Women play a key role in the thousand’s subsistence and livelihood activities. Keeping this view SUPPORT organizes women from poor household into self-help groups around saving and credit. In most villages SUPPORT begins work by promoting poor women’s Self Help Groups, informal association of 10 to 20 women who volunteer to work together as a group. Various project teams formed about 250 new SHGs during the year, bringing about 4010 new families into the fold of the programme.
SUPPORT has come up with a concept of Water User Groups for the equitable water use and efficient management of the water resource bodies. This approach has been successfully works for the continuous maintenance of irrigation structures like lift irrigation system, check dams, ponds and Diversion based irrigation system.
Village organizations have been promoted by SUPPORT in order to strengthen SHGs. These organizations comprise of 10-15 neighbour SHGs within the village and it will have representatives from all its members SHGs. These organizations will perform the basic function of strengthening week SHGs, resolving conflicts among SHGs and its members and provide a plate-form for policy level advocacy. 12 such village organizations have been promoted by SUPPORT during the financial year 2013-14.
The primary objective of the initiative farmers club in SUPPORT was to ensure development in the rural areas through credit, technology transfer, awareness and capacity-building. The clubs would facilitate the transfer of latest agriculture techniques to the field and help farmers enhance the productivity of various crops. The clubs would also co-ordinate with banks to ensure credit flow among its members and forge better bank-barrower relationship, conduct extension programmes, liaison with input suppliers to purchase bulk inputs on behalf of members, and organize joint activities like value addition, processing and collective farm produce marketing for the benefit of members.
Producers’ organization is the collectives of farmers promoted by SUPPORT in order to ensure collective marketing of agriculture produce and higher price to the farmer. This organization is in its initial stage and currently running their collection points for agriculture produce and up-to some extents bargaining with different wholesalers for getting higher price.