What do you mean by Self help groups?

Self-help groups, also known as mutual help, mutual aid, or support groups, are groups of people who provide mutual support for each other. A SHG is an informal association to enhance the member’s financial security as primary focus and other common interest of members such as area development, awareness, motivation, leadership, training and associating in other social inter-mediation programmes for the benefit of the entire community. Self-help groups are started by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that generally have broad anti-poverty agendas. It typically comprises a group of micro entrepreneurs having homogeneous social and economic backgrounds, all voluntarily coming together to save regular small sums of money, mutually agreeing to contribute to a common fund and to meet their emergency needs on the basis of mutual help. A self-help group (SHG) is a village-based financial intermediary committee usually composed of 10–20 local women or men. In the case of disabled persons, the groups formed should ideally be disability-specific wherever possible, however, in case sufficient number of people for formation of disability-specific groups are not available, a group may comprise of persons with diverse disabilities or a group may comprise of both disabled and non-disabled persons below the poverty line. read less