Self-Help Groups and Social Capital Formation among Rural Women in Africa: An Integrative Review

Abstract

Tens of millions of rural women in Africa have since organised themselves into savings clubs, rotating credit associations and village savings and loan associations (VSLAs) – these are invariably referred to as sources of social capital. But the assertion is made much more frequently than it’s investigated. Based on development economics, anthropological, and gender studies and public health evidence, I turn to a narrower, more useful question: when does such participation in a SHG generate social capital for rural African women that remains and when does it only change who has a claim on them? It builds on three lines of thinking that connect the notion of capital with social interaction, and three of the African feminist contributions to the notion of social capital, from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam, respectively, and points to the existence of three registers of group-generated social capital: bonding, bridging and linking, and to the production and the blocking of each of these registers in the African rural context. Four arguments follow. Firstly, there is an ease of establishing the bonds of capital and of the process of making them, although much of this is a formalisation of an existing bond of kin and neighbourhood, and not a net addition. Secondly, it is the least common and most developmentally critical, and most programmes are not intended to be bridging capital. Thirdly, capital is bound to institutional counterparts, typically banks or extension services or local government, which may not be present, resulting in groups becoming stagnant. Third, the economic gains are not as persistent as the empowerment gains, as economic gains were shown to mediate with household bargaining and gender norms. The effect of economic gains and empowerment gains were found to be persistent, but not as persistent as the impact of economic gains as household bargaining and gender norms mediate the link. The article concludes with a research agenda broadly focused on the need to measure social capital over time, to measure non-members and dropouts separately and to measure social returns separately from the stock of social capital.