Chapter 14: Using Social Audit to Assess the Impact of the Social Program: The Case of Family Counseling Center of Stree Mukti Sanghatana

Social audit is an effective tool to evaluate the social performance of any social program. It helps in finding out how well the social enterprise is aligned to achieve its social mission by taking a multi-perspective outlook of the key stakeholders. This chapter presents a social audit of Stree Mukti Sanghatana, Mumbai (SMS), which is one of the pioneering social organizations working for the empowerment of underprivileged women. One of its social programs is the Family Counseling Centre (FCC) which provides counseling services to victims of domestic violence. Over the last 32 years, it has counseled more than 25,000 clients who are mostly victims of physical or mental domestic violence. The objective of this social audit was to find out the perceptions of both internal and external stakeholders of this program and make suggestions to improve the same. It is based on an empirical study using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The results show that FCC has been successful in creating awareness about women’s legal rights and has empowered them to tackle the problems by becoming self-reliant and confident. This study also helped SMS to realign its focus on building economic empowerment of women.