Prepare Women Leaders in Financial Management

The 2 Federations supported by Utthan in coastal Gujarat, Samarthan Mahila Sangathan (Bhavnagar) & Mahila Vikas Sangathan (Rajula), went through 2 key excercises in the last quarter.

1. Training on understanding the structure of a Credit Cooperative:

The training helped familiarise the 28 women participants from 2 Women’s Federations along with some interested women from another block, Mahuva in

-How a cooperative is structured, technicalities like dividend structure, loan disbursement and effective tracking and recovery mechanisms.

-How can the women’s federation become more results oriented and work towards setting up the cooperative.

-How can women become more familiar with existing law for registration, documents required and the process.

18 hours of training was conducted over the two days by Ms. Geeta Oza, an expert in incubation of small microfinance institutions.

Women came to understand responsibilities of the leadership in sustaining a cooperative and the necessary administrative setup. A final group exercise helped them draft a 6 month planning on how they would want to take the plan forward. At the end of the training Samarthan Mahila Sangathan felt more confident about taking the process forward, while the Sangathan of Rajula and Mahuva felt they need a little more preparation and structuring of federation before they could register as a cooperative. Samarthan Mahila Sangathan has already started to prepare the documents required to register as a Cooperative. By December, the federation feels they can produce all necessary documents and start the process of registering. They are also in the process of selecting the members who will be part of the cooperative.

2. Exposure visit to a functional Women’s Cooperative

As a follow up of the training, an exposure visit was conducted to Osad Sangathan supported by another non-profit, Gram Vikas Trust, Dwarka for two days where 26 of the women visited. This institution is successfully running a 3500 member Cooperative, dealing primarily in fabrics in Dwarka. The women from the federation got a chance to interact with the members of the cooperative about their experiences and also look into the documents maintained by them. Primarily, having women with basic literacy as members, record maintenance is a critical point of  planning and caution for these groups.