Women Empowerment

As we know, Women Empowerment is one of the Millennium Development Goal (M.D.G.) fixed by the United Nations Organization (U.N.O.). We know much better those women confines approximately 50 % of the total population of our country. We thought that we must pay our attention to the overall development of rural women.

GREAT Trust since 2000 onwards started and formation of women Self Help Groups (SHG) in Vellore, Anaicut and Kaniyambadi blocks in Vellore District. At present works with women SHG’s for making a difference in the lives of the women by generating awareness, capacity building, institutionalization and facilitating access to resource towards collective self-reliance.

Self Help Groups

The main objective of GREAT Trust is to build the capacity of the poor and less privileged women. In order to enable them to cross all social and economic barriers and thereby to facilitate their complete development into empowered citizen through the formation of women self-help groups.

To strengthen the SHG’s and their sustainable activities, GREAT Trust has provided needful support like orientation on SHG activities, proper guidance through regular follow up visits, entrepreneur development training and so on.

GREAT Trust focused to form SHG’s among women who are below the poverty line, scheduled caste, widows, physically handicapped, orphan and destitute. The target groups were selected and trained to form an SHG as per the norms and conditions of SHG. Through regular field visits to these groups, GREAT Trust provided needful support by imparting knowledge on conducting group meetings, maintaining documents and record maintenance, managing of revolving fund etc.

Empowering Rural Women

We continuously are empowering rural women bringing overall development for them. We have formed and developed SHGs in the 3 blocks in Vellore district. Besides it, we have provided sewing and weaving training programme to those women who are coming under the BPL Category. Approximately 500 individual women have been imparted training by our own effort and they are generating income after getting training.

Taking this feature into deliberation for developing trained women, GREAT Trust focused on the essential activities in the reported period as follows:

Formation of Self Help Groups
Savings and credit mobilization
Credit linkages

A silent economic revolution is taking place in the rural areas by the formation and successful functioning of women Self Help Groups (SHG). Group meeting, minutes note, resolution, internal lending, loan, revolving fund, Bank, cheque, accounts, pass book, savings, repayment, subscription are no more new words for them. SHG is a major tool for empowerment of women and slowly converting their status equal to men.