Microfinance Through Women Self Help Groups Shgs For Grass Root Level Empowerment An Empirical Study Of Varanasi Uttar Pradesh India

Microfinance, as a concept, involves providing financial services, particularly small credit, fund transfer, and insurance to the unemployed, low-income group, and those who do not have easy access to the banking system. It has emerged as an active agent of financial inclusion, ensuring economic, and social upliftment of the unprivileged. Microfinance is being operated through two channels Self-help Group-Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) and Micro-finance Institutions (MFIs). The special characteristic of SBLP is its direct connection with the clients at the grass-root level and working towards poverty reduction by providing financial support. The paper is based on a field study on SBLP undertaken for women in the Varanasi District of Uttar Pradesh, India. The increase in women’s participation in economic activities and decision-making reveals that SHGs have made an impact. SHGs have also helped them to create a common platform to participate, discuss, and find a solution of their problems. Women’s income and occupation structure under SHGs have also influenced the standard of living and empowerment level significantly.

Ensuring accessibility to credit to the poor self-employed households is a critical concern for many developing nations. Self-help groups (SHG) formed by women in the developing countries help them to access financial intermediaries and access credit for various income-generating activities. In case of India, SHGs are formed either through state-assisted SHG-Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) or through private initiatives of micro finance institutions (MFIs) or NGOs. Under the former, the groups access formal banking directly while in case of MFIs, loan is disbursed through MFIs themselves. Rate of interest in case of loans obtained by SHGs through SBLP, therefore, depends on the rate of interest charged by the various types of formal lending agencies and is often found to be lower than the interest charges of the MFIs. It is, however, argued that transaction costs involved in a bank loan are substantial, therefore, borrowers prefer loans from the informal sector, delivered at the borrower’s doorstep. In order to examine this issue rigorously, we have tried to estimate the effective costs towards borrowing by including the transaction costs, estimated using quantitative data collected through our survey. Our results show that the transaction costs contribute only marginally to the cost of borrowing, hence, we argue (using field data) that the programme, which has many additional benefits including ensuring financial inclusion of women and empowering them, should be strengthened and expanded further.

Agricultural interventions are designed on certain assumptions of empowerment that do not necessarily address the livelihood constraints of the rural women they set out to support. This is a failing that might be due to the omission of women’s voices expressing their understanding of empowerment and its relation to existing gender orders. Using primary data from the Upper East and Northern Regions in Ghana, we explored women and men’s notions of the processes and outcomes of empowerment. We began by understanding the basis of women’s disempowerment and confirmed its location within agricultural production relations that granted women limited access to resources. Respondents recognised all the main dimensions of power: within, with, to and over. The restrictions of women’s empowerment to the provisioning role on condition that it did not usurp male power over women limited intervention’s ability to provide true empowerment for women. But signs of increasing transfer of women’s power within into group action and male acceptance of women’s expanding spheres of influence indicate that some grounds for true transformation in the future exists.

This paper suggests the concept of care extractivism as a space- and time-diagnostic tool to international political economics in post-fordist societies. Analogous to resource extractivism, care extractivism depicts the intensified commodification of social reproduction and care work along social hierarchies of gender, class, race and North-South as a strategy to cope with a crisis of social reproduction. Extractivist policies result in the creation of a cheap reproductive labour force. The paper analyses the current national and transnational reconfiguration of social and biological reproduction in Germany / Western Europe interacting with Eastern Europe and Asia. Currently, the most striking features of care extractivism are a) professionalisation for efficiency increase, b) transnationalisation based on import of care workers, and c) transnationalisation of biological reproduction based on reproductive technologies. The contradiction between the rationale of care and the neoliberal capitalist market logic results in frequent care struggles such as the protests of hospital nurses against the depletion of care resources. The politisation of care by the protesting care workers asks for giving preference to the care economy as a common good over care as a commodity.

Thermal energy storage technologies are gaining attention nowadays for uninterrupted supply of solar power in off-sunshine hours. An indigenized solar phase change material (PCM) system was developed and performance evaluated in the current study to efficiently store solar thermal power using a latent heat storage approach, which can be utilized in any subsequent decentralized food processing application. A 2.5 m2 laying Scheffler reflector is used to precisely focus the incoming direct normal irradiance (DNI) on a casted aluminum heat receiver (220 mm diameter) from where this concentrated heat energy is absorbed and conducted to the PCM unit by the flow of thermal oil (Fragoltherm-32 thermo-oil). During the circulation around PCM pipes inside the PCM unit, thermal oil discharges heat energy to the PCM, which undergoes change of phase from solid to liquid. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the PCM unit were also performed according to the actual boundary conditions, which gave satisfactory results in terms of temperature and velocity distribution. With an average DNI of 781 W/m2, the highest temperature of the receiver surface during the trials was observed at about 155 C that produces thermal oil at 110°C inside the receiver and around 48°C of PCM in the PCM unit. The heat energy losses per unit time (W) due to the lack of reflectivity from the Scheffler reflector, out-of-focus radiations at the targeted area, absorptivity of heat receiver, piping system losses, and cylinder losses (in the form of conduction, convection, and radiations using 50 mm insulation thickness) were found to be 110 W (10 %), 99 W (9 %), 89 W (8 %), 128 W (12 %), 161 W (15 %), and 89 W (8 %), respectively. These findings of CFD analysis and mathematical modeling were also consistent with real-time data, which was logged through an online Control and Monitoring Interface portal. The final energy available to the PCM was 414W with an overall system efficiency of 38 %, which can be improved by decreasing thermal losses of the system and using other PCM materials.

Indian fisheries are moving from artisanal to capitalistic methods of production. As this transformation takes place, many traditional fishers are forced to seek employment on trawlers and other fishing vessels owing to their lack of a capital base to purchase modern vessels themselves. Competition among trawlers can lead to cost reducing strategies that lower the quality of working conditions for those employed in these vessels. This paper is an attempt to assess the working conditions of these workers through the use of indicators developed by the International Labour Office in the context of decent work. By utilizing data collected in the National Sample Survey Organization’s (NSSO) 68th round survey of employment and unemployment, we find that there are some areas in which decency of work is lacking. The level of job security is highly inadequate among most workers in fisheries. There is a marked absence of women in the labour pool, especially in unskilled tasks. Child labour, while not a cause for alarming concern, exists to a minor degree in the industry. Furthermore, freshwater fishing was found to afford lower standards of work than marine fishing. Regulation and policy action are called into requirement by these observations.

This report aims to document and evaluate the outcomes of the regional workshop on “Syrian Refugees and Integration of Syrians” held in İstanbul in February 2017. The workshop was organized by the Global Labour University (GLU) Alumni Network in Turkey in collaboration with International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD), the University of Kassel, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), International Labour Organization (ILO), Global Labour University (GLU), Boğaziçi University Centre for Educational Policy Studies (BEPAM) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Turkey Office, with particular focus on the composition and narratives of the Syrian refugees through the “fishbowl session”. The report finds that Syrian refugees have a very difficult life in Turkey in terms of working conditions, living conditions, discrimination, bureaucracy, lack of enough regulation, child education, language barriers etc. One of the most important concerns for Syrian refugees is child labour. Owing to unemployment of Syrian adults, most parents are forced to send their kids to work. With ineffective state control on employment and labour market, employers prefer to recruit children who are paid low wages, thereby enabling them to make higher profits. The other problems Syrian refugees face in the labour markets are low wages, long working hours, employment without social insurance, late payment or non-payment of the wages, discrimination at the workplace, etc. Regarding accommodation, majority of the Syrian refugees live in a populous household, paying higher rents for lower quality houses in comparison with domestic people. In addition, the situation of Syrian refugees in Turkey has a strong gender dimension. The Syrian females work as precarious workers at the workplace. They are the most affected and vulnerable workers. In addition, Syrian female refugees also take the responsibility of the education of the children who face different types of discrimination at school, with which again Syrian female refugees have to struggle. These problems have created barriers for Syrian refugees in exercising their rights at the workplace and in taking services from public institutions including healthcare and education. Besides, as findings show, the Syrian refugees are placed in the lowest strata of the labour markets of Turkey.