Bhubaneswar : School of Women’s Studies, Utkal University is organising a ‘Skill development Workshop for SHGs of Odisha’ on 24th Sept. 2016 in the P.G.Council Hall. This Workshop will be inaugurated by Subrato Bagchi, Chairman, Skill Development Authority of Odisha.
SHG is a holistic programme of micro-enterprises covering all aspects of self-employment, organization of the rural poor into Self Help Groups and their capacity building, planning of activity clusters, infrastructure build up, technology, credit and marketing. It lays emphasis on activity clusters based on the resources and the occupational skills of the people and availability of markets. A self-help group is formed with 12-20 members residing in the same locality, having a homogeneous social and economic background. Leaders of the group — called Animators and Representatives — are elected by the members. A bank account is opened in the name of the SHG to transact their business.
Objective
• The economic objective is to raise small funds for day to day needs
• To transform the saving groups to earning groups which not only increase the productivity of women but their credibility too.
• To educate women to understand and gain knowledge about banking, gram panchayat, zilla parishad and legal system.
• To impart leadership quality amongst women group and instil confidence to take up responsibilities un-ventured before.
Scope
This programme shall focus on leadership, capacity building, micro finance, entrepreneurship and marketing. It is to see the business principles training programme given by organizations, specially designed for the needs of women entrepreneurs, give them insights into finance, marketing, information technology, banking, and soft skills and help them diversify their business. It is also to see how they have learnt to carry group activities and done group management skill with leadership qualities. With introduction of enterprise and microfinance management including financial education how self employed women have transformed themselves to become entrepreneurs.
There shall be discussion on how using the social capital of the group as the collateral, where microfinance is provided to the members, specifically to create or strengthen enterprises. Going beyond mere provision of microfinance, how the entrepreneurs are also helped with bank linkages and hand held to develop their enterprises through business promotion initiatives like the provision of backward and forward linkages, including market support and how promotional support are provided in terms of branding, quality control and marketing to the products produced by SHG members are going to be covered in this session.
• This training programme is fundamentally customized according to the local contexts and language.
• The mode of the training session shall mostly be participative and interactive.
Outcome
There shall be an attempt to find out whether the training received by them are demand driven, need based and whether these training is provided to hone their skill sets in the areas of their interest and whether these are provided to increase the viability and scalability of their micro enterprises.
Monitoring
• Our centre, i.e. School of Women’s Studies shall continue to hold such kind of training-cum-interactive programmes with the SHGs.
• Impact assessment study may be conducted by our centre to see the changes effected amongst poor.
• Our centre shall continue to monitor whether SHG members are provided with institutional networking and linkages to get improved and continuous support for their business activities or not.
• Our centre shall see whether SHGs are strengthening their existing businesses or not; diversifying into new businesses or not, whether the SHG members are upgrading their skills for new business or not and whether proper marketing mechanism is in pace or not.
Note: News shared for public awareness with reference from the information provided at online news portals.
