Women as Volunteers in Empowerment through Self-help Groups (SHGs) Initiatives: Perspectives of Belief

Abstract

Women volunteerism in Nigeria is very significant for effective designing, implementation and evaluation of all their empowerment programs. Self-help group (SHG) approach is one of the fundamental beliefs of women towards empowerment, that only when they join they can be able to become self-reliant. The objective of this paper is to determine how women’s belief in volunteerism influences their level of empowerment as volunteers in SHGs. It has been established that belief has direct positive impact on the level of empowerment of women that actively participate in volunteering through SHGs. A total of 255 women volunteers in SHGs were selected randomly through multi-stage stratified sampling methods. The data was collected through the use of structured self-report questionnaire and the data was analyzed using IBM SPSS version 22 Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation co-efficient technique. The highest relationship and positive linear relationship was found between empowerment and normative belief (r = .72, p = 0.000), while relationship between empowerment and self-belief (r = 5.9, p = 0.000) indicates moderate positive linear. The paper concludes that women belief in volunteerism will intensely encourage their participation in SHG volunteering activities for holistic community development. As such, women SHGs in Nigeria should be exposed to all available positive volunteering activities to enable them become aware of the global standards and also capacity building of volunteers should be given a priority with a clear mission of increasing the knowledge, skills and attitudes of women volunteers in SHGs.