Leveraging self-help groups for women’s collective empowerment : Evidence from India on the importance of decision making in the public sphere

Abstract

In India and elsewhere, the organization of poor women into groups focused on savings and credit activities, termed self-help groups (SHGs), has proven to be an exceptionally popular development model. Although many in the development sector now recognize that microfinance is not the cure-all for poverty it was once touted to be, there remains an 8 million-strong body of SHGs across India alone, constituting a vast network of women’s organizations at the grassroots level. Although scholars and development practitioners alike recognize the potential of SHGs to enable socio-economic change beyond the microfinance ambit, there remains very little scholarly understanding of how such processes actually emerge in practice. Better understanding these dynamics could enable the development of empirically-based programs that support SHGs to tackle the social issues of concern to them and their communities. Given India’s general trend toward decentralization, yet the tendency for village councils to remain male-dominated, empowering SHGs to take on resource governance roles may present a powerful pathway by which to realize both anti-poverty and women’s empowerment goals. In this presentation, I will report on a collective of SHGs in rural West Bengal and the mechanisms by which they pursued projects aimed at talking poverty and enhancing the resource base of their villages. Women’s self-led projects to tackle food insecurity and alcoholism led to enduring shifts in the perceptions of women’s capabilities, both among themselves and among other community members. In this presentation, I will explore the process of change through which these outcomes were possible.