{"id":17988,"date":"2026-10-06T04:44:04","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T04:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/?p=17988"},"modified":"2026-10-12T05:01:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T05:01:16","slug":"self-help-groups-livelihoods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/self-help-groups-livelihoods\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Help Groups and Rural Livelihoods: Collective Action Supports Women&#8217;s Economic Participation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Summary<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Self-help groups (SHGs) help rural women pool savings, access credit and support one another\u2019s livelihood efforts.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Collective action can strengthen women\u2019s financial independence, business skills and confidence in making decisions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Mentorship, financial literacy, market access and institutional linkages help women build more sustainable enterprises.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Government initiatives such as DAY-NRLM and SHE-LEAPS aim to strengthen SHG-led livelihoods and enterprise development.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Smile Foundation\u2019s Swabhiman programme supports women through entrepreneurship development, financial literacy and livelihood opportunities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"682\" src=\"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636007864-1024x682.jpg\" alt=\"The importance of self-help groups in women entrepreneurship\n\" class=\"wp-image-17990\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636007864-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636007864-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636007864-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636007864-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636007864.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Bhawna&#8217;s family survived on two incomes. There was her father&#8217;s work as a sewage cleaner and her own job, until both dried up within months of each other. Then stepped in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/donation\/women-empowerment\">Smile Foundation&#8217;s Swabhiman programme<\/a>, which looked at the pile of old clothes in Bhawna&#8217;s house and saw something nobody else had, that is the raw material. Within weeks, Bhawna was making fifty masks a day, selling them through contacts her coordinator helped her build. <br><em><br><\/em>A few hundred kilometres away, in the village of Modgaon in Maharashtra&#8217;s Palghar district, Ranjana was building something similar from scratch. Her poultry farm, started during the pandemic changed how she saw herself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;I feel economically independent but also empowered to make my own decisions,&#8221; she says, already planning to scale up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bG2xl1vLuis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a kitchen<\/a> that once served 15 people with a handful of borrowed vessels, Shailaja and four other women have spent 16 years building a catering business that now feeds up to 250 people at a sitting, including, on some days, students at Azim Premji University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Behind each story sits the same mechanism: a self-help group, and the collective support that comes with it. This is what self-help groups and rural livelihoods look like when they actually work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What Self-Help Groups Actually Do<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/aksha.gatesfoundation.org\/dialogues\/reimagining-rural-development-with-indias-self-help-groups\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Self-help group<\/a> is a simple idea which begins with a handful of women, usually ten to twenty, who pool small savings, lend to each other and back one another&#8217;s livelihood efforts. No collateral, no paperwork most rural households could never produce, no bank manager deciding who&#8217;s &#8220;creditworthy&#8221; enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The model has been around since the 1980s, when it first took shape as DWCRA groups, before NABARD began linking these groups to formal banks in the early 1990s. Under DAY-NRLM since 2011, that linkage has become one of the largest financial inclusion efforts anywhere in the world. According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/journal.hmjournals.com\/index.php\/JWES\/article\/view\/5494\/3593\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Journal of Women Empowerment and Studies (2025)<\/a>, India&#8217;s SHG-bank linkage network has grown from roughly 500 groups at its outset to close to 9 million SHGs today, drawing in nearly 100 million women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What makes SHGs different from a straightforward loan is the group itself. Bhawna needed capital and Smile Foundation to spot an opportunity in a pile of old clothes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where Collective Action Shows Up and and How It&#8217;s Actually Built<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s tempting to measure SHGs purely by the money moving through them. For FY2024, the <a href=\"https:\/\/journal.hmjournals.com\/index.php\/JWES\/article\/view\/5494\/3593\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">SHG-bank linkage programme<\/a> disbursed loans worth over \u20b92.09 lakh crore. It held savings with banks crossing \u20b965,000 crore, with disbursement up 44 percent on the previous year and non-performing assets down 27 percent. This is indeed a sign the model is scaling without becoming riskier The more useful question is what actually makes collective action work on the ground.<br><br><strong>Pooling savings and capital internally, first:<\/strong> Before a single rupee of bank credit arrives, SHGs build a habit of small, regular group savings. This internal fund does two things at once: it builds a credit history the group can take to a bank, and it gives members a source of &#8220;soft&#8221; emergency money to cover a medical bill or school fee, without resorting to a moneylender. It&#8217;s the same principle behind the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wvi.org\/article\/savings-and-loans-association-empowers-women\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">VSLA<\/a> (Village Savings and Loan Association) model used by cooperatives like KANBAOCU in Ghana, where pooled weekly contributions fund both business capital and emergency loans for members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mentorship and peer learning within the group.<\/strong> Groups that last, like Shailaja&#8217;s sixteen-year-old catering collective, tend to have an informal division of roles. There\u2019s someone who&#8217;s better with accounts, someone who handles orders, someone who trains newer members. Smile Foundation&#8217;s Entrepreneurship Development Programme formalises exactly this, teaching members to manage money and plan for growth rather than simply survive month to month.<br><br><strong>Deliberate convergence with local institutions.<\/strong> SHGs work best when they&#8217;re linked to panchayats, banks and block-level officials. This is where awareness of schemes, priority in local development plans, and smoother loan processing actually happen, rather than being left to chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Market and skill linkages beyond the group itself.<\/strong> Bhawna was connected to a buyer, and that was a turning point. Linking a product to a market is often the difference between a livelihood activity and a one-off income boost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Risk-pooling during shocks.<\/strong> The pandemic tested this directly: SHGs across India pivoted into mask and PPE production, ran community kitchens for stranded migrant workers, and kept local supply chains moving \u2014 Kerala&#8217;s Kudumbashree network alone ran thousands of such kitchens when formal systems buckled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This pattern to save together, learn together, link outward, absorb shocks together, isn&#8217;t unique to India. In Ethiopia&#8217;s Amhara region, women who joined honey-production cooperatives alongside informal self-help groups earned 81 percent more than women working alone, largely because the cooperative gave them access to better prices and bulk buyers they could never have reached individually. In the Philippines, a coffee-growing collective that began as a village effort to fund a shared water system pooled just USD 20 per family to start, and grew, over a decade, into an enterprise worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The mechanism is the same wherever it works. It\u2019s the linking along with the lending that turns a group of women into a livelihood engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Digital Layer: SHE-LEAPS<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The newest addition to this ecosystem arrived in June 2026, when the government launched <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pib.gov.in\/FactsheetDetails.aspx?id=150655&amp;NoteId=150655&amp;ModuleId=16&amp;reg=5&amp;lang=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">SHE-LEAPS<\/a> (Self-Help Entrepreneur-Livelihoods and Enterprise Application for Prosperity and Sustainability) at the Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Sammelan in New Delhi. Built by Digital India Corporation under the LokOS system, it gives SHG-linked enterprises a single platform to track performance, access markets, and plug into formal value chains \u2014 precisely the &#8220;market linkage&#8221; step that often happens informally. It now has a shot at happening systematically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s also designed to power the Lakhpati Didi mission, whose target has just been raised from 3 crore to 6 crore women, backed by a planned \u20b910 lakh crore outlay over five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What Still Holds Women Back<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"682\" src=\"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636006866-1024x682.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17991\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636006866-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636006866-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636006866-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636006866-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791636006866.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">None of this erases the challenges that persist on the ground. Many SHG women remain unaware of the government schemes meant for them. Bookkeeping and digital literacy remain thin in remote areas. Resistance from within households is still common, and local banking or panchayat cooperation remains patchy in places. Collective action has moved the needle, but closing these gaps is where the next phase of progress needs to focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Bhawna, Ranjana and Shailaja needed a group of women willing to back them, and a system patient enough to let that backing compound over time. That, in the end, is what self-help groups and rural livelihoods have quietly built across India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>FAQs<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>1. What is a self-help group (SHG)?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A self-help group is a community-based group, often comprising 10\u201320 women, who pool small savings, provide loans to members and support one another\u2019s livelihood activities. SHGs can also help members access formal banking, training and government schemes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>2. How do self-help groups support rural livelihoods?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">SHGs help women access small amounts of capital, develop business skills, share knowledge and build connections with buyers and institutions. These resources can help women start or expand enterprises and make their livelihoods more sustainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>3. How do self-help groups promote women&#8217;s economic empowerment?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By improving access to savings, credit, financial literacy and income-generating opportunities, SHGs can strengthen women\u2019s economic independence. Working collectively can also help women build confidence, participate in decisions and negotiate challenges that might be harder to address individually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>4. What is the role of the DAY-NRLM scheme in supporting SHGs?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana\u2013National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM), launched in 2011, supports rural poor households, particularly women, in building strong community institutions and improving access to financial services and sustainable livelihood opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>5. Why are market linkages important for women-led enterprises?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Producing goods or developing a service does not guarantee a sustainable income. Market linkages connect women entrepreneurs with buyers, suppliers and wider value chains, helping them reach customers, generate regular sales and grow their businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>6. What is SHE-LEAPS, and how can it help self-help groups?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">SHE-LEAPS stands for Self-Help Entrepreneur-Livelihoods and Enterprise Application for Prosperity and Sustainability. The digital platform is designed to help SHG-linked enterprises track performance, access markets and connect with formal value chains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>7. How does Smile Foundation support women&#8217;s empowerment through Swabhiman?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Smile Foundation\u2019s Swabhiman programme takes an integrated approach to women\u2019s empowerment, combining health, education, livelihoods and entrepreneurship. Its interventions include entrepreneurship development, financial and digital literacy, business support and market access to help women pursue and sustain income-generating activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sources:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>chrome-extension:\/\/efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj\/https:\/\/thedocs.worldbank.org\/en\/doc\/62141abf1152d94953e76c11345c869f-0310022021\/related\/SARL-India-Final-Report-Final-May22.pdf<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/journal.hmjournals.com\/index.php\/JWES\/article\/view\/5494\/3593\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/journal.hmjournals.com\/index.php\/JWES\/article\/view\/5494\/3593<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"about:blank\">chrome-extension:\/\/efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj\/https:\/\/www.worldbank.org\/content\/dam\/Worldbank\/document\/Gender\/Evans%20and%20Nambiar%202013.%20Collective%20action%20and%20women&#8217;s%20agency.%20Dec%2017.pdf<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Self-help groups are helping rural women turn small savings into sustainable livelihoods, stronger businesses and greater financial independence. Through collective support, mentorship, access to credit and market linkages, women are building enterprises and creating new opportunities for themselves and their communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":17992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[1250],"class_list":["post-17988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-women-empowerment","tag-selfhelpgroups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17993,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988\/revisions\/17993"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smilefoundationindia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}