The wide spread of self-help groups (SHGs) in both urban and rural communities in Nigeria and the low empowerment of the members economically, socially, politically and psychologically raises a lot of questions about what exactly his happening, since the primary objective of forming the SHGs is to empower the members holistically. The overall aim of the paper is to identify and discuss the factors influencing SHG member empowerment in Nigerian communities. The paper briefly discusses leadership, cohesiveness, participation, volunteerism, communication, goals/objectives as (Group factors), while age of SHG member, gender, location and marital status as (Personal factors). The paper concludes that understanding why community members remain in their various SHGs or otherwise is very important in empowerment studies and holistic community development. There is every need to keep encouraging community members to form both homogeneous and heterogeneous SHGs to enable elimination of barriers towards participation and allow all community members participate in empowerment process. The paper also recommends that regulatory agencies should be more active in their supervisory and monitoring role in order to identify fake SHGs and those operating below standard and also reward those adhering to ethics and code of conduct; more studies need to be conducted with a view of exploring more factors influencing SHG members empowerment in Nigeria and compare with what is obtained globally to strengthen the system for better performance and management.

Availability of extension workers is very vital in economic, social and psychological empowerment of Self-help groups (SHG) members. This paper discusses the moderating effect of gender in the relationship between extension worker availability and SHG members' economic, social and psychological empowerment in North-Eastern Nigeria. Proliferation and heterogeneity of the SHGs implies the basic assumption of increase in empowerment level of SHG members if there is interaction between the gender and availability of the extension worker and vice versa. The overriding objective of the paper is to analyze the moderating effect of gender in the relationship between holistic empowerment of SHG member and the availability of extension worker. A sample of 373 SHG members were selected through a multi-stage random sampling from a total of 11,021 determined as the accessible population in 476 SHGs that worked or are currently working with extension workers in the 3 sample states. Data were collected through administration of

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