literature review on self help groups

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The power of the collective empowers women: Evidence from self-help groups in India

a International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, United States

Kalyani Raghunathan

b International Food Policy Research Institute, New Delhi, India

Alejandra Arrieta

c University of Washington, Department of Health Metrics Sciences, United States

Amir Jilani

d Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines

Shinjini Pandey

e Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States

• • We study the impacts of women’s Self-help group membership on women’s and men’s empowerment.
• • We measure empowerment using two alternate indices: the A-WEAI and the Pro-WEAI.
• • We find that SHG membership has a significant positive impact on aggregate measures of women’s empowerment.
• • We also find that SHG membership reduces the gap between men’s and women’s empowerment scores.
• • The impacts are driven by increase in control over income, decisionmaking over credit, and active involvement in groups.

Women’s groups are important rural social and financial institutions in South Asia. In India, a large majority of women’s groups programs are implemented through self-help groups (SHGs). Originally designed as savings and credit groups, the role of SHGs has expanded to include creating health and nutrition awareness, improving governance, and addressing social issues related to gender- and caste-based discrimination. This paper uses panel data from 1470 rural Indian women from five states to study the impact of SHG membership on women’s empowerment in agriculture, using the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and the abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI). Because SHG membership was not randomized and women who self-select to be SHG members may be systematically different from non-members, we employ nearest neighbor matching methods to attribute the impact of SHG membership on women’s empowerment in agriculture and intrahousehold inequality.

Our findings suggest that SHG membership has a significant positive impact on aggregate measures of women’s empowerment and reduces the gap between men’s and women’s empowerment scores. This improvement in aggregate empowerment is driven by improvements in women’s scores, not a deterioration in men’s. Greater control over income, greater decisionmaking over credit, and (somewhat mechanistically, given the treatment) greater and more active involvement in groups within the community lead to improvements in women’s scores. However, impacts on other areas of empowerment are limited. The insignificant impacts on attitudes towards domestic violence and respect within the household suggest that women’s groups alone may be insufficient to change deep-seated gender norms that disempower women. Our results have implications for the design and scale-up of women’s group-based programs in South Asia, including the possibility that involving men is needed to change gender norms.

1. Introduction

Over the past three decades, women’s groups have rapidly gained prominence as rural social and financial institutions, particularly in South Asia. In India, many women’s groups programs are implemented through self-help groups (SHGs). SHGs are groups of 10–20 women that meet at regular intervals to deposit money into a group-held account from which loans can be requested in times of need. These groups are typically formed by women who live close to one another and are ethnically and economically homogenous ( Baland et al., 2011 , Sharma, 2001 ). SHGs reaching maturity are provided linkages to bank accounts and lines of credit, federated into higher-order collectives, and provided a range of other inputs – information on agricultural practices, inputs into these practices, trainings on livelihoods activities and so on - depending on the government entity or nongovernmental organization (NGO) that facilitates their formation. More recently, their role has expanded to include creating health and nutrition awareness, generating demand for various government programs, ensuring transparency in the implementation of government schemes, and tackling social issues ranging from dowry and domestic violence to gender- and caste-based discrimination ( Chen, Jhabvala, Kanbur, & Richards, 2007 cited in Desai and Joshi, 2013 , Kumar et al., 2019 ).

This paper uses data on poor rural men and women from five states in eastern and central India to study the impacts of group membership on women’s empowerment. We use two variations of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (the WEAI) to estimate the effect of SHG membership on the level of women’s empowerment, and her empowerment relative to that of her partner. We find that SHG membership positively and significantly affects women’s overall empowerment score and reduces the gap in empowerment scores between the couple. While SHG membership has strong impacts on control over income and decisionmaking, among other outcomes, it does not affect other forms of empowerment that are driven by gender norms that might be harder to shift, such as attitudes towards domestic violence and respect within the household. Reassuringly, reductions in the empowerment score gap are not driven by the disempowerment of men.

SHG programs in India have deliberately targeted women not only due to their low status in society relative to men, but also because women’s SHGs have proved to be successful and sustainable ( Parida & Sinha, 2010 ). As a result of their reach – these groups currently reach more than 50 million households across the country ( NRLM, 2020 ) – donors and policymakers are increasingly interested in using SHGs as platforms for service delivery, as collateral substitutes that help to build other forms of capital, and as vehicles for women’s empowerment. Kumar et al. (2018) develop a conceptual framework linking women’s group-based programs to health and nutrition outcomes among women and assert that women's groups can be socially empowering; they help build social capital by creating a comfortable space where women can voice their opinions and share experiences with fellow members, often achieved through group-building exercises that teach listening skills, build trust, and enhance participation. Many group-based programs also lend themselves to interventions that emphasize collective action. For example, using group platforms to deliver participatory learning and action (PLA) strategies enables members to effectively identify shared problems, plan strategies, act together, and assess impacts ( Harris-Fry et al., 2016 , Kanani et al., 2015 ); this approach is distinguished from others that simply transmit information to members but do not necessarily build community capacity to act collectively.

The evidence on whether these groups do indeed improve women’s empowerment is, however, somewhat mixed. A recent systematic review by Brody et al. (2017) found that women’s economic SHGs have positive effects on economic and political empowerment, women’s mobility, and women’s control over family planning, although the authors did not find evidence of positive effects of SHGs on psychological empowerment. Qualitative evidence from rural Nepal found that increased access to funds through community women’s groups did increase women’s independence and decisionmaking to some extent ( Morrison et al., 2010 ); Morrison et al., 2019 also find that PLA approaches with women’s groups in four countries – Bangladesh India, Nepal and Malawi – increased women’s confidence to negotiate with family members around adoption of recommended behaviors. In contrast, a review of the (largely South Asia focused) literature on the impact of group-based community mobilization efforts on women and children’s health included several qualitative and quantitative studies that reported increases in self-confidence or self-efficacy but concluded that the overall quality of evidence on this aspect was low ( Gram, Fitchett, Ashraf, Daruwalla, & Osrin, 2019a ). In a multi-arm study of pregnant women’s groups in rural Nepal, Gram, Morrison et al (2019b) find limited evidence of improvements in women’s agency as a result either of a participatory learning and action (PLA) approach alone or of PLA combined with food or cash transfers. In the context of participatory women’s groups in rural Nepal, Gram, Morrison et al., 2019b looked at long-term impacts on women’s agency – measured using the Relative Autonomy Index – and found no impact either of initial or subsequent exposure to the PLA groups.

In fact, Gram, Morrison et al. (2019b) caution that women’s agency might be a prerequisite to the success of these groups, rather than a consequence of women’s participation. For women to benefit from any programmatic inputs, they need to have some level of control or agency over their own decisions and be respected within their communities. Strategies to empower women may include increasing their financial independence, encouraging them to run for elected positions in political offices or village councils, promoting a more gender-equitable division of household labor, building perceptions of autonomy and self-wellbeing, improving women’s negotiating skills with husbands, and increasing control over reproductive choices, among others. As the disempowered woman builds confidence and gains support from men and the community at large, she will be better able to make decisions that promote her own health and that of her children ( Sraboni, Malapit, Quisumbing, & Ahmed, 2014 ).

Whether SHGs empower women in agriculture is important in the Indian context for several reasons. The first is one of scale. SHGs formed under the national government initiative – the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) – already cover approximately 48 million households, and plan to reach 100 million households by 2024 ( Ministry of Rural Development, 2018 ). Significant resources have been and continue to be invested both by government and NGOs to form and strengthen SHGs.

Second, women in India fare worse than men along several indicators. The female adult literacy rate is just 59% (versus that for males at 79%), women form only 24.6% of the total labor force, and women farmers control <13% of total operational holdings ( World Bank, 2011 , Agriculture Census, 2010-11 ). Given their low status in society, empowering women is, of course, intrinsically valuable. In addition, some studies have documented linkages with other development goals, such as eliminating poverty, reducing hunger and malnutrition, and achieving good health and well-being for women and their families ( Cunningham et al., 2015 , Malapit et al., 201a , Malapit et al., 2015 , Ruel et al., 2018 , Sraboni et al., 2014 ), though the broader evidence base for low and middle-income countries is mixed ( Harris-Fry et al., 2020 ), and certain time-intensive interventions could have unintended consequences by competing with caregiving, rest or domestic chores like food preparation in certain contexts ( Carlson et al., 2015 , Johnston et al., 2015 , Komatsu et al., 2018 ).

Third, agriculture is the largest sector in India, employing almost half the population ( Gillespie et al., 2012 , Planning Commission, 2007 , Census, 2011 ), but women farmers control a very small proportion of total landholdings and are often unreached by government systems of information and agricultural extension. As a result, women farmers are often unable to access the information needed to make decisions around production, or to enhance their productivity by adopting newer and more innovative methods. Women farmers from historically marginalized social groups – Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) – are doubly constrained, as the female and caste disadvantages reinforce each other: a study on gender and agriculture extension in India ( World Bank and IFPRI, 2010 ) found that villages represented by female gram panchayat members from scheduled castes received significantly fewer resources, such as agricultural extension services, than others. These gender-based inequities are, of course, not limited to India, with women in several contexts having lower asset ownership, lower labor force participation and greater work-related burdens ( Harris-Fry et al., 2020 , Ruel et al., 2018 , Doss et al., 2015 , Palacios-López and López, 2015 ). These inequities often serve to limit the ability of agricultural interventions to bolster household incomes and food security and ensure equitable access to nutritious diets ( Harris-Fry et al., 2020 ). For all these reasons, studying the impact of SHGs on women’s empowerment in agriculture - particularly those SHGs that target marginalized caste and tribe groups - could have wide-ranging policy implications in India.

We use data from an impact evaluation of a nutrition-sensitive agriculture intervention being implemented in five states in India by Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN), one of India’s largest NGOs, to study the impact of SHG membership on women’s empowerment in agriculture. PRADAN works to form, strengthen, and support women’s SHGs, often independently but on occasion in collaboration with the National or State-specific Rural Livelihoods Missions. The broader nutrition-sensitive agriculture intervention being evaluated was delivered through the PRADAN SHG platform, but other organizations, both NGO- and government-led, work in these study areas to form and support SHGs, resulting in a mix of PRADAN and non-PRADAN groups. We use a subsample drawn from within the sample of individuals selected for inclusion in the broader evaluation and look specifically at membership in any SHG – either PRADAN- or government- or NGO-supported – on women’s empowerment measures. Thus, while nested within the context of a larger impact evaluation, the data for this study should be viewed as a stand-alone dataset. For this study, we use two recently developed measures of women’s empowerment: the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), which was designed in collaboration with 13 agricultural development projects for project use ( Malapit et al., 2019 , Malapit et al., 2019 ), and an abbreviated version of a recent internationally validated measure of empowerment, the A-WEAI ( Malapit, Pinkstaff, Sproule, Kovarik, Quisumbing, & Meinzen-Dick, 2017 ), which was designed for large-scale, population-based surveys. Both indexes are modifications of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) ( Alkire et al., 2013 ), and, like the WEAI, are based on interviews of the primary male and female adults in the same household. Both pro-WEAI and the A-WEAI provide an aggregate measure of empowerment as well as a measure of intrahousehold empowerment gaps. Because they are additive, decomposable Alkire and Foster (2011) indices, they can be decomposed into their component indicators to understand specific pathways of impact. Comparing the results from both the indices also allows us to analyze what can be learned from additional indicators that were chosen by projects themselves for inclusion in the pro-WEAI.

Our analysis is based on panel data collected in 2015 and 2017 from 1470 households across five states in India. These 1470 households are drawn from the larger impact evaluation study sample and include those for which we have information both on membership in any SHG (PRADAN or non-PRADAN) and on women’s empowerment. Because access to SHG membership in our sample was not random and women who self-select to join SHGs may be systematically different from those who do not, we employ nearest neighbor matching (NNM) methods to attribute causality. We analyze the impact of SHG membership on overall empowerment measures at the individual and household level - the aggregate empowerment score and the empowerment gap - and then unpack these results by looking at the component indicators for each empowerment domain. Wherever relevant, impacts are estimated for both women and men. In the case of men, comparisons are made between men whose partners are SHG members and those whose partners do not belong to an SHG.

We find that SHG membership has a significant positive impact on aggregate measures of women’s empowerment and reduces the gap in empowerment scores of women and men within the same household. Results are qualitatively similar whether we use pro-WEAI or A-WEAI. Higher levels of aggregate empowerment for women SHG members is driven by greater control over income, greater decisionmaking over credit, and greater and more active involvement in groups within the community. However, impacts on production decisions and asset ownership are limited, and the weakly significant and negative impacts on workloads indicate that group membership may involve tradeoffs in terms of time use. While SHG members can go to more places than nonmembers—owing possibly to the need to attend group activities—their mobility remains limited. The insignificant impacts on other measures of empowerment related to attitudes towards intimate partner violence and respect within the household suggests that, despite impacts on some measures of empowerment, being an SHG member may not be enough to change deep-seated gender norms that disempower women. Finally, and perhaps reassuringly, greater empowerment of women in some areas and the smaller empowerment gap between spouses does not appear to come from men’s disempowerment. Except for the credit domain, where men married to SHG members also have greater participation in credit-related decisions, the impact of having a wife who belongs to an SHG on men’s empowerment outcomes is small and largely insignificant.

Our findings add to the small but growing literature on the impact of women’s groups on various aspects of empowerment. The literature on social capital has long pointed to the importance of women’s groups as pathways towards empowerment (for a review, see Meinzen-Dick, Behrman, Pandolfelli,Peterman, & Quisumbing, 2014 ), but the specific pathways of impact have been studied only relatively recently, following the growth and expansion of these platforms for service delivery in South Asia. Brody et al. (2017) ’s systematic review of the literature on SHGs in South Asia and their impact on women’s empowerment identifies three immediate outcomes of group membership - improved access to credit, training and other resources provided through the groups, exposure to group support, and the accumulation of social capital, which in turn lead to intermediate outcomes of increased income and savings, reduced debt, and increased autonomy and self-efficacy. These, in turn, can result in both positive and adverse long-term impacts – the increased ability to translate choices into actions but also the possibility of increased tension within the household, stigma and backlash from the community or a greater incidence of domestic violence. Reassuringly, their review of the evidence from qualitative and quantitative studies suggests that while SHGs improve women’s economic and political empowerment, their mobility, and their control over family planning, there is no evidence of an adverse effect on the incidence of domestic violence.

Using retrospective data from the JEEViKA SHG-based project in Bihar, Datta (2015) finds evidence of reduced debt and increased mobility, decision-making and collective action for beneficiary households. These findings serve to corroborate those of Brody et al. (2017) , although the data, being retrospective, is subject to recall bias.

In related work using baseline data from this study, Kumar et al. (2019) apply NNM methods to show that SHG members are more politically engaged than nonmembers, more aware of their rights and entitlements, and, perhaps owing to this increased awareness, more likely to have availed of a greater number of government entitlement schemes. SHG members also have wider social networks and display greater mobility than nonmembers. Using the same data, Raghunathan, Kannan, and Quisumbing (2019) find that SHG membership increases women’s access to information and their participation in some agricultural decisions, but has limited impact on agricultural practices or outcomes, possibly due to financial constraints, social norms, and women’s domestic responsibilities. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of SHG membership on the WEAI and its variants has not yet been studied in the context of South Asia, though several evaluations are currently underway.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the measurement of women’s empowerment and how the WEAI and its adaptations can be used to assess the impacts of interventions. Section 3 describes the data used for analysis, and the empirical strategy. Section 4 presents the results from each of our specifications, and Section 5 concludes with a discussion of our findings.

2. Measuring empowerment

Measuring women’s empowerment poses a challenge, as it is a complex multidimensional concept that can be measured in many different ways ( Agarwala and Lynch, 2006 , Kabeer, 1999 , Miedema et al., 2018 , Pratley, 2016 , Santoso et al., 2019 ). Much of the literature studying women’s empowerment has used proxy measures, like mobility, decision-making power over allocation of household resources, participation in political processes, strength of social networks, and so on. As Santoso et al. (2019) point out, differences in the ways in which these measures are collected and aggregated for use adds an additional layer of complexity to the study of women’s empowerment. In addition, these measures are not necessarily grounded in a theoretically robust definition of empowerment, and often rely on what is available in existing data sets, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys, which tend to focus on decisionmaking in the domestic and reproductive spheres. Ewerling et al. (2017) use DHS data from 34 countries to propose the Survey-based Women’s EmPowERment index or SWPER; while this provides a useful starting point, the construction of this index has been critiqued, and the suggestion of more thorough psychometric assessments is made ( Yount, Peterman, & Cheong, 2018 ).

In fact, attempts to develop and formalize women’s empowerment measures that are based in theories of empowerment and the resources-agency-achievements framework laid out in Kabeer (1999) are fairly recent. This paper improves upon the existing literature by using two modifications of one such index – the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) ( Alkire et al., 2013 ), a survey-based, internationally validated measure of women’s empowerment in the agricultural sector. These modifications, discussed below, are the project-level WEAI (pro-WEAI) ( Malapit et al., 2019 , Malapit et al., 2019 ) and the abbreviated WEAI (A-WEAI) ( Malapit et al., 201a , Malapit et al., 2015 ). All WEAI-based measures draw from Kabeer’s (1999) definition of empowerment as expanding people’s ability to make strategic life choices, particularly in contexts in which this ability had previously been denied to them. In this definition, the ability to exercise choice encompasses three dimensions: resources (not only access but also income and future claims to material, human, and social resources), agency (processes of decision-making, negotiation, etc.), and achievements (well-being outcomes, educational levels). The WEAI family of measures focuses on “agency” – far less studied than resources or achievements – because it directly addresses the issue of choice or decision-making.

Pro-WEAI and A-WEAI are similar indexes with some differences in emphasis. Pro-WEAI was developed by the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) in response to demand from implementors of agricultural development projects for an empowerment measure that captured aspects of empowerment relevant to the success of their projects and that was more closely linked to theories of agency. 1 It covers three domains of intrinsic, instrumental and collective agency, and comprises 12 indicators that implementors thought were important aspects of project success ( Malapit et al., 2019 , Malapit et al., 2019 ). The A-WEAI, which was designed for implementation in population-based surveys, was developed in response to partners’ requests to reduce interview time and eliminate modules that were time-consuming, sensitive, and difficult to understand ( Malapit et al., 201a , Malapit et al., 2015 ). In contrast to the pro-WEAI, A-WEAI covers five-domains and consists of six indicators. A-WEAI can be derived from pro-WEAI with a slightly different weighting structure and modified indicator cut-offs, and hence can be thought of as being nested in pro-WEAI. A comparison between the two indexes is presented in Table 1 , with pro-WEAI indicators in the left column and A-WEAI indicators on the right.

Domains and indicators of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI).

Notes: n/a means “not applicable” and applies to pro-WEAI indicators that are not included in A-WEAI. Cells shaded in green are indicators that are common to both indices.

In our study, we measure empowerment using the pro-WEAI and the A-WEAI. Both are aggregate indices composed of two sub-indices, the aggregate empowerment score and the gender parity index (GPI) 2 . In pro-WEAI, the empowerment score is defined over three domains and is hence called the 3DE (3 Domains of Empowerment); in A-WEAI, the empowerment score is defined over five domains and is called the 5DE. The 3DE, the first sub-index of the pro-WEAI, assesses whether individuals are empowered in the three domains of intrinsic, instrumental (“power to”) and collective (“power with”) agency. Intrinsic agency, or “power within”, assesses an individual’s sense of worth, self-confidence, and self-respect. This includes indicators for autonomy in income, self-efficacy, attitudes about intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, and respect among household members. Instrumental agency, or “power to”, measures an individual’s ability to make decisions in their own best interest and includes indicators for input in productive decisions, ownership of land and other assets, access to and decisions on financial services, control over use of income, work balance, and visiting important locations. Finally, collective agency, or “power with”, determines the power of association and includes indicators for group membership and membership in influential groups. The respondent is identified as being empowered in each of the 12 indicators based on pre-determined thresholds, or cutoffs. A simple equal weighting structure ( Table 1 ) is used to aggregate scores from the 12 indicators in these three domains into the 3DE score. In the A-WEAI, a similar procedure is followed, but with different weights. Definitions of the three domains under pro-WEAI, the five domains under the A-WEAI, the corresponding indicators, the definition of adequacy, and their weights are presented in Table 1 . The 3DE and 5DE scores, measured at the individual level, measure the extent to which an individual is empowered, with higher 3DE and 5DE scores indicating greater empowerment.

Because the same information is also collected from the respondent woman’s husband or partner (or a male decision maker if the partner is not available), 3DE and 5DE scores are also computed for the primary male. A comparison of these scores for the primary male and female within the same household is used to calculate the gender gap in empowerment, referred to as the intrahousehold inequality score. This gap is zero in households where the woman is empowered (irrespective of relative empowerment of the primary male and female respondent). 3 For households where the woman is not empowered, the gender gap provides a measure of the gap in empowerment scores that needs to be closed for the woman to be as empowered as the man. The greater the gender gap, the greater the shortfall in women’s empowerment.

This intrahousehold empowerment gap is used to determine whether the household achieves gender parity in empowerment. This is aggregated into the second sub-index, the GPI, which measures the relative equality in empowerment of men and women at the sample level. The 3DE and 5DE contribute 90 percent of the weight to the pro-WEAI and A-WEAI, respectively, and the GPI contributes the remaining 10 percent. Further details on the computation of the two indexes are found in Malapit et al., 2019 , Malapit et al., 2019 , Malapit et al., 201a .

3. Data and methods

We use two rounds of panel data on 1470 rural Indian women to study the impact of SHG membership on women’s empowerment. We also use data on 1344 rural Indian men (either the spouse of the respondent woman or another primary male decisionmaker within the household) to measure the impact of women’s membership in SHGs on men’s empowerment and the gender gap in empowerment. As mentioned earlier, the data used in this study was collected as part of the baseline and midline surveys of a larger four-year evaluation of the nutrition-intensification efforts led by PRADAN. PRADAN has worked to form and strengthen women’s SHGs and their higher-level federations since the early 1980s. It works primarily in marginalized communities, particularly those with high tribal populations. Along with SHG formation and capacity building it also engages women in livelihoods and agriculture to improve their economic empowerment and role in agriculture, and, in recent years, has expanded its thematic focus to include rights and entitlements, gender issues, and health, nutrition and sanitation. Along with PRADAN, several government-led State and National Rural Livelihoods Missions as well as NGOs also work to form and support SHGs in these same areas. As a result, women in our sample could be members of either PRADAN SHGs or those supported by these other organizations.

Our data are from eight districts in five states in eastern and central India (Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal), determined in consultation with PRADAN. Three blocks were selected in each district of the study, from each block between five and seven villages were chosen at random from the full list of villages, and from each village, 20 women were selected at random from among all ever-married women aged 15–49. The final sample size at baseline was 2744 women from 136 villages in 24 blocks in 8 districts in 5 states. Sample selection was not conditioned on SHG membership, and at baseline approximately 38% of the female respondents in our sample belonged to an SHG. This number rose to 50% by midline; again, these SHGs are a mix of PRADAN and non-PRADAN SHGs.

The baseline survey was fielded from November 2015 to January 2016, and collected information on household socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, participation in SHG platforms and women’s empowerment, among other variables. The primary respondent was the woman, but some modules, including the WEAI, were also administered to a male member of the household (often the spouse of the respondent woman). At baseline, only 1674 out of 2744 (60%) of the households had both male and female respondents for the WEAI modules. Subsequent power calculations based on the overall evaluation design with three arms and eight clusters per arm determined the minimum required sample size to detect reasonable changes in WEAI indicators was 40% of the original baseline sample. During the midline survey, conducted from November 2017 to January 2018, we administered the WEAI-related modules to only that subsample of 1674 households for which we had baseline data on the WEAI-related modules from both a female and male respondent. 4 This served to reduce both the cost of the survey and the burden on respondents. After accounting for attrition, we ended up with a subsample of 1470 women and 1344 men, which forms the sample for our analysis in this paper. Finally, since the pro-WEAI was still being developed when the midline survey was fielded, we implemented a partial pro-WEAI module that included only 10 of the 12 indicators. This should be considered when comparing our results to studies using the full pro-WEAI.

Table 2 presents descriptive statistics on characteristics of the respondent women, households and villages. Women in our sample are about 32–33 years old, 14 percent have 5 or fewer years of schooling and 26–29 percent do not work outside the home. SHG members are more likely to be older and have been married longer. Most women in the sample co-reside with their husbands, while slightly more than 20 percent (close to 15 percent) also co-reside with their mothers-in-law (fathers-in-law).

Summary Statistics: Baseline Covariates by SHG membership at midline.

Notes: Standard errors in parenthesis. *, **, *** represent significance at 10, 5 and 1 percent, respectively.

The caste composition across SHG members and nonmembers is skewed with SHG members more likely to be OBC women and less likely to be ST. Village characteristics are not statistically significantly different for those individuals who are nonmembers versus those who are members, in other words, members and nonmembers belong to similar villages: Most villages have a government primary school and an Anganwadi (early childhood development) center, and are remote, located on average more than 21 km away from the nearest town.

Table 3 presents the overall empowerment indicators for the study sample and shows that more women than men are disempowered in this rural Indian sample, using either pro-WEAI or A-WEAI. We present two alternative empowerment scores for the pro-WEAI using different cut-offs. In the standard pro-WEAI case, based on 12 indicators, an individual is classified as empowered if they are empowered in 10 out of the 12 indicators. Because we only have 10 indicators, we compute the empowerment scores using two alternative cut-offs: (1) empowered in 7 out of 10 and (2) empowered in 8 out of 10 indicators. The aggregate empowerment score for women ranges between 0.66 and 0.73 using pro-WEAI (0.73 using A-WEAI); the men’s aggregate score for pro-WEAI ranges between 0.73 and 0.84 (0.83 for A-WEAI). The difference in the scores between the two measures is a result of the stricter threshold to be classified as empowered in pro-WEAI; indeed, the disempowered headcount (the percentage not achieving empowerment) is much higher for both women and men using pro-WEAI.

Pro-WEAI and A-WEAI empowerment scores and gender parity.

The GPI, as described above, presents the proportion of households that achieve gender parity based on the intrahousehold inequality score; this is computed only for the subsample of dual adult households. Half the women in dual-adult households (51%) achieve gender parity using the pro-WEAI and the stricter threshold (8 indicators out of 10); the other half do not. These numbers are not substantially different for A-WEAI at 53% (47%) for those achieving (not achieving) gender parity. The percentage of women in dual adult households that achieve gender parity is 59% with the less strict cut-off of being empowered in at least 7 indicators.

The overall pro-WEAI score, a weighted average of the woman’s 3DE score and the GPI is 0.68 (for the 8 out of 10 cut-off) and 0.75 (for the 7 out of 10 cut-off); the corresponding value using A-WEAI is 0.75. A comparison of the distribution of pro-WEAI and A-WEAI shows that the distributions are fairly similar ( Fig. 1 ). For the rest of the paper we use the stricter cut-off for the pro-WEAI empowerment scores.

Combined adequacy score distribution.

Does the extent of disempowerment vary across households depending on whether the woman belongs to an SHG? Table 4 presents summary statistics for our outcome variables among the women and men in our sample, by women’s SHG membership status: (i) composite A-WEAI indicators: the 5DE score for the respondent woman, the measure of the gender gap between the respondent woman and her partner, (ii) for each of the component indicators, the underlying binary variables indicating whether the respondent woman/man is empowered in that indicator, and (iii) the continuous measures based on which the binary variables are constructed.

Empowerment outcomes for women and men, members vs. nonmembers.

Many of the women’s empowerment indicators presented in Table 4 are significantly better for SHG members compared to nonmembers – indicating that on average SHG members are more empowered. Overall empowerment scores are higher for SHG members, and empowerment gaps with men within the same household are significantly lower, using pro-WEAI and A-WEAI-based measures. Women who are SHG members have more input into agricultural production and decisions on financial services, make more decisions regarding financial services, and have greater input in income decisions. They are also likely to be active in more groups within their communities and to visit more places than non-SHG members, both of which may occur because of SHG-related activities. Although there appears to be a small and weakly significant difference in asset ownership between SHG members and nonmembers, we do not find any difference in terms of workload. Also, there is a lack of apparent difference in attitudes towards intimate partner violence and respect within the household.

Interestingly, men whose wives are SHG members are more empowered in several dimensions compared to those whose wives are nonmembers. Overall empowerment scores are higher for husbands of members, along with the number of assets solely or jointly owned, the number of credit sources in which the husband participates in decisionmaking (whether solely or jointly), group membership, and membership in influential groups. The only indicator on which husbands of SHG members do worse than those of nonmembers is mobility, but this is only weakly significant, and the magnitude of the impact is small. In addition, this finding is consistent with the higher number of places that SHG member women visit; if wives are able to visit these places more freely, they may not need their husbands to.

Although differences in empowerment indicators may be attributable to SHG membership, these descriptive statistics do not account for intrinsic or extrinsic differences between women who choose to be SHG members and those that do not, and their husbands. We address this selection bias in the empirical strategy below.

3.2. Empirical strategy

To assess the impact of SHG membership on women’s empowerment, one needs to consider that access to SHG membership in our sample was not random, and most villages in our sample already had some SHG presence during the baseline survey. Membership is voluntary, and women self-select to be SHG members. The primary identification challenge is to isolate the causal link between SHG membership and our measures of empowerment from any effects of omitted or unobservable factors that may be driving the outcome of interest and be correlated with SHG membership.

In a simple ordinary least squares (OLS) specification as given in equation 1 below, we would regress our measure of women’s empowerment for individual i at time t , Y it , on an indicator for SHG membership, SHGmembe r it . In this specification, β 1 is the coefficient of interest. However, in the absence of random assignment of women to SHGs, i.e. where c o v S H G m e m b e r it , ε it ≠ 0 , β 1 is likely to be a biased estimate of the effect of SHG membership on women’s empowerment.

OLS estimates are potentially biased if women who decide to join an SHG are fundamentally different from those who do not. Self-selection into SHG membership could confound the effect of the unobservable differences between members and nonmembers with the effect of belonging to an SHG, thereby biasing the impact estimate of SHG membership. In our study, the lack of a clear geographical placement and/or targeting criteria and SHGs’ presence in these areas prior to our baseline survey precluded the use of a randomized controlled trial or regression discontinuity design as an identification strategy. We therefore decided to apply matching methods to examine the impact of SHG membership on women’s empowerment.

We construct a comparison group by matching SHG members to nonmembers based on observable respondent, household and community characteristics. We estimate impacts of SHG membership using nearest neighbor matching (NNM), a form of covariate matching in which the comparison group sample of nonmembers is selected based on similarity to the SHG member sample on observable characteristics ( Abadie et al., 2004 , Abadie and Imbens, 2006 ) 5 . NNM matches members and nonmembers to minimize the average difference in characteristics, using a multidimensional metric to determine the weights for constructing the average. The effect of being an SHG member is then measured as the average difference in the outcome for each SHG member from the average outcome among its matched nonmembers. We matched using five nonmembers as neighbors. We also use the bias correction method proposed by Abadie and Imbens (2006) because we match on more than two continuous variables. 6

Some details and limitations of the matching procedures used deserve attention. Matching is based on variables that are associated both with the probability of being an SHG member and with the outcome of interest ( Heckman & Navarro-Lozano, 2004 ). However, these variables should be determined before the SHGs were established to ensure that they were not affected by SHG membership itself. Given that SHGs existed in our sample villages at baseline, we do not have data on these observables before the women became members. To reduce the risk of endogeneity bias, we use SHG membership at midline as our membership variable and match on variables measured at baseline that were predetermined and exogenous (to SHG membership). The matching variables can be grouped in five categories: respondent women’s characteristics, household characteristics, including time spent by women in the household on fetching water 7 , village characteristics, district and state effects. The full list of covariates used for matching is found in Table 2 .

To aid comparison and examine the nature and direction of the bias, we also present the results from the OLS estimations using the same sets of outcomes and the matching variables as covariates. The estimating equation is as follows:

where Y ihvdst is the outcome of interest for woman i in household h in village v in district d of state s at time t (midline), SH Gmember ihvdst is a dummy variable indicating whether the respondent woman is an SHG member, W ihvdst - 1 is the vector of the respondent woman’s characteristics at time t - 1 (baseline) mentioned above, X h v d s t _ - 1 and C vdst - 1 are vectors of baseline household and village characteristics, respectively; and δ d are district dummies. 8 Finally, ε ihvdst is the individual-specific error term clustered at the block level.

3.3. Ethical approval and study registration

Ethical approval was sought from a local institutional review board in India as well as from the [ Anonymized for peer review]. Prior to baseline we registered the larger evaluation study at 3ie’s Registry for International Development Impact Evaluations with the study ID: RIDIE-STUDY-ID-xxxxx [registration number not revealed for peer review].

In this section we first examine the impact of SHG membership on the aggregate empowerment measures - the empowerment scores (3DE and 5DE) and the intrahousehold inequality score which represents the gender gap in empowerment within the same household, and then unpack these results by examining the component indicators in both their binary and continuous forms. Because adequacy is assessed using uniform thresholds or cutoffs, binary indicators may not be as sensitive to changes as the continuous indicators. Wherever relevant, impact estimates are presented for both women and men. In the case of men, comparisons are made between men whose partners are SHG members and men whose partners do not belong to an SHG. All impact estimates discussed in the text refer to the NNM results, unless otherwise mentioned.

4.1. Women’s empowerment score and the empowerment gap

Using both pro-WEAI and A-WEAI, we find significant impacts of SHG membership on the women’s empowerment score and the intrahousehold inequality score ( Table 5 ). Being an SHG member increases the overall female empowerment score by 10.2 percentage points (pp) (9.8 pp using A-WEAI), which is 16.8 percent over the average empowerment score among nonmembers (14.4 percent using A-WEAI), p < 0.01. SHG membership also reduces the gap between male and female empowerment scores within a household by 3.1 pp (3.7 pp using A-WEAI), which translates to a reduction of 33.7 percent (34.6 percent) over the average among the nonmembers, p < 0.01. These are large and appreciable differences in women’s empowerment and the intrahousehold inequality score because of SHG membership. It is important to note that at the aggregate level both indices – pro-WEAI and A-WEAI – show similar results, which is unsurprising given their similar distributions.

Effect of SHG membership on women's and men's empowerment scores and the intrahousehold inequality score, nearest neighbor matching estimates.

In addition, we find a marginally significant and positive impact on the empowerment score among husbands of SHG members compared to husbands of women who are not SHG members using A-WEAI. Although the point estimate is similar for pro-WEAI and A-WEAI, only the latter is statistically significant. These aggregate findings suggest that women’s membership in SHGs can empower them, reduce the empowerment gap and to some extent also empower their husbands. In other words, we can safely say that membership in SHGs can empower women without disempowering the men within their household.

4.2. Impacts on empowerment indicators

4.2.1. pro-weai indicators.

Impact estimates using the aggregate measures show that SHG membership significantly and meaningfully improves overall empowerment. However, these composite measures do not tell us which dimensions of empowerment are improving relative to others. To understand possible pathways of impact, we examine the pro-WEAI domains and indicators in Table 6 , and the A-WEAI domains and indicators in Table 7 , discussing both the binary indicator and the continuous indicator from which it is derived.

Effect of SHG membership on pro-WEAI domains and component indicators.

Effect of SHG membership on the A-WEAI domains and component indicators.

Notes: Standard errors in parenthesis. *, **, *** represent significance at 10, 5 and 1 percent, respectively. a. All men in the sample have some input in income decisions so we were unable to estimate an impact of their partners’ SHG membership on the income indicator.

Pro-WEAI has four indicators in the intrinsic agency domain, of which two were collected in this study. 9 SHG membership does not appear to significantly impact attitudes towards intimate partner violence against women nor respect among household members for both women and men, irrespective of whether binary or continuous indicators are used. The lack of a statistically significant impact on attitudes towards intimate partner violence is in line with the null effects on similar outcomes reported in Brody et al. (2017) . This is not entirely surprising - not only are these social norms harder to move over a short period of time, the set of interventions we study did not provide direct transfers but focused instead on information provision and behavior change communication (BCC). There is evidence that cash and in-kind transfers to women can help reduce intimate partner violence, but these effects are typically not sustained beyond the program period ( Buller et al., 2016 , Buller et al., 2018 ). Roy, Hidrobo, Hoddinott, and Ahmed (2018) use data from Bangladesh to show that transfers combined with group-based intensive BCC significantly reduce the incidence of intimate partner violence even six to ten months after the program had ended, with BCC being the key intervention component driving the observed effects. However, our at-scale programmatic setting did not match either the frequency or intensity of the BCC sessions in Roy et al. (2018) closely controlled experimental set-up.

The instrumental agency domain has six indicators. We are unable to detect significant impacts of SHG membership on the binary indicators for women, with the exception of adequacy with respect to access to and decisions on financial services. The continuous indicators, which are not sensitive to the choice of adequacy cutoffs, provide a more nuanced picture. SHG membership increases the number of agricultural activities for which the woman has some input or feels that she can make decisions (10%, p < 0.01), the number of assets solely or jointly owned by the respondent (3.6%, p < 0.10), the number of accessible sources where the respondent woman solely or jointly participated in credit decisions (128%, p < 0.01), the number of activities in which she has input on income decisions (10.2%, p < 0.01), and the number of places that she can visit when required (7.9%, p < 0.01). The need to attend SHG and higher-level federation meetings of these groups could underlie the significantly greater mobility among SHG members. In addition, we find that having women who are SHG members led to an increase in men’s input into decisions in using income and agricultural output and over credit but reduces their adequacy in the mobility domain. The weakly negative impact on men’s adequacy with respect to mobility may indicate men’s reducing visits to locations that women themselves are now able to visit. Improved decisionmaking for men in the credit domain could reflect the spillover impacts of greater financial literacy and empowerment that SHG women acquire through the group savings and credit activities. Improved male decisionmaking over the use of income could be a result of higher overall agricultural income as a results of SHG-based extension activities, with higher stakes encouraging the men to exert more control over the use of this income.

SHG membership also positively affects the two indicators of collective agency for women, being an active member of at least one group and membership in an influential group. Impacts on both binary and continuous collective agency indicators are positive and significant for women but not for men. Since our ‘treatment’ is membership in an SHG, it follows that ‘treated’ women (those who are SHG members) are more likely to fulfil the adequacy criteria in this domain than women in the comparison arm (those who are not SHG members). We do allow for a broad range of possible groups in the questionnaire, of which SHGs are just one variant, however, the very low control group mean of only 0.03 groups where women are active members suggests that the predominant form of group within the community is indeed the SHG. Given this, the reader should interpret this impact estimate as being largely mechanical.

4.2.2. A-WEAI estimates

Estimates using A-WEAI are organized according to the five domains of empowerment and are presented in Table 7 . Once again, we estimate impacts on both binary and continuous indicators.

A person is considered adequate in the production domain if he/she has input in production decisions in at least two sub-domains. Being an SHG member only has a weakly significant impact on this binary indicator for women, but no impact for men ( Table 7 ). For women, SHG membership has a significant impact on the number of agricultural sub-domains in which the individual has some input in making decisions or feels that she can make them (p < 0.01); there is no corresponding impact on men whose partners are SHG members. This is consistent with earlier results from Raghunathan et al. (2019) documenting increases in women’s participation in some agricultural decisions.

The resource domain is composed of two binary indicators, one of which is related to sole or joint ownership of at least two small assets or one large asset, and the second which measures access to and participation in credit decisions. NNM estimates show that SHG membership significantly increases the probability of a woman owning at least two small assets or one large asset by 1 pp (p < 0.05) and has a positive effect on the total number of assets solely or jointly owned. There is no effect of SHG membership on men’s asset ownership. SHG membership has a significant impact on women’s and men’s adequacy in the credit sub-domain, 9 pp (p < 0.01) in the case of women and 5 pp (p < 0.05) in the case of men. The number of accessible credit sources for which the woman participates in decisionmaking is higher by 0.39 (p < 0.01) among SHG members as compared to nonmembers, representing a dramatic 128% of the average number of accessible credit sources for nonmembers. This result is not surprising, given the strong emphasis of SHGs on financial inclusion through their savings and credit activities. Perhaps more surprisingly, the number of credit sources for which the man participates in decisionmaking is higher among husbands of SHG members by 0.15, which is a sizeable 41 percent of the corresponding average among nonmembers.

An individual is considered adequate in the income domain if he/she has input in income decisions in at least one sub-domain. SHG membership does not affect the probability that a woman has input in decisions in at least one income domain but increases the number of domains in which she has some input in decisions by 0.24 (p < 0.05). This is 4.6% higher than the corresponding average for the control group. All men in the sample have some input in income decisions so we were unable to estimate an impact of their partners’ SHG membership on the income indicator. We see no impact on the number of domains where the man has input or feels that he can make decisions.

As mentioned above, since SHGs are, by definition, groups, it follows that women in the treatment arm satisfy the adequacy criteria in the leadership domain, which is defined as being an active member of at least one group. SHG membership increases the probability that the respondent is an active member of at least one group by 41 pp (p < 0.01) and increases the number of groups of which the respondent is an active member by 0.43 (p < 0.01). 10 While we expect this positive impact on women’s groups owing to the design of the intervention, we do see a small but significant increase of 0.04 in the number of groups where the male respondent is an active member; this is a 52.5% increase over the control group mean of 0.08.

Finally, SHG membership causes an increase in workload – reducing the likelihood of working <10.5 h a day by 5.3 pp (about 12 percent over the control group mean, p < 0.1). However, there is no significant impact on the continuous workload indicator in the NNM estimate, even though the OLS estimate shows a weakly significant increase of 0.35 h or 20 min spent working per day, where working hours are defined as the total number of hours spent on market and nonmarket work (including time spent on domestic work and caring for children and sick and elderly). There is no impact of women’s SHG membership on the number of hours worked by the male respondents. In general, men work about two hours less per day than women, regardless of their wives’ membership status, although workload is also a major contributor to men’s disempowerment.

Overall, we find that the OLS estimates and the NNM estimates are not very different from each other. This indicates the homogeneity of the sample – women in our sample are very alike on observable characteristics whether or not they are SHG members.

4.2.3. Robustness to exclusion of SHG membership from the empowerment indicators

We have noted previously that group membership is one of the component indicators of the women’s empowerment index. Though we ask about a range of possible groups, the predominant form of group membership among individuals in our sample is membership in an SHG. As a result, one might argue that the observed impact of SHG membership on empowerment in the domain of group membership or collective agency is by construction. To check for this, we re-estimate the models for all empowerment indicators – the composite 5DE (A-WEAI)/3DE (pro-WEAI) scores and intrahousehold inequality score, and the underlying sub-domain binary and continuous indicators - by excluding SHG membership from the group membership indicator.

As would be expected, this modification alters our results on the composite measures and group membership indicators among women ( Table 8 , Table 9 ) 11 . Once we exclude SHG membership from the group membership indicator, the impact estimate on the aggregate pro-WEAI empowerment score (3DE) is much smaller in magnitude but remains statistically significant (0.020, p < 0.05; Table 8 ). The coefficients on other composite indicators - intrahousehold inequality score for pro-WEAI and A-WEAI and the 5DE score for A-WEAI - are smaller in magnitude and lose statistical significance. There is no change in the corresponding empowerment scores for the men. Table 9 presents the impact estimates for the collective agency (pro-WEAI) and leadership (A-WEAI), here too the coefficients are smaller, but remain statistically significant. These results show that SHG membership is an important factor contributing to the improvement in women’s empowerment and the reduction in the intrahousehold inequality score.

Effect of SHG membership on women's and men's empowerment scores and the intrahousehold inequality score when SHG membership is excluded from the group membership indicator, nearest neighbor matching estimates.

Effect of SHG membership on collective agency and leadership domains and component indicators when SHG membership is excluded from the group membership indicator.

5. Discussion and conclusion

This paper aimed to assess the impact of women’s SHG membership on various aspects of their empowerment, measured using the pro-WEAI and A-WEAI. In addition to measuring the aggregate impact of SHG membership on empowerment and on the intrahousehold inequality score, the decomposability of the WEAI family of empowerment indicators allows us to identify specific domains of empowerment that are most affected by SHG membership. This not only helps us understand which pathways between SHG membership and empowerment are relevant in the Indian context, but also allows us to identify possible tradeoffs and unintended consequences of participation in SHGs on women’s well-being. Methodologically, comparing the results from these two WEAI variations, enables us to assess the suitability of these indices for assessing empowerment impacts at the project level.

Our results show that SHG participation has significant and quantitatively meaningful impacts on the overall empowerment score as well as the empowerment gap between spouses (both pro-WEAI and A-WEAI), and a weak positive impact on the overall empowerment scores for men (only A-WEAI). We can thus infer that the emphasis on women’s empowerment in SHG programming has been effective overall. Importantly, we also find that closing the intrahousehold empowerment gap does not appear to have been a result of disempowering the men in the household, a potential unintended consequence of programs aimed solely at women.

In terms of pathways of impact, we observe strong positive impacts on women’s credit access and decision making as well as control over income use. This is not surprising, given that SHGs are platforms that are primarily used for facilitating savings and credit activities among group members. At the same time, there are areas where SHG participation appears to have weaker impacts, such as women’s decisionmaking on production and asset ownership, areas that embody deep-seated gender norms about women’s participation in agriculture and women’s asset ownership, norms that are slower and harder to change.

SHG membership mechanically improves outcomes related to the leadership domain, which, in the WEAI context, refers to active participation in groups. What is surprising is that the participation of women in these groups also seems to have an impact on men’s group participation. Along with the financial benefits of belonging to an SHG, the network effects of these groups are empowering in themselves, especially for rural women with limited social ties and access to information. The specific agriculture and livelihoods related information and trainings provided in the group meetings could increase women’s confidence in participating in decision-making in their own homes. For example, a cash transfer program in rural Bangladesh, complemented with nutrition behavior change communication and trainings provided in a group setting to women, had long term impacts on reducing intimate partner violence and improvements in women’s empowerment ( Roy et al., 2018 ). This example shows that an intervention delivered through a group-based platform had impacts on intrahousehold relationships, even when the messaging was not tailored to women’s empowerment. The financial literacy and comfort in dealing with money and transactions that women gain from participating in the group’s savings and credit activities could enable them to take greater control over household resources.

We have noted elsewhere that since SHG membership in our data is neither randomly allocated nor amenable to a regression continuity design, we identify the effect of SHG membership using nearest neighbor matching. We acknowledge the limitation that matching is based on observable characteristics and therefore cannot fully account for all risks of bias. However, similar criticisms could also apply to other methods, for example, in a randomized controlled trial where the control arm may experience spillovers and thus be contaminated. We believe that the matching model provides plausible causal estimates in this real-life programmatic context.

In terms of advancing the methodology for assessing empowerment impacts, in aggregate, both the A-WEAI and pro-WEAI indices yield qualitatively similar results owing to the similarity of their distributions. However, the differences in index construction result in slightly different results for some indicators. For example, we find a weak positive impact on men’s empowerment score measured using 5DE but not using 3DE. The impact on the 5DE seems to be largely driven by the impact on credit related indicators for men in the A-WEAI. The pro-WEAI indicators also show a similar impact but the weighting in pro-WEAI, which involves higher cutoffs, is likely the reason behind no aggregate impact. More importantly, pro-WEAI captures intrinsic agency, an important aspect of empowerment, for which we are unable to detect any impact. We would not have detected this absence of impact using A-WEAI, which does not include the intrinsic agency indicators. The theory of change underlying the intervention may serve as a guide in making the appropriate choice between the two index variations; programs that emphasize changes in gender norms surrounding intimate partner violence and intrahousehold relationships may want to use the more finely-tuned pro-WEAI for project impact assessment. Our findings also underscore the importance of qualitative research on the perceptions of empowerment among women and men; such qualitative research can provide greater insight on the different factors that increase empowerment and those that limit it. Better understanding of these constructs are crucial to furthering their measurement.

A few commonly-raised concerns deserve mention here. First, there is criticism that the SHG platform imposes a significant cost on women’s time. The additional costs women incur as a result of participating in time-intensive interventions has also been noted in other contexts, where engagement in such interventions might compete directly with caregiving or time spent preparing food ( Carlson et al., 2015 , Johnston et al., 2015 , Komatsu et al., 2018 ), though evidence in the microcredit context is limited ( Garikipati, 2012 ). We find some evidence to support that concern using A-WEAI, with our results showing that SHG participation increases workload, albeit by a small and only marginally significant amount. Being an SHG member may involve additional responsibilities that add to a women’s workload, such as attending meetings, engaging in collective action, or undertaking livelihoods activities.

Second, whether SHGs are inclusive and whether they reach women from marginalized groups are valid concerns. We noted earlier that the NGO PRADAN deliberately focuses on marginalized communities in the areas where it works, as reflected in the high proportion of Scheduled Caste and Tribe members in our sample. However, as noted by Nichols (2020) in a similar SHG-based agriculture-nutrition intervention in India, there are several intersecting factors that affect women’s ability and desire to participate actively in SHG-led programs. Poorer women and those who are younger, have small children, belong to smaller households with less labor and hence potentially face a greater opportunity cost of time are all less likely to participate in SHGs and SHG-led agricultural or other programs. The exclusion of the poorest of the poor from participation in SHG programs is also noted in Brody et al. (2017) . NGOs organizing these groups are themselves constrained by limited budgets, reporting requirements to donors (which often focus on quantitative metrics of reach and uptake), and by the amount of time and effort required to train volunteers and frontline workers to target marginalized groups, particularly when that marginalization is linked also to geographic location and language. While we do not find large significant differences in our data between SHG members and non-members, and while our matching exercise controls for this issue to some extent, it is worth noting that participation in these programs is not always equitable.

Third, the question of whether SHGs can be expected to change deeply entrenched social norms, such as those regarding gender roles, has also been raised by researchers and implementors. We show that while SHG membership has a small but highly significant impact on the number of places women can go, a measure of mobility, it does not affect other indicators of empowerment such as attitudes towards intimate partner violence, and trust and intrahousehold harmony. These reflect more entrenched gender norms that are often reinforced by community expectations and are hard to change at an individual level or through any single intervention. The limited impact on the production domain and the intrinsic agency indicators of intrahousehold harmony and attitudes towards intimate partner violence suggests that gender norms are slow to change, and that SHG programming may need to deliberately address changing these norms by reaching out more directly to other members of the community. There is a growing consensus on the need to change social norms and psychosocial determinants of women’s empowerment and participation, and; some evidence on the ways to bring about this change ( Fiala, 2018 , Siba, 2019 ). We need to simultaneously acknowledge that SHGs alone might not be able to do so, especially since they engage only one side of the gender equation ( de Hoop et al., 2014 , Jakimow and Kilby, 2006 ). However, measuring gender norms is a key first step to diagnosing and solving this problem, which is why the inclusion of these indicators in pro-WEAI is welcome. In addition, for gender norms to change, SHG programs also need to target husbands, in-laws, and community leaders. Pilot programs such as the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) program in Bangladesh, discussed in Quisumbing, Ahmed, Hoddinott, Pereira, & Roy (2020) , show the potential of gender sensitization efforts that reach both women and men in changing attitudes towards gender. By using indicators that are sensitive to changes in intrinsic agency, programs will be better equipped to assess whether they have achieved their empowerment objectives.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Neha Kumar: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Kalyani Raghunathan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Alejandra Arrieta: Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Amir Jilani: Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Shinjini Pandey: Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [grant number OPP1132181] and the CGIAR research program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health. We thank, our colleague and friend, Agnes Quisumbing for her constant support and guidance. This work would not have been possible without endless and thoughtful discussions with her. This paper was also presented at various workshops and conferences and we thank the participants for their insightful comments. We also thank two anonymous referees for extremely useful and constructive feedback on a previous draft. All errors and omissions are our own.

1 The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) brings together 13 agricultural development projects with explicit women’s empowerment goals, working together to develop and pilot a project-level measure of women’s empowerment and to use it in impact evaluations to assess which strategies work to empower women. For more information, see gaap.ifpri.info.

2 Here the aggregation is done over individuals such that we obtain a single empowerment score and GPI for a given set of individuals. This implies that these are defined at the sample level.

3 The intrahousehold inequality score is a truncated variable and we acknowledge that linear regression is not ideal. However, our analysis rests on the nearest neighbor matching method which does not rely on linear regression.

4 Since the power calculations were based on the study design of the overall evaluation with three arms and eight clusters per arm these should be viewed as suggestive for this analysis, which investigates the impact of SHG membership and not the design of the larger study. Nonetheless, Table A.1 provides the minimum detectable differences across WEAI sub-domains for women and men for a sample of this size.

5 These approaches rely on two assumptions about the data and the model. The first is that, after controlling for all pre-program observable respondent, household and community characteristics that are correlated with SHG membership and the outcome variable, nonmembers have the same average outcome as SHG members would have had if they had not become members. The second assumption is that for each SHG member and for all observable characteristics, a comparison group of nonmembers with similar observable variables exists.

6 We estimated the NNM models using the ‘teffects’ suite of commands in STATA ( STATACORP (2015 )).

7 This is measured as the time spent by the adult women within the household fetching water from a distant source in summer or winter and is not constructed using the time use module in the WEAI. This is a proxy indicator for women’s time use, as well as for the household’s social and economic status. For example, proximity to and ability to draw water from a handpump or well is often restricted for households of lower social status. To allay concerns that the indicator used for matching might be highly correlated with the time use domain outcome measure, we check the strength of their association – the correlation between the two is very low at 0.006/0.009 (depending on the measure of time use employed). We also note that our results do not change materially if this indicator is dropped.

8 Since districts are entirely contained within state boundaries, we do not include state dummies in the matching exercise.

9 Because pro-WEAI was still being developed, we did not collect the autonomy over income and the self-efficacy indicator in this survey.

10 These estimates are same as the estimates for the corresponding indicators for pro-WEAI because the indicator construction is identical.

11 We do not report the results on indicators that do not change; these are available upon request.

Table A.1: Minimum detectable difference in adequacy rates across the WEAI sub-domains, by gender.

Source: Authors’ calculations. Note: These power calculations were based on the original evaluation design with three arms and eight clusters per arm.

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, empowerment of women through participation in self-help groups: a bibliometric analysis and systematic review.

Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy

ISSN : 1750-6204

Article publication date: 28 November 2022

Issue publication date: 13 November 2023

The purpose of the paper is to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis and systematic review to examine the research landscape of women empowerment through participation in self-help groups (SHGs), identifying the eminent contributors, intellectual communities and future research agenda in the field of SHGs and women empowerment.

Design/methodology/approach

The global works of literature related to the theme of SHGs and women empowerment between 1998 and May 6, 2022 were scanned for bibliometric analysis and systematic review. A total of 176 English language documents from the Scopus database were extracted. Bibliometric analysis is conducted using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer software.

This study finds that SHGs are paramount in achieving rural women’s empowerment multidimensionally. Found that India is the most contributing country with 136 documents, and Ranjula Bali Swain and Fan Yang Wallentin are the most cited authors in the research field of SHGs and women empowerment. In addition, the paper proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework to portray rudimentary antecedents of women’s empowerment achieved through participation in SHGs.

Practical implications

This bibliometric analysis, along with a systematic review demonstrating a framework encapsulating the principal dimensions of women empowerment and their indicators, will be helpful to practitioners, government, policymakers and researchers working in the area of SHGs and women empowerment.

Originality/value

This study recognizes numerous significant contributions by eminent scholars and presents a concise review of the literature for novice researchers working in the area of SHGs and women empowerment.

• Self-help group
• Women empowerment
• Sustainable development goals
• Bibliometric analysis
• Systematic review

Mahato, T. , Jha, M.K. , Nayak, A.K. and Kaushal, N. (2023), "Empowerment of women through participation in self-help groups: a bibliometric analysis and systematic review", Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy , Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 1511-1538. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEC-08-2022-0114

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Introduction, literature review, method and data, acknowledgements, conflict of interest.

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Empowering women through the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme as a tool for sustainable development: lessons from India

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
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Nada Amer Abdulhafedh Al-Kubati, Doris Padmini Selvaratnam, Empowering women through the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme as a tool for sustainable development: lessons from India, Community Development Journal , Volume 58, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 283–308, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsab036

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The purpose of this study is to look at India’s experience in using the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme as a core development strategy aimed to empower women. Self-help groups are seen as socially active groups that can facilitate a government’s plans towards achieving the sustainable development goals. Today, the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme is the largest microfinance programme globally, covering more than 10 million self-help groups. This article uses descriptive analysis to provide an overview of India’s experience. It focuses on how the program contributes to sustainable development by asking how the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme leads to the empowerment of rural women, the challenges faced in its implementation, and the initiatives implemented in India to sustain the programme. This is followed by a quantitative analysis of the economic sustainability and the equality status by measuring the programme’s progress and the disparity between regions in the last decade. India’s experience shows that the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme can empower women, facilitate entrepreneurial activities, enhance confidence and trust, provide technical skills and market access. Those are part of sustainable development goals and increase sustainable livelihood.

The Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme (SHG-BLP) is a platform that can be used to introduce social, economic, and political change. Self-help groups (SHGs) are socially active groups that can facilitate a government’s plans to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) such as no poverty, zero hunger, achieving gender equality and empowering all women, inclusive economic growth and reduce inequality. SHG-BLP brings innovative solutions that go beyond microfinance to encompass other development challenges such as education and training ( Fernandez, 2006 ), health ( Chandrashekar et al. , 2019 ), entrepreneurship ( Baily, 2013 ), grassroots political participation ( Nayak, 2018 ), and social capital ( Desai & Olofsgård, 2019 ). India’s experience of forming and supporting the SHG-BLP has been developed since 1992, when the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) started it as a pilot programme.

There is a large body of literature that looks at SHG-BLP in India from different angles. A large part of the research was conducted as case studies to assess the effectiveness of these groups and how participation in SHGs could change participants’ situations. Other research aimed to highlight the factors affecting SHGs’ efficiency and the roles of different stakeholders in promoting and maintaining these groups in specific contexts. This article, however, provides an overview of India’s experience in using the SHG-BLP as a development tool towards empowering women. The rest of the article is organized as follows: first, a literature review that explains the group’s formation and the debate about the usefulness of the intervention. Next, the paper discusses the contribution of the SHG-BLP to social sustainability by first discussing what makes it a powerful tool for empowering women. Then, the article identifies the issues that can affect the success of this model, as found in the literature. This is followed by the initiatives that have been implemented in India to sustain SHG-BLP. In addition, a quantitative analysis was conducted to look at the programme’s economic sustainability by analysing the progress in the last decade and the equality issue by discussing the disparities between regions in terms of the share of SHG-BLP and the average loan amount. Then a conclusion in the last section.

Basically ‘SHG is a small informal group of ten to twenty members who are homogenous with respect to social and economic background and come together voluntarily to promote saving habits among members and for a common cause which is to raise and manage resources for the benefit of group members’ according to NABARD. These groups were first initiated by an NGO named MYRADA in 1984–1985. They had emerged during the same period when the ‘Grameen Bank’ became a formal bank in Bangladesh after the success of Mohammad Younus’ microfinance initiative in 1976 ( Nayak, 2018 ) . In India, various development programs to achieve the SDGs are designed to be delivered at the SHG level as a ‘multi-sector’ platform. Because SHGs aim to empower women, they contribute to achieving SDG 5 (achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls), which, in turn, is a tool to achieve other SDGs ( Dash, 2019 ).

SHG-BLP was born when NABARD conducted a pilot project in collaboration with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in 1992 that promote the linkage of 500 SHGs to banks to provide formal financial services ( Akoijam, 2012 ). Later in 1999, the government of India adopted SHG-BLP as a core development strategy with the aim of ‘organizing women into SHGs to mark the beginning of a major process of empowering women’ ( Quiroz-Niño & Murga-Menoyo, 2017 ). At a later stage, SHG-BLP was associated with various development programmes ( Gupta et al. , 2020 ). Then in 2011, India adopted the SHG-BLP as part of its federal poverty alleviation programme and as a secondary approach to integrating health literacy services for rural women ( Niyonsenga et al. , 2020 ).

The SHG-BLP is an Indian innovation that makes partnerships between three agencies: SHGs, formal banks, and NGOs ( Tripathi, 2014 ; Aluru, 2010 ). SHGs facilitate collective decision-making among the poor by promoting ‘doorstep banking’. Banks work as wholesalers of credit. NGOs work as organizers and facilitators to build the SHGs’ capacity and women’s social capital ( Aluru, 2010 ; Akoijam, 2012 ). To connect the SHGs to banks, NGOs started to promote SHGs among rural women, organize them into homogenous groups and educate the members about group rules and bookkeeping requirements. In this stage, the group saves a regular amount as decided by the members. The savings can be used as small loans distributed to members at a low-interest rate. After seven months, the women become more experienced in managing financial resources and building financial discipline. They prove it through bookkeeping which banks consider as collateral.

NGOs continue to nurture, support, and train the SHGs to start their income-generating activities ( D’Souza, 2010 ). NGOs also help in building SHGs’ social capital by networking the SHGs to form clusters. These clusters are then connected to become a federation which is a formal institution, unlike SHGs, and have elected leaders. These federations have higher bargaining power ( Dash, 2019 ) and become supporters of the SHGs instead of the NGOs after three years. Federations make the SHG-BLP programme sustainable and can stand on its own. Figure 1 shows the NGOs’ role in SHG-BLP ( D’Souza, 2010 ).

NGOs’ tasks. Source: constructed by authors from D’Souza (2010) .

The benefit of SHG-BLP is that in addition to meeting women’s financial needs in rural areas, SHG-BLP strengthens these women’s capacity, thus leading to their empowerment ( Sundaram, 2012 ). For example, a survey by Rajeev et al. (2020 ) showed that women participating in SHG-BLP were aware of the non-economic benefits of the program, such as self-confidence and improvement of social status. Active participation and rotation of responsibilities that are compulsory under SHG-BLP result in improving their ability to express their views domestically and outside and facilitate their mobility ( Rajeev et al. , 2020 ). The majority of women surveyed described becoming more confident in dealing with government officials and financial resources as an important gain from SHG-BLP, which is unique to the programme ( Rajeev et al. , 2020 ).

However, the program has been under extensive debate about its effectiveness, especially after Andhra Pradesh’s microfinance crisis. 1 For example, Taylor (2011) argued that stakeholders of SHG-BLP have different objectives that sometimes contradict each other. For example, NGOs aim to increase women’s collective power and build their social capital. In contrast, the government supports SHGs to reduce the transaction costs involved in financing rural women. Grassroot SHGs, on the other hand, look at the model as a platform to claim their rights, access to resources and information, identity, justice, and political participation ( Jakimow & Kilby, 2006 ). These differences could lead to stress among SHGs and an adverse effect on empowerment when the government imposes a top–down development model. The top–down model further constraints the already disempowered women, reducing individuals’ ability to realize and pursue their interests ( Jakimow & Kilby, 2006 ).

Another criticism is that SHGs could lead to further social differentiation by excluding members who default their loans and the spread of fear from social stigma due to default, as Taylor (2011) argued. Regarding economic empowerment, Guérin et al. (2015) argued that poor and marginalized groups are less able to start entrepreneurial activities due to the social constraints and established market relations that constrain them more than other groups leading to further exclusion. According to Jakimow and Kilby (2006) , ignoring the broader social constraints, SHGs put all the burden of empowerment on people who are less able to do so.

However, recently, Anand et al. (2020) tried to answer why women are increasingly participating in SHGs when empirical research shows that microfinance does not help increase incomes. They concluded that SHG participation results in significantly higher capability due to increases in quality of life compared to non-members, and this benefit becomes more pronounced with longer periods of participation. Unlike other measurements that only focus on the increase in income or household decision-making, the capability indicators measure several aspects of life quality: risk of future assault and discrimination, freedom of expression, and family support. Hence, the authors suggested that human development resulting from training, regular meetings, financial education, health programmes, and civic participation is essential, so SHGs are not only about microfinance. Moreover, Brody et al. (2016) conducted a systematic review for studies between 1980 and 2014. They concluded that SHGs are positively related to economic, social, and political empowerment.

Given these debates, this article argues that SHG-BLP has multiple faces that work together and should not be looked at separately as an endpoint. Hence, the article follows Jakimow and Kilby (2006) in defining empowerment as the ‘process of removing constraints’ instead of an endpoint. Accordingly, ‘women’s empowerment’ is reconceptualized to ‘empowering women’, which is defined as ‘the reduction or removal of constraints that reduce women’s ability to pursue their interests’ ( Jakimow & Kilby, 2006 ). Hence, governments should work for ‘empowering actions’ through the gradual removal of constraints. Rowlands (1997 ) explains that empowerment has personal, close relationships, and communal dimensions. It entails cultivating a sense of self, personal confidence, capacity, the ability to negotiate and affect the nature of the connection and the decisions made within it, and collaborating to achieve larger results. In summary, internalized oppression and unhealthy competition will be undone in this process, where signs of women being empowered are when they participate in development programmes—by taking part, making plans, having a role in decision-making, and negotiating deals ( Rowlands, 1997 ).

In this regard, SHG-BLP, as an Indian innovation, plays this rule of empowering actions by providing financial inclusion in a more sustainable way and a social vehicle by organizing rural women into homogeneous groups. Given the uniqueness of this program and that most studies are case studies, this article investigates the literature differently to generalize the lessons learned from India and guide policy in other developing countries. Hence, this study looks at India’s experience from four directions: First, by discussing how SHGs empower women. Second, by analysing the main challenges for the program found in the literature. Third, by looking at some solutions developed in India to sustain the program. Fourth, by analysing the financial part of SHG-BLP and its progress in the last decade.

In this article, SHG-BLP as a tool for sustainable development is assessed in terms of social and economic dimensions. In the literature, social sustainability has three components: representation mechanism (indicated by participation in the decision-making process of grassroots development initiatives), collective state (indicated by group membership, trust, family ties, crime-free environment), and individual access (to education, health care, job, better housing, food) ( Baffoe & Mutisya, 2015 ). All these lead towards the enhanced empowerment of women. The article also looks at the way that SHG-BLP contributes to SDGs such as SDG 1 (end of poverty), SDG 2 (end of hunger), SDG 5 (achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls), SDG 8 (promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth), and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). To recognize these themes, the article uses a descriptive analysis of the reports and literature review materials.

For the economic measurements, the article uses a trend analysis of SHG-BLP’s progress in India during the last decade (2010–2020). following Tripathi (2014) and Kumra and Sharma (2018) in using averages, percentages, and the annual compound growth rates (CGR) to evidence increase in loans, income and savings, which are measures of economic aspects of sustainable development (SDG1 & SDG10). Linkages with the formal sector, namely commercial banks (CB), regional rural banks (RRB), and cooperative banks, are analysed in terms of credit and saving to highlight the banking sector’s role as an essential player in the partnership for development (SDG17). This is followed by an analysis of spatial differences in terms of the share of SHG credit-linked accounts and the average loan amount provided to the groups to highlight more on the financial inclusion capability and the equality of the model (SDG 10). This will show further evidence of enhanced women’s empowerment within their family, community, and economy. Those data are collected from NABARD’s annual reports from 2010–2011 to 2019–2020. Numbers are in Indian Rupees.

Social sustainability

How shg-blp works towards empowering women.

Scholars disaggregate power into four types in the development field, namely ‘power over’, ‘power to’, ‘power within’, and ‘power with’ ( Mathie et al. , 2017 ). ‘Power over’ refers to the traditional meaning of control and domination of few people. ‘Power to’ refers to ‘the new possibilities or actions that can be created without using relationships of domination’ ( Mathie et al. , 2017 ). ‘Power within’ refers to a person’s sense of their capacity and self-worth ( Mathie et al. , 2017 ) by focusing on an individual’s psychological aspects of inner strength ( Dulhunty, 2020 ). ‘Power with’, however, refers to the ‘relationships and possibilities that can emerge when people collaborate’ ( Mathie et al. , 2017 ). The power of solidarity has long been activated in social movements and can be found within and across differences within extended family groupings, class, caste, ethnic, gender, and age differences ( Mathie et al. , 2017 ). ‘Power with’ form the basis of successful collective actions. At the same time, the successful collective action feeds up into ‘power with’ through greater trust ( Rowlands, 1997 ), which significantly improves household welfare ( Nayak, 2018 ).

Power dynamics and economic power are widely debated in the literature ( Dulhunty, 2020 ). Although power dynamics are the basis of feminists’ discussion, which looks at empowerment as holistic, neoliberal theories focus on individualism and economic values in the empowerment process ( Dulhunty, 2020 ). The focus on individualism empowerment alone is criticized by advocates of ‘power with’ who argue that ‘an individualistic conception of empowerment can fail to recognize social constraints and connections that either limit or enhance empowerment ( Dulhunty, 2020 ). Dulhunty (2020 ) emphasized that “power with” through the collective action of SHGs is critical for empowerment to overcome the ‘oppressive power relations that disempower individuals.’ It is particularly crucial for isolated women who live in geographic areas with restrictions on women’s mobility, difficulties in getting information and networking opportunities, and weak government service.

The importance of collective action and outside relationships manifests itself in the Dulhunty (2020) study conducted in West Bengal. The women investigated conveyed that they were significantly isolated before belonging to SHGs, and they described their experience with SHG membership as ‘extremely important’. The investigation showed that women belonging to SHGs are engaged in collective actions to demand their rights or stand against social norms, discrimination, and domestic violence. According to Nayak (2018) , SHGs are the only prominent tool available to women in many parts of Indian to act collectively.

SHG-BLP, in this regard, works through several power dimensions such as ‘power with’ through the collective actions and individuals’ empowerment through microfinance. Microfinance through SHGs-BLP aims to improve the economic situation and promote entrepreneurship among rural women, which leads to increasing women’s bargaining power leading to the individuals’ empowerment. Besides, SHG-BLP promotes complex aspects of development that contribute to members’ capacity and well-being, such as training programs in accounting, leadership, self-realization, confidence, decision-making, and dealing with banks and government officials ( Nagarajan & Ponnusamy, 2019 ). Accordingly, SHG-BLP is a ‘community-based finance’ and self-governing domestic institution which acts as a mechanism to strengthen the community through ‘collective action’ and enable women to acquire power ( Quiroz-Niño & Murga-Menoyo, 2017 ).

In this context, Baily (2013) affirmed that empowerment is dynamic and can be manifested in many different ways; hence, it is difficult to extract all the different aspects separately. However, Brody et al. (2016) analysed those pathways in India’s context using the theory of change. Figure 2 below is the outcome of an evidence-based and mixed-method systematic review of studies conducted between 1980 and 2014 on the effect of SHGs on women’s empowerment and how SHG participants perceive this experience, as developed by Brody et al. (2016) . The figure shows that the process of empowerment in the SHGs model happens at multiple stages. Access to resources and information and group support could reflect a better financial situation and increased knowledge and confidence in the short run. This leads to medium-run effects such as increased ability to make better life choices, a change in household spending and investment choices, and changes in the nature of female participation in society. In the long run, the empowerment is reflected by participants’ ability to transform choices into actions and awareness of their personal and political rights, which then lead to the emergence of economic, political, social, and psychological empowerment.

The theory of change developed by Brody et al. (2016) .

Brody et al. (2016) conclude that the positive effects of SHGs on economic, social, and political empowerment go through pathways connected with ‘familiarity in handling money, independence in financial decision making, solidarity, social networking, and receiving respect from family members and the broad community. They suggested that there is little evidence for adverse effects that reduce members’ empowerment. They also found positive effects of SHG on economic and political empowerment, family size choice, and mobility, which are parts of social empowerment.

The rest of this section highlights some evidence for some aforementioned long- and short-run effects. For example, Nagarajan & Ponnusamy (2019) found that 75 percent of 125 women investigated had the opportunity to occupy a leadership position for six months to three years. Those who served more than six months developed into entrepreneurs. Banerjee and Ghosh (2012) highlight the significant impact of training on women’s empowerment. They concluded that SHG members who went through training programmes are ‘more likely to be both empowered and employed’. Ahmad (2017) found that becoming a member of an SHG allows women new opportunities to access information, improve their awareness in various aspects such as their rights, health, nutrition, family planning, self-confidence, self-respect, and increase their mobility. Quiroz-Niño & Murga-Menoyo (2017) suggested SHGs to encourage the adaption of new norms, practices, and behaviours through peer pressure and commitment mechanisms.

However, the Indian experience in implementing SHG-BLP suggests that empowerment is not automatic, and various issues could arise. These issues will be discussed in the next section.

What are the challenges faced when implementing the SHG-BLP?

To answer this question, three themes were found in related literature, namely equality and social challenges, economic challenges, and internal issues.

Equality and social challenges: Growth with equality requires that all people in need are included, and no one is left behind. However, the complication of social relations and society’s characteristics may require a special design for designated programmes. For example, in India, researchers found that not all of the poor are equally included in SHG-BLP. Those who are on the upper level of poverty are more likely to be a member of SHGs, whereas those who are the poorest are less likely ( Reddy & Maliki, 2011 ; Brody et al. , 2016 ), with the exception in programmes where the mandatory condition is to prioritize the poorest ( Reddy & Maliki, 2011 ). Baily (2013 ) found that women who are most marginalized in the community continue to be denied opportunities to participate in SHG activities. One reason for such disadvantage is the lack of assets and awareness of their rights ( Torri, 2012 ).

In communities with conservative gender norms, such as in Odisha, SHG membership negatively affects subjective well-being because of higher identity losses in those communities, according to de Hoop et al. (2014) . This development policy may work against women’s needs if the social context is not considered ( Torri, 2012 ). For example, in a complex sociocultural society like Tamil Nadu, Torri (2012 ) found that the inherent social and cultural inequality practised gives the group leader the right to decide, forcing the disadvantaged members to obey. Hence, we should not assume that members will behave in ‘a cooperative manner irrespective of local heterogeneity within the community’ as mentioned by Torri (2012) . Thus, policies should keep in mind the specific contextual requirements instead of being restrictive ( Torri, 2012 ).

The balance of power in a society should be carefully addressed in the policy design. According to Baily (2013) , SHGs change the role of women in the household. Accordingly, this intention changes men’s role in society, an element not often considered in empowerment programmes. Hence, in societies with limited resources and high poverty levels, neglecting the impact of women’s changing role in society further ‘complicates the situation’ ( Baily, 2013 ). Additionally, suppose the women involved receive no support from their households. In that case, a new set of responsibilities will only be added to their daily work, increasing their burden and disabling them from active participation in the group ( Baily, 2013 ; Nayak et al. , 2019 ).

In communities with high levels of male domination and where women’s autonomy and physical mobility are restricted by gender inequality, it becomes more complicated for women to participate in public forums ( Torri, 2012 ). However, Males are ‘both willing to encourage participation as long as there are some returns to the family and community’ and subscribe to the notion that ‘without male permission, there would not be female participation in such programmes’ ( Baily, 2013 ). It is also important to note that, in places where women have no financial awareness, only males in the family use loans and take the responsibility of repaying them, leaving no effect on women or even adverse effects if they do not pay the loan on time ( Nayak et al. , 2019 ). This problem could lead women to sell their belongings to pay the instalments, leading to tension in the household, which could spur domestic violence ( Nayak et al. , 2019 ).

Economic challenges: One of the economic challenges is the low increment in members’ income. According to Jain & Tripathy (2011) , this intervention focuses on primary sectors in rural areas where economic activities do not result in high-income generation compared to the service and manufacturing sectors. Furthermore, incentives are absent for more ‘productive and diversified income-generating activities’ in the agricultural sector. According to Sundaram (2012) , livelihood activities are growing slower than the fast growth of SHGs; for example, under the SGSY scheme, only one-fifth of the groups have launched economic activities. Other problems include marketing, quality, competition, and knowledge about production ( Ahmad, 2017 ). Torri (2012 ) highlighted that group-based lending could hinder an individual’s entrepreneurship initiative. In addition, social norms and market relations constrain marginalized and vulnerable groups and restrict their ability to participate in market activities ( Guérin et al. , 2015 ).

Internal issues: One of the internal issues is related to the mechanism of collective action within the group setting, such as the lack of self-motivation and awareness amongst some SHG members about the programme’s potential. For example, Huma and Hasan (2017) found that nearly two-thirds of the SHG members—the study involved 15 SHGs-joined because their friends are in SHGs. They highlighted that most members lacked the necessary knowledge about SHG benefits and its transformation role. Another issue is that group dynamics could break down and cause mistrust among members. However, SHGs are only effective if the group has developed enough trust and solidarity ( Dulhunty, 2020 ). Other issues highlighted by NABARD include bookkeeping quality, lack of transparency, quality issues in the groups’ formation, lack of accurate history of members, and limited capacity of banks. Jain and Tripathy (2011 ) suggested that weak SHG performance, low financial base, and irregular ‘inter-loaning’ among members are bottlenecks hindering a group’s success. D’Souza (2010) suggested that quality issues happen due to the short period of grants NGOs receive, leading NGOs to work on a ‘limited target-based approach’ by focusing on numbers instead of quality.

What solutions can be adopted to sustain the SHG-BLP?

India’s experience is evolving because the government constantly adopts new initiatives to sustain SHG-BLP. Some of the main initiatives will be discussed below:

SHG promoting institutions (SHGPI): SHGPIs play a significant role in organizing women into SHGs, linking them to formal banks, and building groups’ and other stakeholders’ capacity. The quality of group formation and the nurturing process depend on these SHGPIs’ quality. NABARD provides financial supports to SHGPIs, including NGOs, the services of individual rural volunteers, RRBs, cooperatives, and farmer clubs ( Aluru, 2010 ).

Support for all stakeholders : To maintain stakeholders’ motivation and awareness, NABARD conducts large-scale capacity-building programmes for officials ranging from the lowest level of the hierarchy to the highest level ( Aluru, 2010 ). NABARD also works to spread the SHG-BLP’s concept, best practices, and innovation among all stakeholders ( Aluru, 2010 ). It also provides training and education for SHG members and their federations in collaboration with other SHGs facilitators. Besides, NABARD has established a microfinance equity fund. This fund facilitates microfinance and provides 100 percent refinance to traditional banks at concessional interest rates to enhance ground-level credit to SHGs ( Kumra & Sharma, 2018 ; Aluru, 2010 ).

Microenterprise support : A vital initiative taken by NABARD was support for SHG members’ livelihood activities through the creation of the Micro-Enterprise Development Programmes (MEDPs) in 2006. These programmes are need-based skills development initiatives to bridge the skills and training gaps of matured SHGs. In 2015, the Livelihood and Enterprise Development Programmes (LEDPs) were initiated to create sustainable livelihood among the SHGs and optimize their skills to increase income and employment. NABARD also provided support to NGOs conducting micro-enterprise development training on technical, managerial, and marketing skills for matured SHGs ( Aluru, 2010 ).

SHGs federations (SHGF): SHGFs were first promoted by NGOs and State Governments in the 1990s ( EDA, 2006 ). SHGFs were designed to overcome economies of scale in the SHGs model and facilitate the withdrawal of SHGPI, which makes SHGs self-dependent. They provide the structure that enables women to negotiate with formal institutions and act collectively ( EDA, 2006 ). Generally, SHGF performs financial and non-financial functions, such as better access to funds and marketing ( EDA, 2006 ). The formation of SHGF starts by forming clusters that contain 10–20 SHGs. Then the clusters are linked to form a federation ( EDA, 2006 ).

Technology adaptation : A recent development is the digitalization of the SHGs, the project called E-Shakti innovation, which means ‘electronic empowerment’ ( Prabhala & Rao, 2019 ). NABARD launched E-Shakti in 2015 to spread financial inclusion and help solve transparency problems in SHG-BLP by providing accountable financial and non-financial data. These data are essential to banks and other stakeholders to make quick decisions with less effort, thus increasing their capacity to serve more groups with better quality ( Sarmah, 2019 ).

Figures 3 and 4 show the latest development of the E-Shakti project. The figures show that 671,306 SHGs are covered under the programme as in 2020, and 97 percent of members covered are women.

Growth of E-Shakti.

Number of women covered by E-Shakti. Source: Data were taken from the E-Shakti website.

Economic sustainability

The rural poor’s financial needs are generally characterized by being small and irregular in terms of time ( Aluru, 2010 ). Hence, there is a severe gap between the financial need of the poor and the formal banking sector. The benefit of SHG-BLP for rural women lies in combining the flexibility, sensitivity, and responsiveness of informal credit (internal credit and savings between members) with the formal banking’s strong technical and managerial capacity ( Aluru, 2010 ; Kumra & Sharma, 2018 ).

The idea of SHG-BLP is to provide a sustainable way to finance rural women, along with offering other benefits discussed earlier. However, the financial side works as the main reason why these women come together. In India, there are three types of SHG-BLP:

1) Banks promote and credit SHGs (5 percent of groups following this model),

2) NGOs promote SHGs, and banks credit them (70 percent of SHGs), and

3) NGOs promote and finance SHGs (25 percent of SHGs).

Vassallo et al. (2019) described these models as a social innovation because they mix profit and not-for-profit organizations. They describe the three types as a for-profit hybrid, a quasi-profit hybrid, and a not-for-profit hybrid, respectively. These hybrid organizations are non-traditional models where the creative actions happen between the ‘boundaries between sectors’ ( Vassallo et al. , 2019 ).

The second model is more common and is achieving higher usage (usage here refers to the size of the financial inclusion sector measured as the outstanding loans for the model relative to local market size) than the other two models ( Vassallo et al. , 2019 ). This prevalence is due to the quasi-profit hybrid advantages built in the model that balance social and commercial objectives and optimizes itself in acquiring resources that are further limited for the traditional businesses and charities ( Vassallo et al. , 2019 ). Another characteristic of the quasi-profit hybrids is the self-sufficient seeker feature, unlike the charity model that depends only on donors or the commercial businesses that seek profit maximization. Thus, these organizations expect lower profitability but enjoy lower market competition ( Vassallo et al. , 2019 ).

However, the second SHG model is not the model for all market characteristics. For example, at the bottom-of-the-pyramid, the third model is more suitable (the not-for-profit model) ( Vassallo et al. , 2019 ). The first model is more likely to achieve better outcomes in the bottom-of-the-pyramid with lower levels of social diversity ( Vassallo et al. , 2019 ). The discussion above brings a general concept of matching the SHG-BLP type with different market contexts to scale and spread SHG-BLP social innovation.

Given its promised sustainability and wide usage, the second model is discussed below. Note that SHGs that MFIs or NGOs finance are not included.

Progress of SHG-BLP

SHG-BLP’s saving and credit progress : The share of SHGs linked with each agency as well as the average savings and overall trend are shown in Table 1 below, followed by the credit side in Table 2 .

Number of SHGs’ saving-linked with banks and the average saving per an SHG

Source: Authors’ calculation, data from NABARD. Note: RS denotes Indian rupee.

Number of SHGS’ credit-linked with banks and average loan per an SHG

Table 1 shows that SHG-BLP has grown steadily with a 3.6 percent CAGR between 2010–11 and 2019–20 from 7.5 million to 10.2 million SHGs. CBs alone accounted for 53 percent of SHGs-BLP in 2019–20 and 54 percent on average during the last decade, followed by RRBs at 29 percent and cooperatives banks at 16 percent on average. The average savings amount per SHG is higher in CBs at Rs18,753 and around 13,500 in RRBS and cooperatives. The table shows stable growth in SHGs linked to all agencies with higher RRBs (5 percent CAGR). In the last three years, the saving amount in CBs and RRBs increased by three fold in 2019–20 compared to 2010–11.

In Table 2 , generally, there was a tremendous increase in SHGs credited under the formal sector with about a three-fold increase in 2019–20 compared to 2010–11. The credit amount increases more than five-fold in 2019–20 compared to 2010–11. CBs also have the largest share with 57 percent of SHGs credited on average, followed by RRBs and cooperative banks with 29 percent and 14 percent share, respectively. Similarly, the average amount of loans per SHG provided by CBs was higher at about Rs206.746 on average compared to Rs181.521 and Rs181.109 by RRBs and cooperatives, respectively. The number of groups eligible to receive bank loans showed a steady upward trend for both CBs and RRBs at 12 percent and 15 percent CAGR, respectively, but at only 1 percent CAGR for cooperatives. Figures 5 and 6 below compare both saving- and credit-linked accounts of SHGs in terms of the number of groups and total amount, respectively.

Number of SHGs with saving and credit accounts.

Amount of savings and credit to SHGs by banks.

Both figures show a noticeable increase in the size of SHG-BLPs for both savings and credit. The first three bars in both figures show the total number and amount of savings each year, followed by the credit bars. The amount of credit dispersed during each year is much higher than savings. In contrast, the number of SHGs credited is less than those who have saving accounts which means that only a small part of the SHGs bank-linked are credited.

Tripathi (2014) analysed SHG-BLP’s progress in terms of widening and deepening from the beginning of the programme in 1992 until 2010. The author showed that the programme’s take-off was slow at the beginning, where promoting the initial 100,000 bank-linked SHGs took eight years (1992–2000). However, the programme achieved a key milestone by reaching one million linked SHGs between 2000 and 2004. By the end of 2010, the number has grown to 4.8 million SHGs credit-linked with banks ( Tripathi, 2014 ).

It is crucial to notice that India has worked to expand bank branches in rural areas from earlier stages ( Burgess & Pande, 2005 ), making it possible to link rural SHGs to the formal financial sector. For example, both RRB and cooperatives are supported by the government and play a vital role in reaching the excluded poor ( Akoijam, 2012 ). RRBs are dominant in backword areas, and cooperatives banks are the primary tool to finance the agriculture sector ( Akoijam, 2012 ). The government also makes it compulsory for CB to have branches in rural areas ( Burgess & Pande, 2005 ).

Progress within regions

In Table 3 , generally, the number of SHGs credited has grown tremendously in the last three years from 1.9 million in 2016–17 to 4 million in 2018–19. In general, SHG-BLPs grow by 11.34 CAGR between 2010–11 and 2019–20. The highest number of credit-linked SHGs was in 2015–16 at 7.7 million groups. The amount of disbursed loans increased from 145.5 billion in 2010–11 to 776.6 billion in 2019–20.

Regional difference in terms of SHG-BLP share and average loan

On average, the Southern region has 54 percent of credit-linked SHGs during the last decade, followed by the Eastern and Western regions at 21 percent and 14 percent. The other two regions have a meagre share at 2.6 percent and 2 percent for the Northern and North-eastern regions. The average loan per SHG is the highest for the Southern, Northern, and Western regions at 222.7, 103.2, and 102.5 thousand Indian Rupees. Meanwhile, the average loan for the Central, Eastern, and North-eastern regions are 94.2, 87.8, and 86.9, respectively.

Figures 7 and 8 below show the fluctuation in number and the average amount of loan per SHG. For example, in 2014–15, the average loan in the Northern and Southern regions decreased but then climbed again. Another example is the Western region, where the number of linked SHGs increased sharply in 2017–18 but fell again in 2018–19.

Regional share of SHG-BLP.

Average loan disbursed.

The analysis confirms a considerable heterogeneity between regions with higher outreach found in the Southern region. Some studies attributed the significant growth in South India to the strong presence of particular development and poverty alleviation programmes such as the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) and the World Bank ( Reddy & Maliki, 2011 ). According to Reddy and Maliki (2011 ), experienced NGOs and broad support from NABARD, the states’ official administration, and bank managers are behind such growth in the South region. On the effect on women, Banerjee & Ghosh (2012) note that self-employed members of SHGs do better than their wage-earning peers when it comes to job stability. Venkatraja (2019) evidences that SHGs supported by the Shri Kshetra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP) contribute significantly to societal reforms, improve rural poor’s capacity, and allow economic well-being and financial inclusion. As a result, SHG activities promote inclusive and long-term rural growth. Gupta (2020) agrees that SGH and NGOs have successfully empowered women and aided them to venture new entrepreneurship opportunities and gainful livelihood.

This article used the argument of Jakimow and Kilby (2006) , who posited that women’s empowerment should not be an endpoint but rather a continuous process in which constraints are reduced. Hence, the concept of empowering women is preferable compared to women’s empowerment, in which governments should work towards empowering actions. The article suggested that the SHG-BLP is not a restricted model but instead is a flexible and comprehensive tool that can be used to achieve various development goals. Hence, the article looked at the SHG-BLP from different directions while it stood on its unique feature as a tool directed to financing women. Women benefit from such arrangements the most, given the various constraints they face compared to men. The article emphasized that the SHG-BLP’s power dynamics that work in several power domains are significant features of the programme that empower women by allowing women to participate in decision-making, planning and develop negotiation skills and a sense of self.

Through this article, SHG-BLP shows the ability to contribute towards social sustainability and to various SDGs; in particular, the following goals: SDG 1 by contributing to ensuring women, the poor and vulnerable in particular, have access to economic resources and basic services such as financial service including microfinance; SDG 2 by contributing to increasing the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, particularly women, through secure and equal access to productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, and markets; ADG 5 by contributing to ensure women’s effective participation and leadership rules in their communities and into political, economic, and public life decision-making.

Also, it contributes to SDG 8 by being a development-oriented policy that supports productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation, and encourage the growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services and by reducing the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training. Also, it strengthens domestic financial institutions’ capacity to increasing the proportion of adults with a bank account and SDG 10 by contributing to promoting social, economic, and political inclusion.

The lessons extracted in this article suggest that SHGPI’s quality, including NGOs, is crucial for the success of SHG-BLP as a tool for empowerment and development. If the initial stage of the group formation goes wrong, serious consequences such as disempowerment and discrimination could exist. In India, the institutional support is remarkable. It is one of the reasons why SHG-BLP is spreading and evolving as a flagship multi-dimensional vehicle for developing and empowering women. On the other hand, social context needs to be considered, and SHG-BLP should be designed and nurtured according to the sociocultural aspects. Accordingly, the bottom-up approach should be adopted instead of a restricted top–down program ( Jakimow & Kilby, 2006 ).

The banking sector’s role is essential as a player in the partnership for development (SDG17). It sustainably finances the SHGs while also reducing informal lending practices that could provide loans at exploitative interest rates, thus leading to better positions for rural women and better resource management. This is evidence of the importance of partnerships. In the last decade, the article showed that the SHG-BLP continued to grow even after the Andhra Pradesh microfinance crises, where the usefulness of microfinance was deeply questioned in the literature. The analysis on the last decade showed steady growth (3.6 percent CAGR) of SHG-BLPs in terms of new groups linked to banks. A higher growth rate (11.3 percent CAGR) was recorded for new groups receiving loans. However, the growth was higher for total savings and total loans dispersed at 15.7 percent and 20.5 percent, respectively. This suggests deepening instead of widening the SHG-BLP in the last decade.

India has expanded bank branches in rural areas from earlier stages, making it possible to link SHGs with banks. The analysis shows that CB are more involved in SHG-BLP than RRBs and cooperative banks, with 54 percent of total SHG-BLP linkages on average during the last decade. The growth of SHG-BLP indicates its usefulness not only for women but also to banks highlighting the benefits of the hybrid models, especially the quasi-profit hybrid that is most spread in India. Hence, the combination of the formal sector’s efficiency and the flexibility and convenience of internal group lending is an essential feature of the program. The lending at the market interest rate, as in SHG-BLP, makes it financially sustainable, reduces the burden of governmental subsidies and benefits borrowers who otherwise will depend on informal lenders at exploitive rates. The spatial difference shows that the southern region alone has 52 percent of SHGs. This difference shows the importance of experienced NGOs and development projects mainly located in the South, and the importance of state planning and officials’ motivation to spread the programme.

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments.

This paper is funded by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia grant code EP-2018-001.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The suicides of a number of rural borrowers.

Nada Amer Abdulhafedh Al-Kubati completed her MSc. in Economics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. She holds a BSc. degree in Business Administration from Sana’a University. Her research interests are in the fields of community development, sustainable development, and environmental economics.

Doris Padmini S. Selvaratnam is an Associate Professor of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (The National University of Malaysia). She conducts research-based courses pertaining to Senior Start-up, Social Entrepreneurship, Economics of Women in Health, Economics of Social Policy; and Social and Political Aspects of Development. Her focus is among mainstream community, indigenous and natives of Malaysia, elderly and minority Indians. She organises numerous community research activities involving various stakeholders – the local community, students, NGOs and the local government. Experiential learning in the community is emphasised in all her courses to highlight elements of gender equality, political bargaining power, and volunteerism in community development, learning from the community and also the richness of knowledge gained through the process of dialogue and engagement with the diverse stakeholder. Her community programmes are currently at various Orang Asli villages for provision of basic needs, digital marketing courses, education programmes and solar powered light. While consultancy and research works are related to online shopping, consumer empowerment and redress among youth and elderly. She has journal articles and books related to gerontechnology, wellbeing of elderly, housing needs of the elderly, ageing in place and currently working on topic of aging gracefully.

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Conceptual Review of the Role of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) in Women Entrepreneurship: The Case of Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad (SMGULP)

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• Niki Kyriakidou ,
• Anita P. Bobade &
• Stefanos Nachmias  

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Rapid economic growth and various community programs have not been sufficient to lift poverty, eliminate social discrimination, and support female employment in rural areas. Access to resources, employment, and education is limited, causing tremendous suffering to millions of people across the globe (Dees, 2007). One potential strategy for implementing social and economic progress is to encourage and support social entrepreneurs in local communities. Organizations and various volunteer groups take action to address social problems through the determination, creativity, and resourcefulness of local communities. Social entrepreneurship is seen as differing from other forms of business entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship programs could be a catalyst of social changes and address important social needs (Mair and Marti, 2004). The study aims to conceptually evaluate the literature on social entrepreneurship and provide insight into the role of self-help groups (SHGs) in women empowerment in India. Social entrepreneurship is widely spread across India in the form of SHGs. It is therefore important to evaluate the growth of SHGs in India and the role of social enterprise in supporting local communities.

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Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel

Helena Desivilya Syna

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© 2015 Niki Kyriakidou, Anita P. Bobade and Stefanos Nachmias

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Kyriakidou, N., Bobade, A.P., Nachmias, S. (2015). Conceptual Review of the Role of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) in Women Entrepreneurship: The Case of Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad (SMGULP). In: Syna, H.D., Costea, CE. (eds) Women’s Voices in Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432155_16

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