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Vishwas Sansthan (Vishwas) was established in 1999 in Uttar Pradesh to mobilise humanitarian and development oriented funds and help poor families lead life with dignity and confidence. Vishwas works with women and rural youth, using self-help groups (SHGs) as a means to address health and livelihood issues. Their SHGs have a total membership of 4,032 people at present, with total savings of more than 3.5 million rupees. More than 10 million rupees worth of loans have been channelized by the groups so far. Vishwas has been recognised for its work with SHGs by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).

Vishwas’s broad strategic approach to address unemployment, poverty and health issues involves the following:

• Augment community capacity through promoting capable people’s institutions
• Focus on women and children to enable them to safeguard their rights and interests
• Build a cadre of grassroot business service providers and health workers on a self-reliant basis

Their interventions are as follows:

• Promotion of SHGs: Vishwas promotes and strengthens women’s institutions around saving and credit activity, which in turn provides women with the opportunity to share, participate and raise issues concerning their lives. SHG sees these institutions as micro institutions for micro planning on development issues contributing towards the development of individuals and society.
• Livelihood: Vishwas lays importance on the transition of SHGs to livelihood promoting institutions that benefit the poor and underprivileged. It provides groups with business planning, technical and managerial skills to achieve this objective. It has experimented with providing complementary skills to group members. Vishwas has been involved with implementing NABARD’s ‘Mature SHG to Livelihood’ pilot program. State bankers and district managers have been exposed to Vishwas-promoted SHGs to learn SHG assessment and financial linkage processes. Vishwas has co-ordinated exposure visits on SHGs and livelihood linkage projects for over 150 bankers.
• Health: The organization focuses on the integration of health and livelihood, especially in the neglected areas of women’s and children’s health. They believe that community-managed health systems will deliver required health solutions and look to build SHGs around health issues to provide women access to health care services.