Empowerment of Women through Self Help Groups in Amreli district of Gujarat

Economic independence is one of the means to empower the women. Enhancing women's economic productivity is an important strategy for improving the welfare of 60 million Indian households living below the poverty line. Self help groups (SHG) are small informal associations created for the purpose of enabling members to reap economic benefit out of mutual help, solidarity, and joint responsibility. The benefits include mobilisation of savings and credit facilities and pursuit of group enterprise activities. The group-based approach not only enables the poor to accumulate capital by way of small savings but also helps them to get access to formal credit facilities. The overall objective of the present study was to analysis the economic empowerment of women though SHGs in ten villages of Amreli District of Gujarat State. Totally 180 respondents were selected from the ten villages by using simple random sampling method and 9 SHG and 9 Non SHG members were selected from the same villages for comparative study. The result revealed that the independent sample ‘Z’ test showed that there was highly significant difference in the mean values of SHG members and Non SHG members in case of components of economic empowerment of women like saving and investment, self sufficiency, knowledge about banking system and skill development.