for the implementation of all major government programs at the village level.
Success Stories: There are several success stories of SHGs enabling women’s economic empowerment in India. Out of an estimated 70,000 women SHGs in the country, a total of 35,000 women SHGs are reported to have credit linkages with banks through micro-credit schemes. Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, “Lijjat” of Shri Gruha Mahila Udyog in the early 1970s, Annapurna Mahila Mandal and the Working Women’s Forum in the 1980s, demonstrated the feasibility of small loans to support miniscule ventures set up by womenfolk from weaker/ marginalized sections of the society. Syndicate Bank's Pigmy Deposit Scheme corporate involvement in providing credit linkages so vital for success in this noble endeavor of women’s upliftment through SHGs. The Development Support team working in Pune supports more than eighty SHGs - almost 2,000 women. Yet their success can be measured, not by the money saved and lent, but by the family and community problems shared and tackled, and the confidence gained through self-help mechanisms.
Experiential Learning from Women’s SHGs
(a)-SHGs serve as effective platforms for enhancing the community stature of women in poverty and priming socio-political recognition for them at the grass-roots level.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Rome is an active player in promoting SHGs in developing countries. Experience under IFAD-supported projects in South Asia has shown that empowerment of women stems not only from the financial aspects of group operations, but also from:
• the community aspect collectively ensconcing SHG members as a cohesive social force affording them a socio-political status
• the social moorings of the SHG as a forum for discussing shared problems; and
• the political power for implementing joint action.
(b)-Access to cash and direct dealings with banks confer an overall societal strength, a sense of self-confidence and self-reliance spurred by a feeling of self-worth amongst womenfolk. Inasmuch as self-worth enhances social empowerment, it simultaneously triggers a craving for participation and involvement in socio-political processes at the grass roots community level.
An example of this type of experience was evident in IFAD-supported Maharashtra Rural Credit Project. In the village of Garade in Maharashtra, women's groups have played an important role in banning the sale and consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco. Before the ban, the bulk of the meager family incomes, which should have gone towards meeting necessities like food, shelter and clothing, were instead being spent on alcohol and tobacco. When legal measures did not work, women's SHGs organized several morchas (sit-ins) at the local liquor stores and forced them to close down. The SHGs pressed for ban on sale of gutka (chewing tobacco) sold in front of the local primary and secondary schools in their village; borrowed money to buy up and burn the village's entire stock of chewing tobacco. Thus participation in resolving community social problems increases a sense of social responsibility among rural womenfolk and gives them required initiative and courage to take a proactive leadership role on community issues. Such outcomes represent a positive step toward building small pockets of “social capital”, raising womenfolk from being a mere targeting mechanism in development projects, which might otherwise tend to be dissipative.
(c)-Sustaining Marginalized Women’s Participation in SHGs is Problematic, But Sensitizing and Empowering them into Community Leadership Roles is Challenging
Women under the IFAD-supported Tamil Nadu Women's Development Project discovered that their membership in the group increased their self-esteem and helped them deal with intra-family injustices and inequities, and even with domestic violence. The groups also became a problem-solving forum where women could discuss and act on common problems. Developing a cadre of women leaders and sensitizing people’s organisations are the need of the day.
(d)-SEWA Bank is Best Practice Institution of International Repute: Internationally, the SEWA Bank is an inspiration for Women’s World Banking (WWB)
The Chairperson of SEWA Bank, Ms Ela Bhatt, is also the Chair Person of this International organization. The bank has contributed directly in achieving, to some extent, the larger SEWA members have their own hand-carts, sewing machines, looms and tools of carpentry and black-smithy to work with. Many of them have upgraded their skills and expanded their businesses. For example, vegetable vendors who used to sell their products with baskets on their heads and now have their own little street-corner shops with a municipal license. The SEWA Bank, innovative in many ways --organizationally, institutionally, financially with important contribution in encouraging women to participate fully in all phases of banking, lending and saving activities, has targeted its efforts not just towards the "symptoms" of homelessness or poverty alleviation, but also on structural causes, including long-term capacity-building of the poor women and their institutions.
(e)-SHGs in Andhra Pradesh (AP) – A Major Government Initiative: Women’s empowerment is one of the prime strategies adopted by the AP Government The socio-economic dimension of self-help through savings is emphasized by women SHGs in AP, where it has caught on as a mass movement.
AP, the leader in Women SHGs: With about 3.95 lakh SHGs covering nearly 53.6 lakh poor women, AP alone has about half the SHGs existing in the country. The SHGs in AP, popularly known as Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) groups, are supported by revolving funds instituted by AP government for the purpose.
(e)-Corporate Involvement: Convergence of quite a few Government programs, both at the Central and State levels, is increasingly getting reflected in the nascent, up coming innovative SHGs tapping the goodwill of FMCG corporates in India.
Christened as “Project Shakti”, consumer giant Hindustan Liver Ltd (HLL)’s new distribution model is changing the lives of AP’s rural womenfolk, co-terminus as it is with the company’s changing rural profile. Piloted in Nalgonda district in 2001, Project Shakti covers over 5,000 villages in 52 districts in AP, Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. With over 1,000 women entrepreneurs (‘Shaktiammas’) involved in the project, the AP Govt has channeled the HLL tie-up through DWCRA networks set up under the Dept of Women Empowerment and Self-Employment.
SHGs as Platforms for Political Mainstreaming
Before discussing the socio-economic role of SHGs in India, it is necessary to recognize that an important desideratum for women’s empowerment is their “political mainstreaming”, a process that is interwoven with the economic dimension. Whereas the United Nations has made rapid strides in progressing with gender mainstreaming. India’s efforts in this regard are woefully inadequate. This is notwithstanding the fact that a number of SHGs have also adopted political empowerment and institutionalization of women’s representation in governance such as people’s organisations (Ayojan Samitis, federations, the Indian parliament, legislative and judiciary, Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha as well as the Panchayati Raj institutions) so that they may be able to exert direct influence on governance. During on going consultations on gender issues involving the UN system as a whole, women leaders have requested the UN System in India to support women in their effort to introduce the 81st Amendment into the Indian Constitution to allow reservation of one-third of all parliamentary seats for women.
SHG Best Practices
Briefly outlined below are select NGO-SHG organizations currently adopting best practices, a few culled out from supra-national sources (*) like the World Bank’s PovertyNet.org/ UNIFEM, UNDP, IFAD etc:
(a)-Empowering Rural Producer Organizations: World Bank Group's Strategic Framework identifies “empowering poor people to participate in development and investing in them” as one of the key pillars underpinning the World Bank's efforts to reduce poverty. A major thrust of World Bank’s Rural Development Strategy is "integrating the needs of the rural poor in national policy dialogues", a process which must include a broad base of stakeholders, including rural producer organizations, civil society and Rural Development Ministries.
(b)-Rural Producer Organizations (RPOs) contribute to food security, making marketable goods available. They also participate in rural development policy making, in natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. They preserve local cultural heritage, building profitable businesses on traditional know-how. The percentage of Bank funded agricultural projects that include capacity building for rural organizations has increased from 26% in 1997 to 62 % in 2001. The Bank is determined to keep up the effort because seventy-five percent (75%) of the world's poor live in rural areas and agriculture or agriculture-related activities are their primary income source. The World Bank website aims to share information and experience among people and institutions committed to building the capacity of Rural Producer Organizations as key economic stakeholders in the fight to reduce rural poverty.
(c)-Sambhav-a social service organization in Madhya Pradesh has started two women SHGs--the Sahariya Jan Andolan (SJA), which has 8,414 members, and Mahila Kranti Manch (MKM) with 5,000 members. Working mainly for infusing a sense of solidarity to address issues affecting women’s lives and resources, Sambhav seeks to press for their involvement in political decision making at grass-roots level such as securing their rightful place in Panchayat Raj institutions, influencing legislators and official machinery, resisting exploitation and abuse etc.. SJA and MKMSahariya members no longer vote for a single party, their franchise is divided and strategic. That political leadership is emerging from such processes is reflected in the fact that critical decisions on the power game and political affiliations of rival groups are preceded by Intensive Analyses of the pros and cons of a wide spectrum of political issues at the grass-roots level. On the subject of women daring to contest elections even in the face of threats and poverty, although apparently in the face of violence and terror, they are forced to adopt a quiet and detached facade.
(d)-Swayamsiddha - A socio-economic empowerment scheme for women to live with dignity and self-reliance, stresses on access to micro-credit and envisages block and Panchayat-level participation by women, cutting across all regional, economic and social groups. The aim is to guide women in understanding the social, economic and political issues; educate them on their status, rights and privileges; and generate awareness on nutrition, health, hygiene and environment.
(e)-International Center for Entrepreneurship and Career Development (ICECD), a voluntary non-government organization formed in 1986 to facilitate economic empowerment of women through micro / small enterprise ownership, works with business communities, government departments and development agencies across Asia, Africa, Pacific and Caribbean countries. They have trained over 10,000 women trainers directly, who in turn have developed the capacity of thousands of personnel in other organizations. In recent years, ICECD is foraying into building up leadership and vision among womenfolk through a variety of strategies. ICECD’s Political Empowerment Program advocacy comprises:
(i)-Awareness building and advocacy for women’s rights and opportunities
(ii)-Developing strategies for political empowerment of women in local governance in rural areas
(iii)-Capacity building enhancing women’ functional skills for resource mobilization, planning and networking.
(iv)-Creating a Counseling Cell for both: access to information and support to women leaders.
(*)-Also refer Annexure-A for excerpts from the UN Sub-Committee Report on NGO Best Practices, April 2003
(f)-Two SHG projects “Community Aid abroad” and “Development Support Team” are part of a program of social, economic and political empowerment of women in Maharashtra and the neighboring states. The program also includes, inter alia, lobbying for legal and economic policy changes at the state and national levels. Stree Aadhar Kendra, another SHG, is part of a government committee that came up with one of the most progressive of state level gender policies in India, viz., “title to all newly-purchased property must be jointly held by husband and wife”.
Community Aid Abroad has extended its South Asia program with assistance from Aus AID, together with Oxfam in Great Britain. The Netherlands Credit programs are reportedly far from successful in achieving the desired socio-economic change. A recent five-year review of their South Asia programs has observed that in some regions women involved in credit activities were not moving on to broader issues; and loan activities had become ends in themselves. As such the program is considering literacy classes as an alternative way of involving women in political discussion, enkindling thereby a hope for political inclusion and participation that has hitherto eluded and alienated them.
Problems Encountered by Women SHGs in India
Understanding Poverty: Understanding poverty is basic to identifying target groups most vulnerable to poverty that SHGs ought to be aiming at. Research based on secondary sources and the Internet reveals variegated problems -- social, economic and political --, commonly encountered by women SHGs in India, as discussed below:
Identification and Addressing Root Causes of Poverty: There is a great deal of discussion in academic literature on how to identify the poor, and how efficiently to reach them. Poverty was initially defined as an income concept, but in recent years it is also being seen as a vulnerability concept. Using the “income” concept, poverty removal is seen as happening through raising income levels; while as per “vulnerability” concept, poverty removal is seen as a process of protecting women from both economic and social vulnerability. Both approaches are valuable and meaningful. The income approach tends to lead more to “income-generation’ programs, the vulnerability approach in contrast leads to more social programs such as education and health provision.
Socio-Economic Factors
Structural Issues: The first structural issue is the place of the poor in the society. Are all Indians below the poverty line (BPL) only to be considered as poor ? Or are there some poor above the poverty line (APL). What is the rationale if non-income criteria were also considered? Barriers to entry into labor and product markets, for example, are closely connected in India with gender, caste and class. Further, social needs such as health, child-care, education and housing --, are all linked to economic capabilities as well as to provision of social security by markets and the State. With reforms getting under way in India for over ten years now, market and State structures have learnt to measure levels of poverty and well being with greater precision, with the result that the inter-related nature of these structures is beginning to assist Governments in better understanding of poverty. Thanks to technology, a more structured approach to poverty reduction in respect of modern day rural India is within the realm of feasible solutions..
The Poor Need Gainful, Guaranteed Employment: Women are no longer regarded as mere “deprived persons”, but also reckoned for their economic potential in what Alvin Toffler calls “Prosumers”, meaning simultaneously producers, workers and consumers in their own myriad ways. They wish to earn their living in dignity, not depend on doles or outside support. Women crave for the security afforded by employment through which they can earn enough in cash and kind. In other words, they need guaranteed employment. Whereas in the formal sector, employment generates through creation of jobs by firms, -- such employment is generally regular, full time, protected employment, with a clear employer-employee relationship --, in the informal sector there are no ‘jobs’ as such, they ought to be minimal given the tiny nature of the businesses that one finds dotted in this sector.
Creating employment is no longer a matter of creating ‘jobs’, but of strengthening workers and producers to overcome barriers and enter markets where they would be competitive. Labor, product and financial markets need to be survailled by rule-based institutions, which in turn would link them with larger markets. Although Governments have been serious with liberalization of markets, the process has been slow. It has so far reached only the formal sector, and not yet the informal (unorganized, tiny) sector where the vast majority have remained straitjacketed by archaic, non-inclusive policies.
Paucity of Studies with Gender SHGs and Cost-Benefit Perspective: India’s women’s organisations are concerned about the manner in which micro-credit is being promoted as a panacea for poverty alleviation. It was pointed out that "success", for both Government and the NGOs is gauged by the amount of money saved, size and frequency of loans and rate of loan repayment, rather than by the extent to which the economic exploitation of women has been reduced. There are practically no rigorous studies of changes in the income and expenditure patterns of members of SHG’s before and after they take up economic activities using micro-credit. Similarly, there are very few studies that explore the extent to which micro-finance programs have been able to facilitate non-economic dimensions of empowerment for the women members of SHGs such as inclusion and participation in political decisions impacting their lives.
Globalization, Competition Policy versus Subsidies: Micro-credit and micro-enterprise projects, funded by large by multilateral and bilateral donors, provide safety nets for women as part of their efforts to keep a "human face" consistent with the globalization philosophy. Experience shows that support in the form of subsidies on raw materials and marketing assistance to traditional artisanal cooperative SHGs is far from organized be it from Government or from a well-connected NGO. With government policies favoring entry of multinationals into the rural market in India, the extent to which SHGs can provide a viable base for rural entrepreneurship has come under scrutiny. Grassroots women SHGs also express concern about the tendency of donors to piggyback their micro-finance interventions on already existing groups, thus reducing costs and co-opting the work of smaller integrated programs. In their eagerness to promote financially viable and minimalist interventions, donors are glossing over contradictions emerging in micro-finance programs. Often empowerment got a short shrift because of untenable assumptions made by policy makers.
Socio-Political Factors
Capacity-Building ensures Empowerment: While the focus of women’s SHGs is increasingly getting limited to savings and credit support, women’s political empowerment endeavors in India are relegated to back burner due to excessive wieghtage accorded to economic upliftment issues. Rather than fuzzy, ivory tower policy interventions, Governments should do well to take on the more fundamental problem of SHG Capacity Building. Special focus is required to build skill sets to enable SHGs focus on strengthening their vision to deal with the effects of policy interventions on socio-economic and political issues. Inducting the SHGs gradually into political processes as they gain experience follows as a corollary. What SHGs need is hand-holding, viz., (a)-Management training to get at an enhanced learning curve and benefit from own as well as peer SHG experience, and (b)-Market prognoses to internalize and enmesh own priorities in line with the village level needs. Surveys indicate that simply providing credit to poor women may not be enough to enable them take care of their living, particularly if men in their families try to take charge of loans. Without a holistic approach, credit programs can not be successful in achieving the desired socio-economic ends. A recent review of Community Aid Abroad - South Asia program cited above is a case in point.
Political Empowerment: Political empowerment of women, organized under thrift movement, appears to be miles away. The Kurnool (AP) experience, wherein women’s SHGs have been organized under the UNDP since 1995 in seven Mandals of the district, illustrates this point. The SHG women, who entered the electoral fray in the 2001 local body elections in Kurnool, tasted the bitterness of fighting an election battle. Out of five posts of Sarpanches and forty ward members contested, only seven posts could be secured by SHG women in Orvakal mandal. The groups thereafter realized that only political parties could fight electoral battles, not the SHGs that came into being for fighting poverty. The village-level political outfits exerted pressure on them to retire from the contest. As the women remained adamant, the leaders, affiliated to major parties, tried to bring pressure on the contestants through their kin. In one case, a son threatened to commit suicide, in another, a husband threatened to divorce wife if she did not retire, in yet another case brothers issued a threat to their widow-sister to leave home if she wanted to remain in the contest. Such response from women SHGs, having become a controversy, was taken to the notice of the State Election Commission. The Commission, after due hearing, had come out strongly in support of the women SHGs. However, the critics of women SHGs contended that, being sponsored by Government, the SHGs should not have entered the electoral battle. Though not emerged yet as a strong political force, the local political leadership is suspicious about the intentions of the women SHGs in the political arena.
NGOs are important, but as a rule defy Accountability: NGOs have flourished only in closed loop communities where their work is appreciated, elsewhere they are not as much present as is often believed. While there are regional differences, NGOs are by and large plagued by the same problems as the state: the poor feel they are excluded from the NGOs decision arena. Lack of accountability apart, NGOs’ inept handling of gender sensitivity in respect of obstacles such as caste discrimination, social, religious taboos adversely impact their image.
In a series of studies carried out by UNDP and the South Asian Poverty Alleviation Program in Andhra Pradesh last year, three debates --centering on (a)-micro credit; (b)-social capital and feminization of poverty; and (c)-women and empowerment -- were prominent:
(a) The first debate was on the potential and limitations of micro-credit for women’s empowerment, with one section arguing for micro-credit as a panacea for poverty reduction and empowerment, and another section negating it saying that women’s labor and time gets exploited through such programs, without any tangible gains.
(b) The second debate was on the potential and limitations of "social capital". One group believes that strengthening social capital-bonding, bridging and linking can help people to come out of poverty and empower themselves, while another group posits that unless "physical capital" and "financial capital" are strengthened, poverty reduction and women’s empowerment will be distant goals.
(c) The third debate devolved on whether focus on gender and poverty distracts attention from the political agenda of women’s empowerment. One section holds that poverty is feminized, and that donors and development agencies should focus on the inter linkages between “gender, women and poverty”. The other position is that evidence on feminization of poverty is weak, and conflating gender issues with poverty, takes attention away from the broader agenda of women’s empowerment.
Strategies / Solutions for Promoting Sustainable Women SHGs
In light of the above analysis, it is imperative that strategies for sustaining women SHGs lay considerable emphasis on concerted joint action entailing continual struggle to steer development through their own organisations. The whole process essentially is one of self-empowerment (which is important, being a Gandhian edict at that, in the context of a polity at the grass-roots community level). What is needed is an Integrated Approach that identifies the needs of womenfolk from the poor and marginalized sections to reach a state of full employment status:
(i)-Women need capital formation at the household level through access to financial services (savings, credit, insurance) to build up and create assets of their own (land, house, work shed, equipment, cattle, bank balance). Asset ownership is the surest weapon to fight vulnerability to poverty;
(ii)-Capacity building to support themselves in a competitive market: access to market, infrastructure, technology, information, education, knowledge and relevant skills (eg., accountancy, management, planning, designing etc.);
(iii)-Social security-a modicum of healthcare, child-care, shelter and relief, - to insure themselves against the contingency of major health risks they and their families may face;
(iv)-Collective, organized strength (through their associations) to be able to actively participate at various levels in the planning, implementation and monitoring processes of the programs meant for them, and also in all matters of socio-political importance impacting their lives.
Gender Mainstreaming Initiatives
Designing Empowerment Strategies: Four key elements should feature in the design of empowerment strategies: (a)-Access to Information; (b)-Inclusion and Participation; (c)-Accountability; and (d)-Local Organizational Capacity. Interwoven alongside the application of these four elements are local and national governance, access to justice and pro-poor market development. For example, Judicial Reform Project (Ecuador) supports creation of legal aid clinics to help the poor and indigenous women exercise their legal rights; People’s Voice Program (Ukraine) demonstrates how greater citizen participation at the municipal level can lead to better service delivery and higher public satisfaction. While many examples of empowerment do exist, Steven Jorgensen, World Bank’s Social Development Director said the challenge now is to scale up and “move the empowerment agenda from the micro to a macro level.” Toward this end, the UN and the World Bank are seized with the task of forging partnerships across related networks, as also with constituting a thematic group on empowerment to seriously address the issues thereof. Regarding political empowerment one can cite the activities /programs of the Sahariya Jan Andolan and Mahila Kranti Morcha in MP that can be replicated elsewhere:
(a)-Organize electorate education activities.
(b)-Motivate the community to participate in the election and vote casting activities
(c)-Organize group dialogues with the contestants
(d)-Prepare an agenda of local issues and problems distribute it among the media and political groups
(e)-Generate mass awareness and lobby through the use of loudspeakers for increased participation of communities in electoral process.
(f)-Highlight draught relief work, atrocities on women, land alienation, displacement, PDS and drinking water issues
Coordination with UN System: The UN system in India during the past few years, under the leadership of UNIFEM, has been particularly active first, in preparing for Beijing and subsequently contributing to implementation of the plan of action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) and the Indian National Program for Women. In 1997, the Inter-Agency Working Group on Gender and Development continued to coordinate UN system efforts to reflect gender issues in macro-policies and the allocation of resources consistent with India’s National Policy for the Empowerment of Women of 1996 and the development agenda of the UN system in India. In mid 1997, the Inter-Agency Working Group has formally linked up with the Government of India, who deputed an official as a permanent member of the group.
In support of the avowed Government of India agenda of reservation of one-third of seats in executive legislative bodies across the nation, UNIFEM started a project in media advocacy and strategic lobbying. Mention should be made here of a UN system collaboration with Women’s Political Watch, an American NGO, to convene an international conference on women and governance. The core consideration here was to express UN system’s concern for women empowerment and opportunities for their active participation in local self-governance paving the way for sustainable holistic development. Consultations with the UNIFEM have facilitated a dialogue between grass-roots women, the Government, banks and other credit dispensing institutions, and resulted in the birth of a registered.
National Collective for Micro-credit Movement comprising some 1,500 women SHGs and grassroots NGOs as the stakeholders. One of the most important tasks for advocates of self-help programs must therefore be dissemination of knowledge and sharing of members’ self-help experience.
Self-Help and SHG Integrity
• One of the tasks is to ensure that what is genuine and authentic in the ideology of self-help is developed and enhanced independent of the dictates of government-directed management. (Entails structuring and activating coalitions of relevant stakeholders; to facilitate working independently regardless of pushing and prodding by funding sources; remaining focused on missions and goals, setting out and implementing own business plans);
• Ensuring that self-help does not become a government healthcare facility; but that it remains accessible as an opportunity chosen by a deliberate purpose, vision and commitment;
• Public funding of self-help work may be exploited by the authorities to justify budget cut backs on other essential public services. SHG community must be wary of these ploys and not be swayed by exploitation.
• When specific areas of self-help receive public funding, money can be used to employ personnel as and when necessary to coordinate the work.
• Public funding should contribute to the systematic gathering of knowledge and its dissemination. A serious educational challenge confronting this work is to make self-help accessible to as many as possible.
• Funding ensures that self-help becomes known more widely and is accessible to a wider public by making funds available to publish informational and promotional materials.
• Self-help increases the self-helper's quality of life and improves his or her ability to cope with adversity
Working with self-help can play a significant role in women’s motivational and behavioral paradigm whilst facing winds of change. The next step would be advocacy for others in need of self-help, which requires a collective vision and entails the need for a proper sustainability framework for women SHGs, which, cast in a multi-dimensional matrix of inter-relationships, will enable us comprehend its scope and importance (See Annexure for SHG best practices).
Empowerment
"Empowerment" puts individuals at the center of development and in a position where they can improve their social and economic situation in society. Empowerment implies dealing with the distribution of power within a society. The purpose is to strengthen disadvantaged groups and to prepare them to a more important share of power. Issues at stake are human rights, awareness, self-confidence and the ability to represent and defend the group or personal interests against stronger groups. But empowerment has also to do with our own attitudes and values. In fact they at least partially influence our development philosophy and our motivation. Generally speaking, it is difficult to promote empowerment if we are not ready to discuss our own value systems. Empowerment may lead to social and political conflicts: whether we accept the risks of such conflicts needs to be appreciated on a case by case basis, usually a basic poser in policy making.
Desiderata for Implementation
• The Institutional Policy of Intercooperation: A clear will to make out of empowerment an institutional goal and to implement such a strategy operationally.
• A Target Group Approach: Disadvantaged groups within a society, in particular small farmers and women are the primary focus.
• Mobilization and Organization: The target groups have to be supported in the mobilization of their own forces, in their organizational capability, their ability to express their interests and defend these towards other interest groups.
• Networking: Local organizations to be strengthened through exchange with other groups, the promotion of regional networks and service organizations.
• Access to Resources: The target groups need access to economic resources and participation in decisions on the use and control of such resources.
• Sustainable Results: Empowerment strategies have to be conceived in such a way that sustainable results are possible. This means that responsibility for execution and management lies from the beginning with the target groups and their partner institutions. Organizational capacity and institution building efforts have to be designed in such a way that sustainability can be reached within a defined deadline without further donor/outside support.
Necessary Complementary Activities
• Comprehensive socio-economic analysis: Gaining insight and knowledge of power relationships, the interests involved and the values of the participants and groups concerned is a prerequisite for defining the support strategy for an empowering process.
• Target Groups Involvement: The target groups and/or their representatives have to be involved in all steps of the co- operation program.
• Policy Dialogue: The mobilization of target groups should lead to increased negotiation power and advocacy in the policy dialogue with other interest groups in society and state.
• Capacity Building: Access and creation of information, education and training strengthen the ability to define one's own interests and defend them. This calls usually for specific support programs.
• Economic Activities: Political empowerment entails a general improvement of living conditions; access to employment, economic activities. Access to credit and markets are therefore indispensable instruments.
Partners for Empowerment
• The State as a Guarantor for the necessary Basic Conditions: Even though the unequal distribution of power and resources and unfavorable basic conditions are often the reasons for putting empowerment on the international co-operation agenda, an appropriate legislation and a law enforcement power are preconditions for empowering the disadvantaged groups of society. Therefore a strong state, able to create a conducive environment for empowerment, is important. Intercooperation thinks that part of a successful empowerment strategy is to negotiate with the state in order to enhance the political will for "good governance" and to promote social equity (policy dialogue).
• NGOs and Civil Society as operational partners: The experience, convocation power and motivation knowledge of NGOs earmark them in the opinion of Intercooperation to be privileged partners for the implementation of empowerment strategies. Collaboration should be conceived in such a way that these organizations should actually be the ones to put such strategies into practice. The role of Intercooperation from the very beginning is one of counselling and supporting.
• Disadvantaged Groups as Partners and Beneficiaries: The role of the target groups in an empowerment strategy has to be redefined in each case. Basically, as much partners' autonomy as possible should be favored. Usually, co-operation is a participatory effort, where the respective role of each partner has to be coordinated and well balanced. Increased self-help capacity and increased autonomy of decision are the overriding goals.
Expected Results
• Redistribution of Power: The partners and beneficiaries of an empowerment strategy will have more weight and active participation and increased autonomy in their decisions. They are recognized partners in the political decision making process.
• Strengthening of Social Identity: The partners will be able to define their interests and defend them towards other interest groups and the state in a sustainable way. They have an increased self-consciousness and they feel that they and their interests are represented.
• More Equitable Distribution of Resources and Control of their Management: The co-operation partners have an improved access to economic and natural resources. There are indications of redistribution in favor of economically disadvantaged groups.
• Stable Social and Organizational Structures: The empowerment process is supposed to enable the partners to build autonomous and self sustaining structures, which strengthen their political, social and economic position within society on a long term basis.
Empowerment Strategies
Sustainable SHGs at Mandal / Village / Block Level: In dry rural areas provision of drinking water is closely linked to the capability of women to enter labor markets. Thanks to modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), it is possible to look deeper into and analyze successful micro-credit funded enterprises in terms of a range of causal variables such as market access, levels of family assets and risk-taking capacity. However illiteracy, accentuated by the extent of digital divide, often limits analytical depth precluding the analyses of variance traceable to "core vulnerable sections" among the poor. Evaluations confirm that SHGs tend to exclude the poorest women not only because of their inability to save but also because other members see them as bad credit risks. Knowledge Management (KM) tools and well defined poverty metrics incorporating multi-disciplinary approaches as defined by the World Bank (PovertyNet.org) and UNDP (Millennium Development Goals) should go a long way in this direction.
Emphasis on Quality Training of SHGs There is already an acute shortage of trained women for running the existing SHGs on a sound footing. Efforts made so far by the Government agencies and the voluntary agencies in training women reportedly are not that successful, as besides the problems already mentioned, they are woefully under-equipped lacking as they are in a systematized approach for seeding and replication of sustainable SHGs, quality training material etc. In the initial stages the need of the day, therefore, is to:
(a)-prepare quality training material, launch a nationwide seeding program, and provide training to women in large numbers, who could then function as resource persons to form more replicable seed SHGs, who in turn train the new SHGs and oversee their work.
(b)-Use of Latest Technologies: An important of technology is affordability and appropriateness for rural women, who by and large are disadvantaged both in access and ability to use.
Communication Media: Education is the most important pre-condition for women’s empowerment. Distance education and its associated technologies allow increased access to education, democratize and control costs to afford quality of education at a reasonable cost, not otherwise possible through traditional means. The strength of modern media consists in reaching a large section of population in the shortest possible time. Together with interactivity made possible by modern ICTs providing update content, graphics and case studies at minimal costs, women SHGs will go a long way in fighting socio-economic causes in the country.
More choice is not necessarily better choice: More information does not necessarily make us better informed. Technologies should be viewed as ‘tools of trade’ rather than a driving force behind education. Selection of appropriate media is an important factor in reaching out specific target groups. Alternative media such as visually rich small booklets with a little text, flip charts and posters, media have been imaginatively used by some NGOs in generating awareness on issues like health, child-care, women’s rights, empowerment etc.
Support Groups: SHGs evince structural affinity with small voluntary groups for mutual aid and the accomplishment of special tasks or resolution of specific problems. They are usually formed by peers who have come together for mutual assistance in satisfying a common need, overcoming a common handicap or life-disrupting problem, and bring about desired social and/ or personal change. The initiators of such groups emphasize face to face social interactions and assumption of personal responsibility by members. Such interactions often provide material assistance, as well as emotional support. Frequently cause-oriented, they evince an ideology or value system through which members may attain an enhanced sense of personal identity.
Empowerment is quite Challenging: The Govt of India has launched a number of women empowerment programs, and formulated several schemes such as the Integrated Women’s Empowerment Program (IWEP). The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), with its experience of running a large number of programs for women throughout India, has accepted this challenge in collaboration with Dept of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. The IGNOU started a Training Certificate Program "Empowering Women through SHGs" with a view to preparing a cadre / network of master trainers for the sustainability of these SHGs. In a country like India, where the gender divide and the inequalities between men and women is so pronounced and widespread, providing skills and opportunities to be economically self-sufficient must go hand in hand with social and political empowerment.
Towards Sustainable SHGs
Basic Gender Needs and Issues: Strategies for sustaining women SHGs must lay considerable emphasis on concerted joint action to steer development through own organisations. The process, being a Gandhian edict at that is essentially one of self-empowerment is important in the context of a polity at the grass-roots community level. An Integrated Approach that identifies the needs of women from the poor and marginalized sections uplifting them to a state of full employment must be underlined in this regard.
Strategies / Solutions for Sustainable SHGs: Over the past few years SHGs have been organized under a veritable list of Government-sponsored programs, e.g., the DWCRA of AP, Mahila Mandals, Nehru Yuvak Kendras etc. Simultaneously, financial institutions have come forward with various schemes such as the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)’s scheme for providing micro-credit through women SHGs. Recently, a number of international agencies have launched schemes offering micro-credit to women SHGs. The Department of Women and Child Development, Government of India is implementing a scheme called Indira Mahila Yojana, aiming, inter alia, at federating the women SHGs at the village / block levels. Important to sustainability is ensuring that SHG women are accountable for the four desiderata outlined below in the right combinations which they think are viable and manageable.
Seeding and Replication of Sustainable SHGs: Women themselves must don the multi-stakeholder roles of planners, users, managers and owners of the poverty alleviation programs meant for them. Merely forming groups is not enough for capacity building among women. Training, skill development to tackle market and risk exposure need strong emphasis. Most SHGs in India are currently focusing on information sharing; awareness and confidence, capacity-building for empowerment through micro level planning and group action. SHGs promoted by NGOs exude a groundswell of confidence, determination and will power in their assertions that India’s women SHGs, fledgling though they may be, will be able to overcome teething troubles, of which women’s empowerment stands out prominently. Sustainable development is possible only if all the stakeholders of development programs participate in the development process, a prime reason why NGOs are able to show better results compared to Government agencies. The approach, considered particularly effective in the case of women, in the macro-sense, is that of sustainable SHGs. A definitive organizational, socio-economic and political framework as shown below must be at the core as a prime mover to groom SHGs as sustainable entities:
Sustainability Framework for Women’s Self Help Groups
(a)- Organizational - Sustainability
(a-1)- Encouraging self-reliant women SHGs to form groups according to felt-needs and socio-economic status creating an environment for federating and networking with other groups
(a-2)- Improving access of women to micro-credit
(a-3)- Convergence of different agencies for women’s empowerment
(a-4)- Ensuring women’s involvement in local-level planning
(b)-Economic Sustainability
(b-1)- Creating self-reliant, sustainable SHGs capable of prioritizing women’s needs and interests, and bringing about their social emancipation and economic empowerment
(b-2)- Ensuring for SHGs direct access to and control over resources through a sustained mobilization and convergence of all sectoral programs
(b-3) - Strengthening and institutionalizing the savings habit among the womenfolk and ensuring their control over own resources;
(b-4)- Infusing a subsidy-free ethos in women’s economic empowerment
(c) Political Empowerment Sustainability
(c-1)-Motivation to work for change, priming womenfolk to moving up the ladder economically and politically
• Confidence and awareness among SHG members regarding
• women’s status, legal rights, health, nutrition, education,
• hygiene & environment and of other socio-economic and
• political issues impacting their lives.
(c-2)- Interaction with professional assistance, networking with pressure for ensuring women’s empowerment / rights
Women SHGs - a Hunting Ground for Research
Change in Resource using Competencies: Over the past four decades, planned interventions have from time to time ushered in new institutions and innovative experiments to mobilize rural social capital in the Asian region. Rural women are increasingly being organized into small SHGs to procure credit for micro-enterprises. Access to credit makes it necessary for women to acquire resource use competencies. These competencies include (a) women understanding their obligations and rights relevant to credit, (b) women cultivating skills to identify, set up and operate profitable micro-enterprises and (c) learning to function in a formal or semi-formal organizational structure of SHGs linked to NGOs that foster non-traditional norms of participation and articulation.
Although social innovations such as credit groups, supported by donor agencies, have opened up opportunities for rural women, a challenge yet lies in developing resource competencies taking advantage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to reach them out by distance education. Can SHGs also be learner groups for distance education outreach? Can women leaders, developed through women’s participation in SHGs, be targeted as facilitators of a learner group? On production–related resource use competencies, adopting cash crops such as onion, tomato or ginger in a contract farmer relationship requires learning about markets and prices, as well as of the obligations and problems of being tied to a world market through a third party. Rural women, unfamiliar as they are with world market linkages, lack key competencies to negotiate and deal with complex contractual relationships, and thus be economically disadvantaged. Can the content of a distance learning package include resource use competency know-how for women, to help them function effectively amidst complex economic transactions?
Sustainable SHGs and Economic Development: Sustainable development must be people centric; ensure quality and not quantity of growth. Alternative development models are lately gaining ground as current models have failed to fulfill people’s aspirations. Deficiencies in the present development models must be corrected on the following lines:
• Sustainable development models must have a basic needs orientation, and not exploitative;
•Sustainable models must not result in alienating people from critical development processes (leading to deficiencies/ default in gender inclusion, participation, bottom-up micro-level planning etc)
• Presents models incorporate mechanisms of centralization of sorts with sporadic excesses in control over resources and decision-making.
An elevated status to people should therefore be the main plank of any new people-centric strategy so essential for success especially of women SHGs.
• People must be subjects and not objects of development. Creativity and enhancement of human potential, and self confidence among people to steer their own vision and destiny, and inner satisfaction that forms the basis of a convivial living in an enlightened society, must be the guiding principles in all development endeavors.
Conclusions
As can be gauged from above discussion, poverty is a multi-faceted problem. Involving finances, food supply, housing, infrastructure, education, health and hygiene, war, politics, self-regard and more, poverty is by and large a women’s issue. “There can be no one single solution to poverty” is a major conclusion emerging from a recent Survey (April 2003) prepared by Sub-Committee for the Eradication of Poverty of the NGO Committee for Social Development to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). Many issues must be addressed and a variety of approaches must be taken to ease impoverishment among the peoples of the world. The projects surveyed represent a diverse, if not exhaustive, array of active programs managed by NGOs and local communities, often in partnership with government. They are reducing local poverty and its resulting problems.
Formidable as it is the task of getting at an analyzed, well assimilated and cultured viewpoint on promoting Self Help Groups in India, this Paper seeks to win inspiration from (a)-the PovertyNet.org (world Bank’s) site which provides good insights on how to go further in this regard; and (b)-the UN Sub-Committee’s Survey Report on best practices in promoting an NGO-SHG praxis. Borrowing a leaf from PovertyNet.org’s Empowerment web pages on Tamil Nadu is recommended in this context.
PovertyNet.Org’s Empowerment Web Pages on Tamil Nadu
The Government of Tamil Nadu in partnership with the World Bank is preparing the Tamil Nadu Empowerment and Poverty Reduction Project, which seeks to improve the livelihoods and quality of life of the rural poor (particularly women and other disadvantaged groups) through social, economic and democratic empowerment. Slated to go to the Board in FY05of their Project Business Plan, which boasts of the following components:
The Project Concept Document (PCD) identifies four components: Institutional and Organizational Development: including support to self managed organizations of the poor, strengthening and capacity building of village level elected representatives, and building NGO capacity to work as intermediaries and change agents.
Panchayat Support: including financial support to Gram Panchayats to implement demand driven community infrastructure and service plans (such as bridle paths and small connecting roads, rural water supply, village schools and small health centers), and capital investment to support development of the Panchayat's own basic infrastructure and technical assistance needs (services of financial experts, private providers, contractors and technical support).
Enterprise Development: including support to innovative pilots for small and medium scale enterprises to improve local productivity and generate wage employment. The component would enable SHGs, common interest groups and their federations to undertake initiatives to enhance value-addition from their members' products and develop new enterprises and joint ventures.
Vulnerability Reduction: including community based insurance packages to address sources of risks and income instability, support to eradicate child labor and trafficking, and support to people with disabilities.
Taken together, these components seek to address both the supply side and the demand side of development in the state: improving the ability of local governments to respond to the interest of their citizens, and increasing poor people's incomes and reducing their vulnerability by creating opportunities for them to engage in society and organize for collective action. The World Bank’s PovertyNet.org’s web page says, “tracking and reporting the project progress where new and interesting learning and developments can be shared, and general information about the project disseminated”. Through this a "real time collective learning” process can take place regarding how to design and implement strategies to empower poor people”. Once such improvements are up and running, development information on this website can offer noteworthy insights into best practices for NGO-SHG praxis.
Goal-oriented drive in organizing and creating visibility for self-employed women, enabling them to get a higher income and have control over their own resources is paramount. A large number of people assert deep interest in the election processes, and encourage the community to exercise their franchise wisely.
Sunvistas
Overview
The past two decades have demonstrated the growing role of SHGs in advocating women’s empowerment Long before the Beijing Platform for Action identified access to credit as a critical contributor to women’s economic empowerment, micro-credit – defined as “credit for the poor without a collateral” – was established as a mainstream development intervention. The World Bank has set a target of reaching 100 million of the world’s poorest people with micro-credit by 2005, and has placed micro-credit at the center of its global strategy for poverty alleviation. SHGs Abroad: Typically underpinning the evolution of women’s SHGs the world over is a pronounced “voluntary” element”.
Micro-Credit Empowers: In most developing countries, where poverty is endemic, the emergence of women’s SHGs is traceable more to a pervading need to combat poverty to deliberate policy interventions. Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, one of the micro-credit pioneers, serves 2.4 million borrowers among the poorest groups, of which 2.28 million, or 95 percent, are reported to be women. Some 90 percent of the Country Women's Association of Nigeria's 1,26,000 poorest borrowers are women, while 65 percent of the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Union's 4,00,000 poorest clients are women. Among other notable efforts are Rating Credit Unions in Guatemala; "Papa" and "Mama" Cards in Zaire; Mobile Banks in Western Africa; FlashCash - a form of finance in Cameroon; Women's Bank in Sri Lanka; production credit for rural women of Nepal; and Money Shops in Philippines, and more recently “Courier Services on Bi-Cycles” back home in Tamil Nadu. Prominent among the internationally recognized SHG success stories is the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh pioneered by Mohammad Yunus, who started it with an experimental project in Chittagong in 1983. Later on, several NGOs had taken up micro-credit as a central strategy. Fuelled by the World Bank-sponsored micro-credit summits, the potency of micro-credit has grown to a point where it is being hailed as the ultimate answer to poverty and underdevelopment. To its proponents, micro-credit has everything – participation, flexibility, community ownership and, best of all, women’s empowerment. To its critics, it is a Band-Aid solution to poverty, an easy way of side-stepping structural issues and making the poor responsible for finding solutions to their own problems Poverty is a multi-faceted problem, involving finance, food supply, housing, infrastructure, education, health & hygiene, war, politics, self-regard and more. Poverty thus has a ”domino effect” as a women’s issue.
“There can be no one single solution to poverty” is the major conclusion emerging from a Survey (April 2003) prepared by the Sub-Committee for Eradication of Poverty of the NGO Committee for Social Development for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). Many issues must be addressed and a variety of approaches made to eradicate poverty among the peoples of the world. An attempt has been made in this Paper to explore the problems of women SHGs in India in the contemporary socio-politico-economic milieu in which they operate, and strategize solutions for sustaining such groups.
WOMEN SELF HELP GROUPS IN INDIA
"Self-help” and “micro-credit” connote a magic mantra in gender empowerment discourse today. Almost every non-Governmental Organization (NGO) worth the name in India has a micro-credit tie-up where major donors including national financial institutions are involved. Woman power in India has primed Self Help Groups (SHGs) as effective platforms for economic and political empowerment, bringing womenfolk together to protect their legitimate rights as well as fight for social causes. Formed from time to time over the past two decades by NGOs, these groups draw support from national schemes such as the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh, the Indira Mahila Yojana and other poverty alleviation programs, or from bilateral and multilateral donors including the UN Agencies and the World Bank. In certain states, -- notably Andhra Pradesh, women’s SHGs, -- majority of them initiated under the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) program --, are now the vehicle of choice for the implementation of all major government programs at the village level.
Success Stories: There are several success stories of SHGs enabling women’s economic empowerment in India. Out of an estimated 70,000 women SHGs in the country, a total of 35,000 women SHGs are reported to have credit linkages with banks through micro-credit schemes. Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, “Lijjat” of Shri Gruha Mahila Udyog in the early 1970s, Annapurna Mahila Mandal and the Working Women’s Forum in the 1980s, demonstrated the feasibility of small loans to support miniscule ventures set up by womenfolk from weaker/ marginalized sections of the society. Syndicate Bank's Pigmy Deposit Scheme corporate involvement in providing credit linkages so vital for success in this noble endeavor of women’s upliftment through SHGs. The Development Support team working in Pune supports more than eighty SHGs - almost 2,000 women. Yet their success can be measured, not by the money saved and lent, but by the family and community problems shared and tackled, and the confidence gained through self-help mechanisms.
Experiential Learning from Women’s SHGs
(a)-SHGs serve as effective platforms for enhancing the community stature of women in poverty and priming socio-political recognition for them at the grass-roots level.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Rome is an active player in promoting SHGs in developing countries. Experience under IFAD-supported projects in South Asia has shown that empowerment of women stems not only from the financial aspects of group operations, but also from:
• the community aspect collectively ensconcing SHG members as a cohesive social force affording them a socio-political status
• the social moorings of the SHG as a forum for discussing shared problems; and
• the political power for implementing joint action.
(b)-Access to cash and direct dealings with banks confer an overall societal strength, a sense of self-confidence and self-reliance spurred by a feeling of self-worth amongst womenfolk. Inasmuch as self-worth enhances social empowerment, it simultaneously triggers a craving for participation and involvement in socio-political processes at the grass roots community level.
An example of this type of experience was evident in IFAD-supported Maharashtra Rural Credit Project. In the village of Garade in Maharashtra, women's groups have played an important role in banning the sale and consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco. Before the ban, the bulk of the meager family incomes, which should have gone towards meeting necessities like food, shelter and clothing, were instead being spent on alcohol and tobacco. When legal measures did not work, women's SHGs organized several morchas (sit-ins) at the local liquor stores and forced them to close down. The SHGs pressed for ban on sale of gutka (chewing tobacco) sold in front of the local primary and secondary schools in their village; borrowed money to buy up and burn the village's entire stock of chewing tobacco. Thus participation in resolving community social problems increases a sense of social responsibility among rural womenfolk and gives them required initiative and courage to take a proactive leadership role on community issues. Such outcomes represent a positive step toward building small pockets of “social capital”, raising womenfolk from being a mere targeting mechanism in development projects, which might otherwise tend to be dissipative.
(c)-Sustaining Marginalized Women’s Participation in SHGs is Problematic, But Sensitizing and Empowering them into Community Leadership Roles is Challenging
Women under the IFAD-supported Tamil Nadu Women's Development Project discovered that their membership in the group increased their self-esteem and helped them deal with intra-family injustices and inequities, and even with domestic violence. The groups also became a problem-solving forum where women could discuss and act on common problems. Developing a cadre of women leaders and sensitizing people’s organisations are the need of the day.
(d)-SEWA Bank is Best Practice Institution of International Repute: Internationally, the SEWA Bank is an inspiration for Women’s World Banking (WWB)
The Chairperson of SEWA Bank, Ms Ela Bhatt, is also the Chair Person of this International organization. The bank has contributed directly in achieving, to some extent, the larger SEWA members have their own hand-carts, sewing machines, looms and tools of carpentry and black-smithy to work with. Many of them have upgraded their skills and expanded their businesses. For example, vegetable vendors who used to sell their products with baskets on their heads and now have their own little street-corner shops with a municipal license. The SEWA Bank, innovative in many ways --organizationally, institutionally, financially with important contribution in encouraging women to participate fully in all phases of banking, lending and saving activities, has targeted its efforts not just towards the "symptoms" of homelessness or poverty alleviation, but also on structural causes, including long-term capacity-building of the poor women and their institutions.
(e)-SHGs in Andhra Pradesh (AP) – A Major Government Initiative: Women’s empowerment is one of the prime strategies adopted by the AP Government The socio-economic dimension of self-help through savings is emphasized by women SHGs in AP, where it has caught on as a mass movement.
AP, the leader in Women SHGs: With about 3.95 lakh SHGs covering nearly 53.6 lakh poor women, AP alone has about half the SHGs existing in the country. The SHGs in AP, popularly known as Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) groups, are supported by revolving funds instituted by AP government for the purpose.
(e)-Corporate Involvement: Convergence of quite a few Government programs, both at the Central and State levels, is increasingly getting reflected in the nascent, up coming innovative SHGs tapping the goodwill of FMCG corporates in India.
Christened as “Project Shakti”, consumer giant Hindustan Liver Ltd (HLL)’s new distribution model is changing the lives of AP’s rural womenfolk, co-terminus as it is with the company’s changing rural profile. Piloted in Nalgonda district in 2001, Project Shakti covers over 5,000 villages in 52 districts in AP, Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. With over 1,000 women entrepreneurs (‘Shaktiammas’) involved in the project, the AP Govt has channeled the HLL tie-up through DWCRA networks set up under the Dept of Women Empowerment and Self-Employment.
SHGs as Platforms for Political Mainstreaming
Before discussing the socio-economic role of SHGs in India, it is necessary to recognize that an important desideratum for women’s empowerment is their “political mainstreaming”, a process that is interwoven with the economic dimension. Whereas the United Nations has made rapid strides in progressing with gender mainstreaming. India’s efforts in this regard are woefully inadequate. This is notwithstanding the fact that a number of SHGs have also adopted political empowerment and institutionalization of women’s representation in governance such as people’s organisations (Ayojan Samitis, federations, the Indian parliament, legislative and judiciary, Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha as well as the Panchayati Raj institutions) so that they may be able to exert direct influence on governance. During on going consultations on gender issues involving the UN system as a whole, women leaders have requested the UN System in India to support women in their effort to introduce the 81st Amendment into the Indian Constitution to allow reservation of one-third of all parliamentary seats for women.
SHG Best Practices
Briefly outlined below are select NGO-SHG organizations currently adopting best practices, a few culled out from supra-national sources (*) like the World Bank’s PovertyNet.org/ UNIFEM, UNDP, IFAD etc:
(a)-Empowering Rural Producer Organizations: World Bank Group's Strategic Framework identifies “empowering poor people to participate in development and investing in them” as one of the key pillars underpinning the World Bank's efforts to reduce poverty. A major thrust of World Bank’s Rural Development Strategy is "integrating the needs of the rural poor in national policy dialogues", a process which must include a broad base of stakeholders, including rural producer organizations, civil society and Rural Development Ministries.
(b)-Rural Producer Organizations (RPOs) contribute to food security, making marketable goods available. They also participate in rural development policy making, in natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. They preserve local cultural heritage, building profitable businesses on traditional know-how. The percentage of Bank funded agricultural projects that include capacity building for rural organizations has increased from 26% in 1997 to 62 % in 2001. The Bank is determined to keep up the effort because seventy-five percent (75%) of the world's poor live in rural areas and agriculture or agriculture-related activities are their primary income source. The World Bank website aims to share information and experience among people and institutions committed to building the capacity of Rural Producer Organizations as key economic stakeholders in the fight to reduce rural poverty.
(c)-Sambhav-a social service organization in Madhya Pradesh has started two women SHGs--the Sahariya Jan Andolan (SJA), which has 8,414 members, and Mahila Kranti Manch (MKM) with 5,000 members. Working mainly for infusing a sense of solidarity to address issues affecting women’s lives and resources, Sambhav seeks to press for their involvement in political decision making at grass-roots level such as securing their rightful place in Panchayat Raj institutions, influencing legislators and official machinery, resisting exploitation and abuse etc.. SJA and MKMSahariya members no longer vote for a single party, their franchise is divided and strategic. That political leadership is emerging from such processes is reflected in the fact that critical decisions on the power game and political affiliations of rival groups are preceded by Intensive Analyses of the pros and cons of a wide spectrum of political issues at the grass-roots level. On the subject of women daring to contest elections even in the face of threats and poverty, although apparently in the face of violence and terror, they are forced to adopt a quiet and detached facade.
(d)-Swayamsiddha - A socio-economic empowerment scheme for women to live with dignity and self-reliance, stresses on access to micro-credit and envisages block and Panchayat-level participation by women, cutting across all regional, economic and social groups. The aim is to guide women in understanding the social, economic and political issues; educate them on their status, rights and privileges; and generate awareness on nutrition, health, hygiene and environment.
(e)-International Center for Entrepreneurship and Career Development (ICECD), a voluntary non-government organization formed in 1986 to facilitate economic empowerment of women through micro / small enterprise ownership, works with business communities, government departments and development agencies across Asia, Africa, Pacific and Caribbean countries. They have trained over 10,000 women trainers directly, who in turn have developed the capacity of thousands of personnel in other organizations. In recent years, ICECD is foraying into building up leadership and vision among womenfolk through a variety of strategies. ICECD’s Political Empowerment Program advocacy comprises:
(i)-Awareness building and advocacy for women’s rights and opportunities
(ii)-Developing strategies for political empowerment of women in local governance in rural areas
(iii)-Capacity building enhancing women’ functional skills for resource mobilization, planning and networking.
(iv)-Creating a Counseling Cell for both: access to information and support to women leaders.
(*)-Also refer Annexure-A for excerpts from the UN Sub-Committee Report on NGO Best Practices, April 2003
(f)-Two SHG projects “Community Aid abroad” and “Development Support Team” are part of a program of social, economic and political empowerment of women in Maharashtra and the neighboring states. The program also includes, inter alia, lobbying for legal and economic policy changes at the state and national levels. Stree Aadhar Kendra, another SHG, is part of a government committee that came up with one of the most progressive of state level gender policies in India, viz., “title to all newly-purchased property must be jointly held by husband and wife”.
Community Aid Abroad has extended its South Asia program with assistance from Aus AID, together with Oxfam in Great Britain. The Netherlands Credit programs are reportedly far from successful in achieving the desired socio-economic change. A recent five-year review of their South Asia programs has observed that in some regions women involved in credit activities were not moving on to broader issues; and loan activities had become ends in themselves. As such the program is considering literacy classes as an alternative way of involving women in political discussion, enkindling thereby a hope for political inclusion and participation that has hitherto eluded and alienated them.
Problems Encountered by Women SHGs in India
Understanding Poverty: Understanding poverty is basic to identifying target groups most vulnerable to poverty that SHGs ought to be aiming at. Research based on secondary sources and the Internet reveals variegated problems -- social, economic and political --, commonly encountered by women SHGs in India, as discussed below:
Identification and Addressing Root Causes of Poverty: There is a great deal of discussion in academic literature on how to identify the poor, and how efficiently to reach them. Poverty was initially defined as an income concept, but in recent years it is also being seen as a vulnerability concept. Using the “income” concept, poverty removal is seen as happening through raising income levels; while as per “vulnerability” concept, poverty removal is seen as a process of protecting women from both economic and social vulnerability. Both approaches are valuable and meaningful. The income approach tends to lead more to “income-generation’ programs, the vulnerability approach in contrast leads to more social programs such as education and health provision.
Socio-Economic Factors
Structural Issues: The first structural issue is the place of the poor in the society. Are all Indians below the poverty line (BPL) only to be considered as poor ? Or are there some poor above the poverty line (APL). What is the rationale if non-income criteria were also considered? Barriers to entry into labor and product markets, for example, are closely connected in India with gender, caste and class. Further, social needs such as health, child-care, education and housing --, are all linked to economic capabilities as well as to provision of social security by markets and the State. With reforms getting under way in India for over ten years now, market and State structures have learnt to measure levels of poverty and well being with greater precision, with the result that the inter-related nature of these structures is beginning to assist Governments in better understanding of poverty. Thanks to technology, a more structured approach to poverty reduction in respect of modern day rural India is within the realm of feasible solutions..
The Poor Need Gainful, Guaranteed Employment: Women are no longer regarded as mere “deprived persons”, but also reckoned for their economic potential in what Alvin Toffler calls “Prosumers”, meaning simultaneously producers, workers and consumers in their own myriad ways. They wish to earn their living in dignity, not depend on doles or outside support. Women crave for the security afforded by employment through which they can earn enough in cash and kind. In other words, they need guaranteed employment. Whereas in the formal sector, employment generates through creation of jobs by firms, -- such employment is generally regular, full time, protected employment, with a clear employer-employee relationship --, in the informal sector there are no ‘jobs’ as such, they ought to be minimal given the tiny nature of the businesses that one finds dotted in this sector.
Creating employment is no longer a matter of creating ‘jobs’, but of strengthening workers and producers to overcome barriers and enter markets where they would be competitive. Labor, product and financial markets need to be survailled by rule-based institutions, which in turn would link them with larger markets. Although Governments have been serious with liberalization of markets, the process has been slow. It has so far reached only the formal sector, and not yet the informal (unorganized, tiny) sector where the vast majority have remained straitjacketed by archaic, non-inclusive policies.
Paucity of Studies with Gender SHGs and Cost-Benefit Perspective: India’s women’s organisations are concerned about the manner in which micro-credit is being promoted as a panacea for poverty alleviation. It was pointed out that "success", for both Government and the NGOs is gauged by the amount of money saved, size and frequency of loans and rate of loan repayment, rather than by the extent to which the economic exploitation of women has been reduced. There are practically no rigorous studies of changes in the income and expenditure patterns of members of SHG’s before and after they take up economic activities using micro-credit. Similarly, there are very few studies that explore the extent to which micro-finance programs have been able to facilitate non-economic dimensions of empowerment for the women members of SHGs such as inclusion and participation in political decisions impacting their lives.
Globalization, Competition Policy versus Subsidies: Micro-credit and micro-enterprise projects, funded by large by multilateral and bilateral donors, provide safety nets for women as part of their efforts to keep a "human face" consistent with the globalization philosophy. Experience shows that support in the form of subsidies on raw materials and marketing assistance to traditional artisanal cooperative SHGs is far from organized be it from Government or from a well-connected NGO. With government policies favoring entry of multinationals into the rural market in India, the extent to which SHGs can provide a viable base for rural entrepreneurship has come under scrutiny. Grassroots women SHGs also express concern about the tendency of donors to piggyback their micro-finance interventions on already existing groups, thus reducing costs and co-opting the work of smaller integrated programs. In their eagerness to promote financially viable and minimalist interventions, donors are glossing over contradictions emerging in micro-finance programs. Often empowerment got a short shrift because of untenable assumptions made by policy makers.
Socio-Political Factors
Capacity-Building ensures Empowerment: While the focus of women’s SHGs is increasingly getting limited to savings and credit support, women’s political empowerment endeavors in India are relegated to back burner due to excessive wieghtage accorded to economic upliftment issues. Rather than fuzzy, ivory tower policy interventions, Governments should do well to take on the more fundamental problem of SHG Capacity Building. Special focus is required to build skill sets to enable SHGs focus on strengthening their vision to deal with the effects of policy interventions on socio-economic and political issues. Inducting the SHGs gradually into political processes as they gain experience follows as a corollary. What SHGs need is hand-holding, viz., (a)-Management training to get at an enhanced learning curve and benefit from own as well as peer SHG experience, and (b)-Market prognoses to internalize and enmesh own priorities in line with the village level needs. Surveys indicate that simply providing credit to poor women may not be enough to enable them take care of their living, particularly if men in their families try to take charge of loans. Without a holistic approach, credit programs can not be successful in achieving the desired socio-economic ends. A recent review of Community Aid Abroad - South Asia program cited above is a case in point.
Political Empowerment: Political empowerment of women, organized under thrift movement, appears to be miles away. The Kurnool (AP) experience, wherein women’s SHGs have been organized under the UNDP since 1995 in seven Mandals of the district, illustrates this point. The SHG women, who entered the electoral fray in the 2001 local body elections in Kurnool, tasted the bitterness of fighting an election battle. Out of five posts of Sarpanches and forty ward members contested, only seven posts could be secured by SHG women in Orvakal mandal. The groups thereafter realized that only political parties could fight electoral battles, not the SHGs that came into being for fighting poverty. The village-level political outfits exerted pressure on them to retire from the contest. As the women remained adamant, the leaders, affiliated to major parties, tried to bring pressure on the contestants through their kin. In one case, a son threatened to commit suicide, in another, a husband threatened to divorce wife if she did not retire, in yet another case brothers issued a threat to their widow-sister to leave home if she wanted to remain in the contest. Such response from women SHGs, having become a controversy, was taken to the notice of the State Election Commission. The Commission, after due hearing, had come out strongly in support of the women SHGs. However, the critics of women SHGs contended that, being sponsored by Government, the SHGs should not have entered the electoral battle. Though not emerged yet as a strong political force, the local political leadership is suspicious about the intentions of the women SHGs in the political arena.
NGOs are important, but as a rule defy Accountability: NGOs have flourished only in closed loop communities where their work is appreciated, elsewhere they are not as much present as is often believed. While there are regional differences, NGOs are by and large plagued by the same problems as the state: the poor feel they are excluded from the NGOs decision arena. Lack of accountability apart, NGOs’ inept handling of gender sensitivity in respect of obstacles such as caste discrimination, social, religious taboos adversely impact their image.
In a series of studies carried out by UNDP and the South Asian Poverty Alleviation Program in Andhra Pradesh last year, three debates --centering on (a)-micro credit; (b)-social capital and feminization of poverty; and (c)-women and empowerment -- were prominent:
(a) The first debate was on the potential and limitations of micro-credit for women’s empowerment, with one section arguing for micro-credit as a panacea for poverty reduction and empowerment, and another section negating it saying that women’s labor and time gets exploited through such programs, without any tangible gains.
(b) The second debate was on the potential and limitations of "social capital". One group believes that strengthening social capital-bonding, bridging and linking can help people to come out of poverty and empower themselves, while another group posits that unless "physical capital" and "financial capital" are strengthened, poverty reduction and women’s empowerment will be distant goals.
(c) The third debate devolved on whether focus on gender and poverty distracts attention from the political agenda of women’s empowerment. One section holds that poverty is feminized, and that donors and development agencies should focus on the inter linkages between “gender, women and poverty”. The other position is that evidence on feminization of poverty is weak, and conflating gender issues with poverty, takes attention away from the broader agenda of women’s empowerment.
Strategies / Solutions for Promoting Sustainable Women SHGs
In light of the above analysis, it is imperative that strategies for sustaining women SHGs lay considerable emphasis on concerted joint action entailing continual struggle to steer development through their own organisations. The whole process essentially is one of self-empowerment (which is important, being a Gandhian edict at that, in the context of a polity at the grass-roots community level). What is needed is an Integrated Approach that identifies the needs of womenfolk from the poor and marginalized sections to reach a state of full employment status:
(i)-Women need capital formation at the household level through access to financial services (savings, credit, insurance) to build up and create assets of their own (land, house, work shed, equipment, cattle, bank balance). Asset ownership is the surest weapon to fight vulnerability to poverty;
(ii)-Capacity building to support themselves in a competitive market: access to market, infrastructure, technology, information, education, knowledge and relevant skills (eg., accountancy, management, planning, designing etc.);
(iii)-Social security-a modicum of healthcare, child-care, shelter and relief, - to insure themselves against the contingency of major health risks they and their families may face;
(iv)-Collective, organized strength (through their associations) to be able to actively participate at various levels in the planning, implementation and monitoring processes of the programs meant for them, and also in all matters of socio-political importance impacting their lives.
Gender Mainstreaming Initiatives
Designing Empowerment Strategies: Four key elements should feature in the design of empowerment strategies: (a)-Access to Information; (b)-Inclusion and Participation; (c)-Accountability; and (d)-Local Organizational Capacity. Interwoven alongside the application of these four elements are local and national governance, access to justice and pro-poor market development. For example, Judicial Reform Project (Ecuador) supports creation of legal aid clinics to help the poor and indigenous women exercise their legal rights; People’s Voice Program (Ukraine) demonstrates how greater citizen participation at the municipal level can lead to better service delivery and higher public satisfaction. While many examples of empowerment do exist, Steven Jorgensen, World Bank’s Social Development Director said the challenge now is to scale up and “move the empowerment agenda from the micro to a macro level.” Toward this end, the UN and the World Bank are seized with the task of forging partnerships across related networks, as also with constituting a thematic group on empowerment to seriously address the issues thereof. Regarding political empowerment one can cite the activities /programs of the Sahariya Jan Andolan and Mahila Kranti Morcha in MP that can be replicated elsewhere:
(a)-Organize electorate education activities.
(b)-Motivate the community to participate in the election and vote casting activities
(c)-Organize group dialogues with the contestants
(d)-Prepare an agenda of local issues and problems distribute it among the media and political groups
(e)-Generate mass awareness and lobby through the use of loudspeakers for increased participation of communities in electoral process.
(f)-Highlight draught relief work, atrocities on women, land alienation, displacement, PDS and drinking water issues
Coordination with UN System: The UN system in India during the past few years, under the leadership of UNIFEM, has been particularly active first, in preparing for Beijing and subsequently contributing to implementation of the plan of action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) and the Indian National Program for Women. In 1997, the Inter-Agency Working Group on Gender and Development continued to coordinate UN system efforts to reflect gender issues in macro-policies and the allocation of resources consistent with India’s National Policy for the Empowerment of Women of 1996 and the development agenda of the UN system in India. In mid 1997, the Inter-Agency Working Group has formally linked up with the Government of India, who deputed an official as a permanent member of the group.
In support of the avowed Government of India agenda of reservation of one-third of seats in executive legislative bodies across the nation, UNIFEM started a project in media advocacy and strategic lobbying. Mention should be made here of a UN system collaboration with Women’s Political Watch, an American NGO, to convene an international conference on women and governance. The core consideration here was to express UN system’s concern for women empowerment and opportunities for their active participation in local self-governance paving the way for sustainable holistic development. Consultations with the UNIFEM have facilitated a dialogue between grass-roots women, the Government, banks and other credit dispensing institutions, and resulted in the birth of a registered.
National Collective for Micro-credit Movement comprising some 1,500 women SHGs and grassroots NGOs as the stakeholders. One of the most important tasks for advocates of self-help programs must therefore be dissemination of knowledge and sharing of members’ self-help experience.
Self-Help and SHG Integrity
• One of the tasks is to ensure that what is genuine and authentic in the ideology of self-help is developed and enhanced independent of the dictates of government-directed management. (Entails structuring and activating coalitions of relevant stakeholders; to facilitate working independently regardless of pushing and prodding by funding sources; remaining focused on missions and goals, setting out and implementing own business plans);
• Ensuring that self-help does not become a government healthcare facility; but that it remains accessible as an opportunity chosen by a deliberate purpose, vision and commitment;
• Public funding of self-help work may be exploited by the authorities to justify budget cut backs on other essential public services. SHG community must be wary of these ploys and not be swayed by exploitation.
• When specific areas of self-help receive public funding, money can be used to employ personnel as and when necessary to coordinate the work.
• Public funding should contribute to the systematic gathering of knowledge and its dissemination. A serious educational challenge confronting this work is to make self-help accessible to as many as possible.
• Funding ensures that self-help becomes known more widely and is accessible to a wider public by making funds available to publish informational and promotional materials.
• Self-help increases the self-helper's quality of life and improves his or her ability to cope with adversity
Working with self-help can play a significant role in women’s motivational and behavioral paradigm whilst facing winds of change. The next step would be advocacy for others in need of self-help, which requires a collective vision and entails the need for a proper sustainability framework for women SHGs, which, cast in a multi-dimensional matrix of inter-relationships, will enable us comprehend its scope and importance (See Annexure for SHG best practices).
Empowerment
"Empowerment" puts individuals at the center of development and in a position where they can improve their social and economic situation in society. Empowerment implies dealing with the distribution of power within a society. The purpose is to strengthen disadvantaged groups and to prepare them to a more important share of power. Issues at stake are human rights, awareness, self-confidence and the ability to represent and defend the group or personal interests against stronger groups. But empowerment has also to do with our own attitudes and values. In fact they at least partially influence our development philosophy and our motivation. Generally speaking, it is difficult to promote empowerment if we are not ready to discuss our own value systems. Empowerment may lead to social and political conflicts: whether we accept the risks of such conflicts needs to be appreciated on a case by case basis, usually a basic poser in policy making.
Desiderata for Implementation
• The Institutional Policy of Intercooperation: A clear will to make out of empowerment an institutional goal and to implement such a strategy operationally.
• A Target Group Approach: Disadvantaged groups within a society, in particular small farmers and women are the primary focus.
• Mobilization and Organization: The target groups have to be supported in the mobilization of their own forces, in their organizational capability, their ability to express their interests and defend these towards other interest groups.
• Networking: Local organizations to be strengthened through exchange with other groups, the promotion of regional networks and service organizations.
• Access to Resources: The target groups need access to economic resources and participation in decisions on the use and control of such resources.
• Sustainable Results: Empowerment strategies have to be conceived in such a way that sustainable results are possible. This means that responsibility for execution and management lies from the beginning with the target groups and their partner institutions. Organizational capacity and institution building efforts have to be designed in such a way that sustainability can be reached within a defined deadline without further donor/outside support.
Necessary Complementary Activities
• Comprehensive socio-economic analysis: Gaining insight and knowledge of power relationships, the interests involved and the values of the participants and groups concerned is a prerequisite for defining the support strategy for an empowering process.
• Target Groups Involvement: The target groups and/or their representatives have to be involved in all steps of the co- operation program.
• Policy Dialogue: The mobilization of target groups should lead to increased negotiation power and advocacy in the policy dialogue with other interest groups in society and state.
• Capacity Building: Access and creation of information, education and training strengthen the ability to define one's own interests and defend them. This calls usually for specific support programs.
• Economic Activities: Political empowerment entails a general improvement of living conditions; access to employment, economic activities. Access to credit and markets are therefore indispensable instruments.
Partners for Empowerment
• The State as a Guarantor for the necessary Basic Conditions: Even though the unequal distribution of power and resources and unfavorable basic conditions are often the reasons for putting empowerment on the international co-operation agenda, an appropriate legislation and a law enforcement power are preconditions for empowering the disadvantaged groups of society. Therefore a strong state, able to create a conducive environment for empowerment, is important. Intercooperation thinks that part of a successful empowerment strategy is to negotiate with the state in order to enhance the political will for "good governance" and to promote social equity (policy dialogue).
• NGOs and Civil Society as operational partners: The experience, convocation power and motivation knowledge of NGOs earmark them in the opinion of Intercooperation to be privileged partners for the implementation of empowerment strategies. Collaboration should be conceived in such a way that these organizations should actually be the ones to put such strategies into practice. The role of Intercooperation from the very beginning is one of counselling and supporting.
• Disadvantaged Groups as Partners and Beneficiaries: The role of the target groups in an empowerment strategy has to be redefined in each case. Basically, as much partners' autonomy as possible should be favored. Usually, co-operation is a participatory effort, where the respective role of each partner has to be coordinated and well balanced. Increased self-help capacity and increased autonomy of decision are the overriding goals.
Expected Results
• Redistribution of Power: The partners and beneficiaries of an empowerment strategy will have more weight and active participation and increased autonomy in their decisions. They are recognized partners in the political decision making process.
• Strengthening of Social Identity: The partners will be able to define their interests and defend them towards other interest groups and the state in a sustainable way. They have an increased self-consciousness and they feel that they and their interests are represented.
• More Equitable Distribution of Resources and Control of their Management: The co-operation partners have an improved access to economic and natural resources. There are indications of redistribution in favor of economically disadvantaged groups.
• Stable Social and Organizational Structures: The empowerment process is supposed to enable the partners to build autonomous and self sustaining structures, which strengthen their political, social and economic position within society on a long term basis.
Empowerment Strategies
Sustainable SHGs at Mandal / Village / Block Level: In dry rural areas provision of drinking water is closely linked to the capability of women to enter labor markets. Thanks to modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), it is possible to look deeper into and analyze successful micro-credit funded enterprises in terms of a range of causal variables such as market access, levels of family assets and risk-taking capacity. However illiteracy, accentuated by the extent of digital divide, often limits analytical depth precluding the analyses of variance traceable to "core vulnerable sections" among the poor. Evaluations confirm that SHGs tend to exclude the poorest women not only because of their inability to save but also because other members see them as bad credit risks. Knowledge Management (KM) tools and well defined poverty metrics incorporating multi-disciplinary approaches as defined by the World Bank (PovertyNet.org) and UNDP (Millennium Development Goals) should go a long way in this direction.
Emphasis on Quality Training of SHGs There is already an acute shortage of trained women for running the existing SHGs on a sound footing. Efforts made so far by the Government agencies and the voluntary agencies in training women reportedly are not that successful, as besides the problems already mentioned, they are woefully under-equipped lacking as they are in a systematized approach for seeding and replication of sustainable SHGs, quality training material etc. In the initial stages the need of the day, therefore, is to:
(a)-prepare quality training material, launch a nationwide seeding program, and provide training to women in large numbers, who could then function as resource persons to form more replicable seed SHGs, who in turn train the new SHGs and oversee their work.
(b)-Use of Latest Technologies: An important of technology is affordability and appropriateness for rural women, who by and large are disadvantaged both in access and ability to use.
Communication Media: Education is the most important pre-condition for women’s empowerment. Distance education and its associated technologies allow increased access to education, democratize and control costs to afford quality of education at a reasonable cost, not otherwise possible through traditional means. The strength of modern media consists in reaching a large section of population in the shortest possible time. Together with interactivity made possible by modern ICTs providing update content, graphics and case studies at minimal costs, women SHGs will go a long way in fighting socio-economic causes in the country.
More choice is not necessarily better choice: More information does not necessarily make us better informed. Technologies should be viewed as ‘tools of trade’ rather than a driving force behind education. Selection of appropriate media is an important factor in reaching out specific target groups. Alternative media such as visually rich small booklets with a little text, flip charts and posters, media have been imaginatively used by some NGOs in generating awareness on issues like health, child-care, women’s rights, empowerment etc.
Support Groups: SHGs evince structural affinity with small voluntary groups for mutual aid and the accomplishment of special tasks or resolution of specific problems. They are usually formed by peers who have come together for mutual assistance in satisfying a common need, overcoming a common handicap or life-disrupting problem, and bring about desired social and/ or personal change. The initiators of such groups emphasize face to face social interactions and assumption of personal responsibility by members. Such interactions often provide material assistance, as well as emotional support. Frequently cause-oriented, they evince an ideology or value system through which members may attain an enhanced sense of personal identity.
Empowerment is quite Challenging: The Govt of India has launched a number of women empowerment programs, and formulated several schemes such as the Integrated Women’s Empowerment Program (IWEP). The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), with its experience of running a large number of programs for women throughout India, has accepted this challenge in collaboration with Dept of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. The IGNOU started a Training Certificate Program "Empowering Women through SHGs" with a view to preparing a cadre / network of master trainers for the sustainability of these SHGs. In a country like India, where the gender divide and the inequalities between men and women is so pronounced and widespread, providing skills and opportunities to be economically self-sufficient must go hand in hand with social and political empowerment.
Towards Sustainable SHGs
Basic Gender Needs and Issues: Strategies for sustaining women SHGs must lay considerable emphasis on concerted joint action to steer development through own organisations. The process, being a Gandhian edict at that is essentially one of self-empowerment is important in the context of a polity at the grass-roots community level. An Integrated Approach that identifies the needs of women from the poor and marginalized sections uplifting them to a state of full employment must be underlined in this regard.
Strategies / Solutions for Sustainable SHGs: Over the past few years SHGs have been organized under a veritable list of Government-sponsored programs, e.g., the DWCRA of AP, Mahila Mandals, Nehru Yuvak Kendras etc. Simultaneously, financial institutions have come forward with various schemes such as the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)’s scheme for providing micro-credit through women SHGs. Recently, a number of international agencies have launched schemes offering micro-credit to women SHGs. The Department of Women and Child Development, Government of India is implementing a scheme called Indira Mahila Yojana, aiming, inter alia, at federating the women SHGs at the village / block levels. Important to sustainability is ensuring that SHG women are accountable for the four desiderata outlined below in the right combinations which they think are viable and manageable.
Seeding and Replication of Sustainable SHGs: Women themselves must don the multi-stakeholder roles of planners, users, managers and owners of the poverty alleviation programs meant for them. Merely forming groups is not enough for capacity building among women. Training, skill development to tackle market and risk exposure need strong emphasis. Most SHGs in India are currently focusing on information sharing; awareness and confidence, capacity-building for empowerment through micro level planning and group action. SHGs promoted by NGOs exude a groundswell of confidence, determination and will power in their assertions that India’s women SHGs, fledgling though they may be, will be able to overcome teething troubles, of which women’s empowerment stands out prominently. Sustainable development is possible only if all the stakeholders of development programs participate in the development process, a prime reason why NGOs are able to show better results compared to Government agencies. The approach, considered particularly effective in the case of women, in the macro-sense, is that of sustainable SHGs. A definitive organizational, socio-economic and political framework as shown below must be at the core as a prime mover to groom SHGs as sustainable entities:
Sustainability Framework for Women’s Self Help Groups
(a)- Organizational - Sustainability
(a-1)- Encouraging self-reliant women SHGs to form groups according to felt-needs and socio-economic status creating an environment for federating and networking with other groups
(a-2)- Improving access of women to micro-credit
(a-3)- Convergence of different agencies for women’s empowerment
(a-4)- Ensuring women’s involvement in local-level planning
(b)-Economic Sustainability
(b-1)- Creating self-reliant, sustainable SHGs capable of prioritizing women’s needs and interests, and bringing about their social emancipation and economic empowerment
(b-2)- Ensuring for SHGs direct access to and control over resources through a sustained mobilization and convergence of all sectoral programs
(b-3) - Strengthening and institutionalizing the savings habit among the womenfolk and ensuring their control over own resources;
(b-4)- Infusing a subsidy-free ethos in women’s economic empowerment
(c) Political Empowerment Sustainability
(c-1)-Motivation to work for change, priming womenfolk to moving up the ladder economically and politically
• Confidence and awareness among SHG members regarding
• women’s status, legal rights, health, nutrition, education,
• hygiene & environment and of other socio-economic and
• political issues impacting their lives.
(c-2)- Interaction with professional assistance, networking with pressure for ensuring women’s empowerment / rights
Women SHGs - a Hunting Ground for Research
Change in Resource using Competencies: Over the past four decades, planned interventions have from time to time ushered in new institutions and innovative experiments to mobilize rural social capital in the Asian region. Rural women are increasingly being organized into small SHGs to procure credit for micro-enterprises. Access to credit makes it necessary for women to acquire resource use competencies. These competencies include (a) women understanding their obligations and rights relevant to credit, (b) women cultivating skills to identify, set up and operate profitable micro-enterprises and (c) learning to function in a formal or semi-formal organizational structure of SHGs linked to NGOs that foster non-traditional norms of participation and articulation.
Although social innovations such as credit groups, supported by donor agencies, have opened up opportunities for rural women, a challenge yet lies in developing resource competencies taking advantage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to reach them out by distance education. Can SHGs also be learner groups for distance education outreach? Can women leaders, developed through women’s participation in SHGs, be targeted as facilitators of a learner group? On production–related resource use competencies, adopting cash crops such as onion, tomato or ginger in a contract farmer relationship requires learning about markets and prices, as well as of the obligations and problems of being tied to a world market through a third party. Rural women, unfamiliar as they are with world market linkages, lack key competencies to negotiate and deal with complex contractual relationships, and thus be economically disadvantaged. Can the content of a distance learning package include resource use competency know-how for women, to help them function effectively amidst complex economic transactions?
Sustainable SHGs and Economic Development: Sustainable development must be people centric; ensure quality and not quantity of growth. Alternative development models are lately gaining ground as current models have failed to fulfill people’s aspirations. Deficiencies in the present development models must be corrected on the following lines:
• Sustainable development models must have a basic needs orientation, and not exploitative;
•Sustainable models must not result in alienating people from critical development processes (leading to deficiencies/ default in gender inclusion, participation, bottom-up micro-level planning etc)
• Presents models incorporate mechanisms of centralization of sorts with sporadic excesses in control over resources and decision-making.
An elevated status to people should therefore be the main plank of any new people-centric strategy so essential for success especially of women SHGs.
• People must be subjects and not objects of development. Creativity and enhancement of human potential, and self confidence among people to steer their own vision and destiny, and inner satisfaction that forms the basis of a convivial living in an enlightened society, must be the guiding principles in all development endeavors.
Conclusions
As can be gauged from above discussion, poverty is a multi-faceted problem. Involving finances, food supply, housing, infrastructure, education, health and hygiene, war, politics, self-regard and more, poverty is by and large a women’s issue. “There can be no one single solution to poverty” is a major conclusion emerging from a recent Survey (April 2003) prepared by Sub-Committee for the Eradication of Poverty of the NGO Committee for Social Development to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). Many issues must be addressed and a variety of approaches must be taken to ease impoverishment among the peoples of the world. The projects surveyed represent a diverse, if not exhaustive, array of active programs managed by NGOs and local communities, often in partnership with government. They are reducing local poverty and its resulting problems.
Formidable as it is the task of getting at an analyzed, well assimilated and cultured viewpoint on promoting Self Help Groups in India, this Paper seeks to win inspiration from (a)-the PovertyNet.org (world Bank’s) site which provides good insights on how to go further in this regard; and (b)-the UN Sub-Committee’s Survey Report on best practices in promoting an NGO-SHG praxis. Borrowing a leaf from PovertyNet.org’s Empowerment web pages on Tamil Nadu is recommended in this context.
PovertyNet.Org’s Empowerment Web Pages on Tamil Nadu
The Government of Tamil Nadu in partnership with the World Bank is preparing the Tamil Nadu Empowerment and Poverty Reduction Project, which seeks to improve the livelihoods and quality of life of the rural poor (particularly women and other disadvantaged groups) through social, economic and democratic empowerment. Slated to go to the Board in FY05of their Project Business Plan, which boasts of the following components:
The Project Concept Document (PCD) identifies four components: Institutional and Organizational Development: including support to self managed organizations of the poor, strengthening and capacity building of village level elected representatives, and building NGO capacity to work as intermediaries and change agents.
Panchayat Support: including financial support to Gram Panchayats to implement demand driven community infrastructure and service plans (such as bridle paths and small connecting roads, rural water supply, village schools and small health centers), and capital investment to support development of the Panchayat's own basic infrastructure and technical assistance needs (services of financial experts, private providers, contractors and technical support).
Enterprise Development: including support to innovative pilots for small and medium scale enterprises to improve local productivity and generate wage employment. The component would enable SHGs, common interest groups and their federations to undertake initiatives to enhance value-addition from their members' products and develop new enterprises and joint ventures.
Vulnerability Reduction: including community based insurance packages to address sources of risks and income instability, support to eradicate child labor and trafficking, and support to people with disabilities.
Taken together, these components seek to address both the supply side and the demand side of development in the state: improving the ability of local governments to respond to the interest of their citizens, and increasing poor people's incomes and reducing their vulnerability by creating opportunities for them to engage in society and organize for collective action. The World Bank’s PovertyNet.org’s web page says, “tracking and reporting the project progress where new and interesting learning and developments can be shared, and general information about the project disseminated”. Through this a "real time collective learning” process can take place regarding how to design and implement strategies to empower poor people”. Once such improvements are up and running, development information on this website can offer noteworthy insights into best practices for NGO-SHG praxis.
Goal-oriented drive in organizing and creating visibility for self-employed women, enabling them to get a higher income and have control over their own resources is paramount. A large number of people assert deep interest in the election processes, and encourage the community to exercise their franchise wisely.
No comments:
Post a Comment