Influence of Women’s Participation in Self-Help Groups on Their Social Networks in Tigania West Sub-County

Abstract

The women participation in self-help groups has been established to have diverse effect on their social economic empowerment aspects including social networks. The self-confidence of the women members is often associated with the self-help groups through interactions with group members, exposure to a wide variety of skills and masterly of specific tasks that are undertaken within the self-help groups. The self-help groups also create and enhance social networks amongst the women. This is through the interaction with members, bonding and joint undertaking of various activities together. Through these processes the women develop social relationships amongst themselves. The women participation in self-help groups have enabled them to access credit through group lending and revolving loans amongst the members. The self-help groups create social security that enables the lending from financial institutions to the group in which they guarantee each other. The social ties amongst the group members enables the provision of the revolving loans in which the individual members are issued with loans and then thereafter other members are issued with loans after loan repayments. The study was guided by the research hypothesis that there is no statistically significant influence of women’s participation in self-help groups on their social network in Tigania West Sub-County. The study used descriptive and explorative research designs. The target population was 3610 women from 250 registered self-help groups. The number of women in the 250 groups was 3610. Sample size was determined using a formula by Nassiuma (2008) to get a sample size of 150. 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 p-value less than 0.05 (significance level) indicates that participation in self-help groups has statistically significant influence on their social networks. This led to the rejection of the hypothesis stating that women’s participation in self-help groups has no statistically significant influence on their development of social network in Tigania West Sub-County. The significance of the results can be attributed to the importance of the social networks amongst the women in self-help groups. Participation in self-help groups has an influence on the social network of the group members due to interaction while undertaking group activities. This enhances their bonding and consequently social networking.

Keywords: Self Help Group, Social Networks

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/10-18-01

Publication date:September 30^th 2020