Vikasana is proud of its model of sustainable development. It’s built on capacity building, the training of the members of its many self-help-groups, their integration into a co-operative funding model with access to offshore funds, and with goods produced for export sale following carefully prepared business plans.

It’s a model your own self-help-group can adapt, anywhere in the world, and it’s a good organizational model for NGOs wishing to build capacity in other third world countries. Apart from providing meaningful self-employment opportunities, the micro-economic growth can empower communities and fund health, education and sanitation projects... all of which we run here at Vikasana.

Helping the very poorest can be difficult; they may have a fund of traditional knowledge, but lack the education and skills required to compete in the modern marketplace. They are reluctant to take risks which could easily ruin them. In their lives, they have often been discriminated against and even cheated. All of our training programs aim to link women with income generation activities to ensure their positive role to protect and promote their social, cultural, political and economic rights.

Your members can travel and have training in our training centre (overnight accommodation and meals are available) both in craft skills, agriculture, business skills and even in learning our offshore operating systems. Great care has been taken to ensure that the training is appropriate to people who are illiterate or semi-literate and lacking in confidence. Numbers are restricted to forty at a time, and the course uses a mixture of teaching methods. The emphasis is on building the trainees' self-confidence, finding out what problems they have encountered with the scheme and giving them simple, workable solutions for dealing with those problems. Modest fees pay our staff wages and overheads.

This is an approximate budget for the training of 25 Self Help Group