Women Self Help Groups (WSHG) are in the lift in India. Women come together in such group to safe monney toegether, "as a sort of live insurance" one of them told me. For instance every month every member put together 100 or 150 roepies. With 15 or 20 members that becomes a bigger amount of monney they can work with. Members can then, when they are in need, get a loan from the group, they pay 2% interest, which goes also to the groups acount. "At this way we learn to handle our financiance independent from our husbands, learn to go to the bank ourselves etc" they said.

In Kalewadi, a village, about an hour away from Pune, we had a meeting with members of 3 Women Self Help Groups: "Women Power + Women Liberation + Women Unity". The three groups started to tell about how they save monney every month and giving financial support when one of them need it. "Our book (in which they write down every single roupie) helps us also to get a loan from the Bank" they said. But beside the big focuss on this financial aspect, every from these groups had also a big other programm. The group "WOMEN LIBERATION" for instance organised a childcaring programm, a festival, a HIV programm, cleaned together the streets and now they are working together to start a new home-job, they want to make a little corporation for a specific food they then can sell at their neighbours, in the shops or cantines closeby. The group "WOMEN POWER" told us that beside the financial part of their WSHG also do other things, have a cultural programm, do cleaning toghether the area, celebrating religious feasts together etc. They were also very proud to tell that they had achieve a big victory when they got a new street. "We always had problems with electicity wires and the streets were all mud when it had rained... So we demanded that they would make us a proper street here and put electricity under the road..." they said. As you can see in one of the photos, this was indeed a big succes of them. Women sat down together and improved their life. Also the third group "WOMEN UNITY" express that on the road to women liberation the financial issue of the WSHG is important but far not the only thing. "Before we didn't talk to each other, I mean about personal stuff" they said, "if lucky we maybe had someone in the family we could talk about personal. Now in our group we also started talking about personal things, and this is such a good feeling, it makes us stronger to knonw we're not alone" they said. As the two other groups, also this WSHG worked for a better water connection and sanitair in their neighbour.

It look me that the financial, personal and political action comes together in those WSHG, I can feel the good energy it awakes by all her members here and how it also inspired me. Later, when I was in Karnataka, at a Women's Hearing on Dowry and Related Forms of Violence Against Women in Mandya district, I saw that different WSHG came to the meeting too. It seems to go way further and deeper than I first thought WSHG were about. About these Hearings I later will share in another album. I only wanted to mention here because the action radius of these WSHG are large, personal also political and they are reflecting on all problems they meet in life. Sharing as start to look for how to improve and act for better...