Andhra Pradesh - Visakhapatnam   

Doing her bit for slum dwellers

Photo:K.R. Deepak

Crusader: Yasuko Hara of Japan with members of SHGs in Visakhapatnam. -

VISAKHAPATNAM: Friendly smiles greet Yasuko Hara as she enters the meeting room. Within a minute she effortlessly begins conversing in Telugu with the ten women members of various self-help groups at Kobbarithota, one of the most dense and notorious slums of the region.

Ms. Yasuko came to India from Japan in 1995 and since then has been working in various slum areas to help form SHGs among women with the support of the Society for Mutual Aid Networking Environment Education and Development (SOMNEED), an NGO and its Japanese sponsor, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

“Our aim is to make women self-sufficient without relying on high interest loans, getting them to realise the importance of borrowing and lending money in the self-help groups,” said Yasuko, chief representative of SOMNEED-India. SOMNEED launched the project in Visakhapatnam district in 2004 to link rural and urban self-help groups (SHGs) for the first time and eventually established a network of women in the form of Visakha Vanitha Kranthi (VVK). Today, VVK is a federation of 36 SHGs with more than 600 members .

There are about eight slums in Visakhapatnam district alone that are being covered by the project. In Kobbarithota slum, which houses more than 2,000 families and is notorious for anti-social activities, the formation of the SHGs has come as big boon for the women of the families.

They could generate Rs.1.28 lakh loan in 2007-08 from their own funds and saved Rs.6,000 during the same year.

Ms. Yasuko gives training to the members of SHGs to maintain account books, to work collectively, organise their funds and establish their own organisations.

“Our idea is to make them realise their own resources and create a new type of producer-consumer relationship through the linkage of urban-rural women’s SHGs,” Ms. Yasuko added.

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