Lumanti | Promoting community led finance in urban poor communities

Promoting community led finance in urban poor communities

Lumanti has been promoting community led finance mechanism since its inception as one of the central lines of action through strengthening women based saving and credit programs. In addition to this, community led finance has been the key program for the economic empowerment of the low income families leading to the enhancement of their socio-economic conditions and increased self-dignity.

Lumanti has been providing technical and financial support for improving and increasing easy access to financial resources, economic empowerment, enhance entrepreneurship skills, and to promote self-reliance. At present, Lumanti is promoting and strengthening 44 community based women saving and credit groups and cooperatives including 30 formal, 14 informally run women cooperatives and women self-help groups. The current data shows that there are 38890 women associated with 1488 women groups.

Lumanti believes that savings can be a key tool in organizing women, leading to socio-economic transformation of the women and the communities. Saving schemes is a strong form of community-based finance that ultimately helps communities to leverage resources, access land, safe and secure shelter and build a harmonious working relationship with the local governments. Lumanti is currently enhancing the capabilities of 37 community-based women’s savings and credit cooperatives, alongside 4 proposed cooperatives and 4 self-help groups, spanning 24 municipalities throughout Nepal. These cooperatives collectively consist of 52,875 members organized into 1,790 groups.