Social Mobilisation & Institution Building
DAY NRLM, known as Anandadhara in West Bengal is a major programme to eradicate poverty by enabling the poor households to access gainful self-employment and skilled wage employment opportunities, resulting in appreciable improvement in their livelihoods on a sustainable basis, through the formation and strengthening of women SHGs and their networks.
Based on NRLM guideline all Self Help Group (SHG) under Anandadhara is being typically a community based institution at hamlet level comprising minimum 10 to 20 poor women from more or less homogeneous background coming together to come out of poverty having several dimensions. In some special cases SHG may be formed with minimum 5 members situated in remote area, difficult terrain and forests or having PwD members or other vulnerable members. (Household coverage & SHG Formation).
Universal Social Mobilization is the base activity and pillar on which NRLM stands. Social mobilization bringing and organizing all women from poor rural households with at least 1 deprivation and auto inclusion (as per Socio-Economic Cast Census 2011) in Self Help Group.
One of the important feature of SHGs under Anandadhara to follow a set of practices called Panchasutra (regular meeting, regular savings, regular inter-lending, regular repayment and maintain up-to-date books of accounts) to strengthen their group.
In West Bengal since Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana (SGSY) period SHGs federations known as Upasangha has been started forming at village level where all SHGs formed at village level federate. Similarly SHG federation known as Sangha has been started forming at GP level where all the Upasnghas federated.
During the NRLM programme under Anandadhara the saturation of Sangha and Upsangha has been completed and the role of these federations has been defined. These federations are basically provide/facilitate different supports like capacity building, financial inclusion, access to institutional credit and skill development for taking up different livelihoods options, supported with provisions of technological as well as marketing support to the SHG members to create an enabling environment for them.
Based on the experiences Sangha, the GP level federations has been identified as Pivotal organization in West Bengal and in course of time a need for a legal entity for them has been evolved. To cater this need all Sanghas under Anandadhara has been registered as 'Primary Multipurpose Cooperative Society' under the West Bengal Cooperative Act and all Sanghas become Sangha Cooperative.
Being a registered organization all Sangha Cooperatives become liable to provide different services to her members as well as for statutory compliance; hence there is a major transformation in leadership, operations and processes evolved. To provide necessary support to cater this change and strengthening the organization necessary trainings on Cooperative management has been done.
In next level to streamline the process, operations and practices of the Sangha cooperatives a concept of Model CLF has been introduced with the objective to develop a strong, self reliable and self sustainable organization as well as emerge as immersion site for learning. In this intervention apart from Cooperative Management Training, training related to standardization of different operational systems and policies/manual on Governance, Financial Management and Human Resource has been planned along with Visioning Exercise, Business Development Plan, Financial Projection, Annual Plan and budgeting in advance level.
Training Management
