Tamilnadu

SOCIAL DETERMINANT OF HEALTH

Tribal and Rural Livelihood

Socio-economic inclusion of the elderly- Samrakshana Project, Rameshwaram:

The concept of social inclusion involves organising the elderly people into Self-help Groups with each group having 15 people and there will also be a field staff to facilitate the group meetings and training on governance. The fundamental principle of the ESHGs model is that the members will own, control and manage their organisation, this will be achieved by the strategy of role evolution and devolution. A series of capacity building activities are conducted so that the responsibilities that the field staff are undertaking will slowly be absorbed by the members. The main activity of the ESHGs will be associated with savings and credits. The ESHGs will later be grouped as clusters at panchayat/ ward level where non-financial activities like providing training to ESHGs members, monitoring performance, providing financial and non-financial activities to support vulnerability issues etc. A general body at the cluster network level having representation of 3-4 members of each ESHG will form policy making forum of the cluster network. In addition to this, an executive committee will be selected from the general body to execute the decisions. Continuous training programmes will be implemented to train the cluster level leaders. After 15 to 18 months, a town level federation of ESHGs will be promoted to undertake functions like representing the demands of the community members to the district administration, facilitating entitlements to the government agencies, banks etc to undertake livelihood activities, training the cluster, ESHG level leaders, monitoring and review of cluster and ESHG level activities etc. Seed capital fund will be meant for supporting the elder’s groups who have entrepreneurial capacities in the ESHGs. Financial systems established will take care of the loan processing process such as loan appraisal, sanctioning, distribution, repayment scheduling and monitoring. The loan funds repaid by the borrowers along with the interest will be pooled at a common level and it is made available for further distribution of the loan to the individuals in future on a continuous basis. Vulnerability reduction at the cluster network level will be used to support assisted and destitute category of elders who intend to initiate economic activities. At a federation level, collective livelihood groups will be promoted involving elders who are interested in common economic activities. The loans that are repaid along with the interest will be pooled and will be utilised for lending to collective livelihood in future. The three funds in addition to providing support to enhance livelihoods, reducing vulnerabilities will also enable the community organisations to attain financial sustainability.