Majority of the rural women are landless. Invariably, they work as farm labourers. Sanskriti Samvardhan Mandal, an NGO has helped women of Sagroli in Maharashtra in empowering them financially by providing the needed  credit support in managing their enterprises.

Sagroli, located in Biloli, in Nanded district of Maharashtra, is quite a big village with 2046 households. As per the census 2011, the female population is 3796 of the total 8494. Average land holding is 1.24 Ha. The village depends on rain fed agriculture which keeps them occupied for two agro seasons while leaving them unemployed during other times.

Sanskriti Samvardhan Mandal (SSM) has been working in this area, untiringly in the fields of education, livelihoods, skill development, agriculture and natural resource management. It facilitated the formation of 500 women Self Help Groups (SHG). The Home Science Department of the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), run by SSM, imparts technical support to the SHGs in Health and Entrepreneurship. The KVK organizes need based training programs  at regular intervals in garments, food processing, farm-produce processing and packaging, back-yard poultry, goatery, dairy etc. The duration of such training programs ranges from 1 day to 3 months.

Involving simple repayment mechanisms, SSM has extended interest free financial support to 5-10 village based small entrepreneurs every year, since 2015-16, to scale up their business.  SSM helped them through financial support and marketing. This has resulted in 20-40% hike in the income of the entrepreneurs per year. This activity was further strengthened through a project, Embrace, supported by Drishti, Mumbai. The project main objectives are: to encourage rural women to start businesses to support their family; to give financial support to needy rural women/youth to start enterprises; to increase self-employment among rural youth; and to reduce financial burden of rural families.