Abstract:
Women’s participation in self-help groups’ activities aims mostly towards their
empowerment. In Tigania West Sub-county, there was insufficient empirical literature
that could be used to enhance support for the self-help groups by development
agencies. The purpose of this study was to establish the influence of participation in
self-help groups on socio-economic empowerment of women. The study was guided
by the family systems theory. Women groups that had been in operation for a
minimum of four years and registered with the Ministry of Labour and Social
Protection, Department of social Development were considered. The study used
descriptive and exploratory research design. This was important in enabling an
objective description of the items as they are on the ground without any manipulation.
The explorative research design on the other hand was key in enabling an exploration
of relationships among variables. The target population was all women in self-help
groups in Tigania West Sub-County in which accessible population was 3610 women
from 25 registered self-help groups. A sample size of 150 was selected through
stratified simple random sampling. The study results indicated that participation in the
women self-help groups had an influence on the self-confidence of the women. This
was due to a positive beta coefficient of 0.252 with a p value of 0.000. The results of
the regression indicated that participation in women self-help groups led to an
increase in level of social networks due to a positive beta coefficient of 0.380. The pvalue
less than 0.05 (significance level) indicates that participation in self-help groups
has statistically significant influence on their social networks. The results indicated
that women participation in self-help groups had positive influence on credit access of
the women. The p-value less than 0.05 (significance level) indicates that participation
in self-help groups has statistically significant influence on their income. The
conclusion was participation in self-help groups helped in improving on the
confidence of the group members, social networks of the self-group members, credit
access and level of income amongst women in self-help groups. The study
recommends that participation in women self-help groups can be improved through
sensitization and empowerment in agricultural activities and the capacity for the
women in the self-help group should be enhanced for decision making on the
financial management and entrepreneurship aspects. The study further recommended
that women groups to diversify their sources of income to ensure that they are not
over dependent on agricultural activities.
