Empowerment of Self Help Groups (SHGs) towards Microenterprise Development

The main thrust of micro finance, in medium and long term perspectives, should be to empower the SHG members to enable them to undertake income generating microenterprises on a viable and sustainable basis. The paper aims at examining empirically the determinants of empowerment of SHGs as micro finance clients to microenterprise investors and problems faced by them in this transition as well as in undertaking microenterprises on a viable and sustainable basis. For this purpose, an attempt is made in this paper to construct a consolidated empowerment index of SHGs based on the level of institutional and financial performance of the SHGs of different promoters studied in different districts and determine the relative importance of various determinant factors by using correlation matrix and regression model.