Factors Influencing Self-Help Group Members Empowerment in Nigeria

Abstract

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.

Determinants that Contribute Women to Join in SHGs in Rayalaseema Region of Andhra Pradesh

“…Table 1 The dimension wise factor loadings that demonstrated 50 percent of variation were selected and tabulated in Table 2. Results from table showed that Five variables in the first-factor set, four variables in the fifth factor set, three variables in second & third factor set, two variables in fourth, sixth and ninth factor sets, and only one variable in factor set seventh, eighth, tenth and eleven were included based on the percent of variation [14]. The first dimension (Factor I) that influenced women members to join in SHG was labelled as Enterprise development domain as the five factors were related to enterprise development through SHG.…”

Relationship between Extension Worker Availability and Self-help Groups (SHG) Member Empowerment: Does Gender Moderate the Relationship?

“…Moreover, activities of both extension worker and the available SHGs in a given community is to empower community members, which can be observed physically and mentally by raising their purchasing power, increase in their farming output, increase in their level of literacy, increase in their home management skills, good decisions taken, ability to overcome treason, reduced child abuse, low disease outbreak, high youth engagement, self-dependence and readiness to sacrifice resources for the benefit of the community [39,2,34].…”