Loan usage among members of mature SHGs
The Self Help Group Bank Linkage Pro-gram (SBLP) is by far the dominant model of microfinance in India, in terms of both number of borrowers and loans outstanding . The Na-tional Bank of Agriculture and Rural Devel-opment (NABARD) estimates that as of March 2006 over 33 million women have been linked to banks for financial services through 2.2 mil-lion Self Help Groups (SHGs). Growth of the program has been spectacular over the past 5 years with the number of members linked to banks having increased nearly tenfold (the NABARD website claims a growth rate of over ‘400 women per hour’). Given the level of outreach, growth and the huge impact of the program on the members’ and their communi-ties’ (both in terms of access to formal credit and the intangible impacts like empowerment), understanding how SHGs function, mature and how they affect the members’ lives is of major importance to both researchers and policy makers. There is however still a relative pau-city of quality research on the SHG movement in India. This report seeks to help fill this gap by looking at the credit behaviour of SHG mem-bers over time. Using field studies and data obtained on mature SHGs in the South Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu we analyse how a set of SHG members utilize their loans and how this changes over time.

CMF Research Associate: Doug Johnson

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See Some CMF Related Documents:
# CMF Working Paper Summary (Eye on Microfinance, Issue 6)