Strengthening SHGs and their Federations to provide quality services on a sustainable basis to their members is one of the founding principles of APMAS. Our Quality Enhancement (QE) team provides capacity building services to enhance the quality of SHGs and their Federations and of other stakeholders. The QE team plays a strategic role in the conceptualization and de signing of the institution building models promoted by major stakeholders like GoAP and other NGOs. Several capacity building modules and materials have been developed and published for a wider use by all the stakeholders in the sector.

To impact the quality of SHGs and federations, the staff of SHPIs must to be trained, exposed to successful promotional processes and provided handholding support. This task becomes more complicated if the dominant SHPI happens to be the Government. To be effective in capacity building, APMAS has placed teams at the field level, with each regional team covering two to three districts. In addition to conducting high quality Training of Trainers, these teams provide on-the-job support and participate in review and planning meetings and in problem-solving processes.

The outreach of APMAS has been expanded to 19 clusters covering 96 sub - districts in 11 districts. Partnership agreements exist with Government of AP (IKP, APUSP and APRLP), NABARD, CARE-CASHE, NGOs and CBOs. Its main partner is the Government of AP through agreements with Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) with its Velugu/IKP project. Most of the APMAS staff time is invested in the support of this project. APMAS also supports the Rural Livelihoods Project (APRLP) in the Anathapur region, strengthening 50 village federations as models in APRLP watershed projects. At the state level, APMAS supports APRLP in their staff induction. Another major project that APMAS has started to support is the AP Urban Services for the Poor Project (APUSP), with the objective of strengthening the SHGs and SHG networks in APUSP towns through building the capacities of the staff and support structure. As of 2006-2007, APMAS will support a new phase: promoting ward and town level federations in three selected towns, as a model for a total of 42 towns in which the project is working.

The quality enhancement initiatives of APMAS focus on facilitating SMFIs to become sustainable member-owned and member-managed institutions. In quantitative terms the accomplishments of APMAS are overwhelming. In five years it trained 31,177 participants directly which represents a crucial input into the quality enhancement process. Its indirect outreach, through trainers and staff who had received their training from APMAS is to 293,560 participants. The main focus of the training is on federations, accounting for 67.5% of the direct training and 74% of the indirect training. 5,227 people have participated in APMAS'

1.)AP Urban Services for the Poor Project
2.)AP Rural Livelhioods Program

direct training in bookkeeping and financial management. This figure includes 2,709 participants from NGOs who were trained in accounting and bookkeeping, financial analysis, delinquency management and interest rate setting. The APMAS trainees have in turn trained another 40,450 participants. Another outreach instrument of APMAS is field visits of federations for group or federation maintenance. APMAS reports that in fiscal 2005-06, its staff paid 1,211 visits to SHGs, 834 visits to village federations, 458 visits to sub - district federations and 45 visits to district federations, totaling 2,548 visits. APMAS participates in all the monthly meetings of the district and sub-district level federations in 96 sub-districts.