Abstract
Mobilizing, promoting and operating self-help groups that provide financial services is a difficult and costly learning cycle for each NGO. These early difficulties are, however, resources for skills, methods and insights that are intrinsic to both working with communities of the poor and providing financial services. Transforming the experience into a systematic training process for newer entrants into the arena is an important constituent of attempting to reduce learning time and costs. This document from the field looks closely at some of the issues as experienced by Sharan, an NGO based in Delhi of developing community based financial services for the urban poor.