Self-Help Groups: An Empty Promise or a Genuinely Effective Tool for Socio-Economic Development

Self-Help Groups are an increasingly popular policy tool for boosting socio-economic development, access to financial services and women’s empowerment. In India its use has grown exponentially in the last decades. It is therefore surprising that there is relatively little research that evaluates their long-term impact. This thesis aims to add to the academic literature and the policy debate by measuring the effect of the length of membership on the savings of rural women in Maharashtra, India, and the level of control they have over those savings. The nature of the data makes it necessary to use a variety of estimation techniques in order to ensure robustness of the results. This paper finds that SHGs are successful in increasing a rural woman’s savings. However, on the basis of these findings we cannot conclude that women also experience an increase in control over those savings.