Empowerment of Tribal Women through Skill Development: The Role of Self Help Groups

Empowerment of Tribal women is the central issue that has been pervading the development debate since eighties. Improving the status and empowering women would go a long way in accomplishing egalitarian gender relations in society. Tribal Women who are hitherto constrained by their social structure for their selfexpression constitute the target of most of the development programs, which aim at bringing them into the mainstream of the development process and skill development training is a way to give a ray of hope to the community, to make them realize that they are capable of doing a lot more and to introduce them with selfconfidence.Keeping in view the importance of skill development, an attempt has been made to know the impact of training programmes on empowerment of tribal women in the study area which not only reduced poverty & improved the welfare of participating households, but also enhanced the household’s capacity to sustain their gains over time.