Saahasee, India (newsletter April 2009)
Society for Community Empowerment and Urban Transformation.
Saahasee combines material and immaterial values in their development programs. Not only do they improve the economic situation of women and their families, but they also effectively support women's empowerment and their abilities to plan, share, and take responsible risks offering each other microcredit loans. The importance of values like these was stressed at our international conference Transforming Development in 2007.
Quote from their website:
"Saahasee works towards the empowerment of the urban poor whose sense of dignity and justice is not necessarily governed by only economic factors but factors such as equality of all human beings and equal opportunity for all. The focal point on which we leveraged all our interventions is the empowerment of women through thrift and credit groups wherein participation, inter-dependance, knowledge enhancement, sharing of knowledge and sustainability are key tenets.
The Rationale of our focus on women and self-help groups is primarily to converge three key elements of sustainable development. The first is socio-economic empowerment of poor communities, the second is leadership development, the third is knowledge enhancement & management. In other words, while we work in general communities offering a variety of services, our success is determined by the communities, managing, governing and carrying this development process through a structured mechanism into poor communities."
More information can be found on their website.
