Self Help Groups – An Empowerment Model or Financial Model: Perceptions of Stakeholders

Economic and social marginalisation of poor by formal credit agencies including cooperatives led to the emergence of Self Help Groups (SHGs). SHGs emerge as an important strategy for empowering women, alleviating poverty and act as alternative credit source to the poor. Researchers identify SHGs as both empowerment and financial model of development. Sa-Dhan (2003) has sort out a lot of unresolved issues in quality assessment of SHGs for further discussion and research. The main objective of this paper is to assess the opinion of the direct stakeholders of SHGs regarding the issue whether SHG is an empowerment model or financial model. The study is conducted by using multi-stage random sampling method to collect primary data from the selected Development Blocks of Nagaon districts of Assam. It is observed that there is no correlation between perceptions of stakeholders about SHG as Empowerment & Financial model. Moreover, from the ANOVA test on overall score of variables on empowerment model, we conclude that at least one of the group mean is significantly different from the others while in case of overall score of variables on financial model, we conclude that the group mean is not significantly different from the others. Keywords: empowerment Model, financial Model, micro finance, perceptions of stakeholders, self help group