Page 85 - DMGT310_ENTREPRENEURSHIP_AND_SMALL_BUSINESS_MANAGEMENT

Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management

Notes It is definite that if appropriate skills and opportunities of decision making are given to women,
they are proving that they are, if not superior, at least equal to men. Women are considered to
be good leaders in matters requiring collaboration, group integration and ability to listen and
motivation. Recent trends in India and even at global level women are far more superior to men
in various aspects of development. Only problem is that so far the society has given little chance
to women to enter into the fields of various economic activities. Hence, it is necessary today to
empower women by providing the facilities to enter into various economic activities to make
themselves economically independent and socially confident in their endeavor.

Did u know? The founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus
Schwab, introduced the first grassroot or social entrepreneurship award. It was awarded
through Schwab foundation to Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya
in Bangalore. The award was given with a view to highlight social entrepreneurship as a
key to advance societies and address social problems.
Micro finance through the self help groups has a lot of role to play in the grassroots
entrepreneurship as well as women empowerment. Economically poor individual gains strength
as part of a group. Besides, financing through SHGs reduces transaction costs for both lenders
and borrowers. While lenders have to handle only a single SHG account instead of a large
number of small-sized individual accounts, borrowers as a part of a SHG cut down expenses on
travel (to and from the branch and other places) for completing paper work and on the loss of
workdays in canvassing for loans. A Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) is a voluntary
organization established to undertake social intermediation like organizing SHGs of micro
entrepreneurs and entrusting them to banks for credit linkage of financial intermediation like
borrowing bulk funds from banks for on-lending to SHGs.

Task Identify a self help group nearby you and further your knowledge about
how they help grassroots entrepreneurs.

Micro credit appears to improve the lives of those who are poor by increasing their buying and
investing capability, this lifting them onto a higher economic plane. Accordingly, these small
loans seem to positively affect poverty by creating entrepreneurship and greater self-reliance
among the poor. SHGs now constitute the grass roots level institutions developed for social/
economic and financial intermediation with a focus on the poor. The SBLP is “overwhelmingly
based on the principle of financial services being related to the cash flows of the low-income
client groups and thus aim to facilitate relatively frequent and very small or micro-loan and
saving transactions”(Sinha, 2003). In the financial year 2007-08, Microfinance in India through its
two major channels – Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) and MFIs served over
33 million Indians, up by 9 million over the previous year. 4 out of 5 microfinance clients in
India are women.
Self-help groups are usually informal groups whose members have a common perception of
need and importance towards collective action. These groups promote savings among members
and use the pooled resources for multi dimensional development.

!
Caution The number of members in SHGs is normally ranges from 10 to 20, it is expected
that within the group, there should be true democratic culture in which all the members
must participate actively in the decision making process.

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