Programmes Women Empowerment

“Developing Good Governance Practices and Sustainability among the Cooperatives and Networking among them”

Objective:

Developing in connection with the Credit Cooperatives a cadre of women from marginalized communities, with the required knowledge and skills to increase the financial viability of the cooperatives and address social and political issues of the communities they belong to and specifically issues faced by women within these communities.

Specific Objectives are:

• To developing a new methodology of enabling the cooperatives to address financial and governance as well as social issues.
• To address in each cooperative the governance and financial issues and to develop the skills and networks needed for each cooperative.
• To develop among members of the cooperatives a sense of the areas in which social action (specially around gender justice) needs to be taken; and the willingness and skills to mobilise people in order to be able to take on social action. It also attempts to develop among the women a focused involvement in local governance, at the level of awareness, access, opportunity and control, via decisive leadership.
• To bring together the cooperatives into a platform capable of addressing policy issues, regarding both cooperative-related issues and social issues.

The project covers the areas across Gujarat, where women’s credit cooperatives are in existence. According to the distances, the project area has been divided into 4 zone i.e. North Zone, South Zone, Central Zone.

The project has the network of 30 Cooperatives of which project has direct intervention in following 15 cooperatives:

Bhiloda, Khiloda, Himmatnagar, Borsad, Nana Kantharia, Unai, Meghraj, Bardipada, Dakor, Limboi, Nani Singloti, Narukot, Mandal, Subir, Zankhvav

Activities:

A number of activities is undertaken at the local level while others at the level of zones or at a centralised level.

To develop a Resource Team at state level for strengthening coops, collective leadership and for platform

• a.Orientation, capacity building and planning meeting
• b.Capacity building for the resource team
• c.Orientation meeting with promoters, pramukhs and secretaries of all the 15 cooperatives

To strengthen governance and finance of participating cooperatives

• a.Collective process for financial growth plan at the level of each cooperative
• b.Monthly Handholding for governance and finance

To Develop & strengthen collective leadership and develop institutional support mechanism for women leaders to address issues affecting women and community at large

• a.Identifying 10-12 potential social leaders in each cooperative
• b.Collective process for social growth at the level of each cooperative
• c.Handholding for social action

To evolve a platform of all coops for state level advocacy agenda.

• a.State-level consultation for advocacy strategy
• b.Monthly intervention and follow-up meeting

Program benefit:

• The good governance training has given 15 cooperatives skills to deal with different norms and legal demands of Income Tax, GST and Government department.
• At the functioning level – they decided to make the information of the accounts available for all the members of the Cooperatives, to be more transparent, accountable, democratic and value based without discrimination and they will place more emphasis on it.
• Developed goal-oriented and need-based methods of daily recording and documentation.
• Social intervention increased as second-line leadership emerged.
• 50 percentage of the women became aware of the sexual and reproductive system and are able to understand the social pressure and the discrimination that they go through.
• The women are well aware of the patriarchal system and how it affects the Gender and discrimination that is very much prominent in the society. They have better understanding of different types of violence that women face – it is not only physical.
• From 15 Cooperatives around 250 second line leaders became aware that they have to recognize the problems/issues that is affecting them and the society at large. They are encouraged to understand their problems in depth and speak about it in the open.
• Gujarat Cooperative Mahasangh has become a platform for all cooperatives for State level Advocacy on the issue of Stamp duty, Mahasangh got an identity at the State level because of the training programs, guidance, legalities that is followed by the members of the coop at the State level.
• 60 percentage of the cooperatives have made paradigm shift from economic priorities to social concerns.

Upcoming events:

• Campaign on the effect of the AtmaNirbhar Bharat Package on the Cooperatives.
• Trainings on collective process for financial growth and social growth plan at the level of each Coop
• Capacity building for the Resource team members to develop social action plan for each Cooperatives –follow up and its implementation to be monitored by us.

Key words:

Women Cooperative, Women Empowerment, Gujarat Women Cooperative Mahasangh, Women with power, Women leadership