Samam for Women’s Equality, Education and Empowerment: Currently Samam Pondicherry is an independent Women’s Organisation which has an organizational format of a federation of women’s SHGs with about 5000 active women members. Its central activity is that of a credit cooperative.
Self- Help Groups: PSF experimented with the earliest forms of the Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and by 1994 evolved the Samam SHG Network in Pondicherry. Today there are over 300 groups spread across 25 villages. Their total savings
Thulir Illams and Libraries: In addition to the credit cooperative, Samam is running a number of informal education centres or called Thulir illams and libraries. As Samam groups are operational in 25 villages, this means that most of these have a thulir illam a library for its members.
Back-to-School: Every June-July the Samam groups conduct a back-to-school campaign- wherein they identify children out of school and try to put them back into school.
Community Health: Samam is coordinating health awareness activities and community health programmes in its 25 villages. Its current focus is on screening and follow up for NCDs.
Sanitation Promotion: Samam is actively involved in sanitation promotion. It has given loans exclusively for sanitation over the years. It has also started up on Fuel Efficient smokeless chulah production as an economically viable activity, which benefits poor women. This had been tried unsuccessfully ten years back by CERD, but given the rising prices of kerosene and gas and the improved models of chulahs now available, this is making a quiet comeback.
Enterprises for Self-Employment: The most important Samam linkage of course is the ability to make the transition from credit and savings, which is only a poverty alleviation exercise to one of enhancing incomes, which would be poverty eradication, move. Over time, an understanding on this aspect has evolved which consists of encourage enterprise, but not too vigorously making sure that the potential woman entrepreneur also moves half way. Many women are in the credit groups for other reasons and do not want to make the choice of becoming entrepreneurs. Respect this. Give most enterprise related credit to expansion of working capital needs for women already in enterprises, cottage industries. Then give next preference to industries which are familiar to the area, preferably occurring as a cluster, where the woman seeking credit is just a new entrant into a well-established network. Over the years only about 10 percent of women have started up successfully on enterprises. In the introduction of enterprises there is considerable importance given to moving beyond stereotypes of what constitutes women’s skills and occupations. Thus, though there is enough opportunity for training on tailoring, food products, animal husbandry emphasis is also given on livelihoods related to computer skills, soap production etc.