Empowerment Through Microfinance: The Relation Between Loan Cycle and Level of Empowerment

Weber, Olaf; Ahmad, Adnan

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.05.012

Cited by 114 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…By offering poor households access to formal or semi-formal financial services, microfinance has the potential to empower its clients in a variety of ways: providing women greater security and power, linking women with networks beyond their neighborhoods through group formation [11,29,30]. Microfinance services that foster group formation and selfmanagement by women have additional potential to empower women through exposure to new ideas, mutual support, fostering an identity beyond the family and the opportunity to cultivate leadership roles and responsibilities.…”

Section: Women Empowermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women Empowerment Through Microfinance: Empirical Evidence from Ghana

Addai¹

2017

JFA

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Abstract:Microfinance programmes are currently promoted as a key strategy for simultaneously addressing both women empowerment and poverty alleviation in Ghana. However, there has been a hot debate on the potency of microfinance in empowering the Ghanaian women. Apparently, this research was conducted to analyse the impact of microfinance services on the economic and social empowerment of women in Ghana. A purposive non-probability sampling technique was utilized in a 500 sample-size selection of female microfinance customers from Ashanti, Greater Accra, Central, Eastern and Western Regions of Ghana (100 from each region). For this study, SPSS and STATA Statistical tools were used to analyze the data and the ordered probit model was used as the estimation model. Glaring in this study is a statistically significant positive relationship between microfinance and women empowerment, for both economic and social but such relationship is dependent on marital status and educational level of the women with age having no controlling effect. Nevertheless, it is also evident in this study that women encounter myriad problems in accessing microfinance services of which high interest rate is paramount. Recommendations have been given on how microfinance outreach programmes could be enriched especially among the rural women since enhanced microfinance accessibility could be a perfect tool to accelerate economic and social empowerment of women in Ghana.

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Section: Women Empowermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women Empowerment Through Microfinance: Empirical Evidence from Ghana

Addai¹

2017

JFA

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“…Income generated by women and asset ownership are mentioned as important indicators of women's empowerment in several studies (e.g. Garikipati, 2008;Weber & Ahmad, 2014;Ganle et al, 2015;Samarakoon & Parinduri, 2015). For married women, the value of their household's assets is divided by two, because the Ethiopian constitution grants equal ownership rights for husbands and wives.…”

Section: Measuring Women's Empowermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The familial dimension comprises decision-making power regarding certain aspects of women's life. In several studies (Weber & Ahmad, 2014;Ganle et al, 2015;Samarakoon & Parinduri, 2015), decision-making power of women is considered as the main indicator of empowerment. We use both financial and non-financial decisions.…”

Section: Measuring Women's Empowermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some studies place women's income and financial decisions along the economic dimension (e.g. Bhuiyan, Siwar, Ismail, & Hossain, 2013;Weber & Ahmad, 2014), but other studies (e.g. Mahmud et al, 2012;Heath, 2014) place these decisions together with non-financial decisions on the familial dimension.…”

Section: Measuring Women's Empowermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To fully reflect the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment, indicators need to be specified and measured across various dimensions (Estudillo, Agnes, Quisumbing, & Otsuka, 2001). Moreover, the economic dimension should comprise women's income as one of the main indicators, because in gender studies other development variables are often examined in relation to this indicator (Garikipati, 2008;Heath, 2014;Weber & Ahmad, 2014;Ganle, Afriyie, & Segbefia, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Multidimensional Nature of Women's Empowerment: Beyond the Economic Approach

Bayissa

Smits

Ruben

2017

J of Intl Development

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Most interventions promoting women's empowerment focus on the economic dimension. Economic improvement is supposed to lead automatically to improvements in other dimensions. To test this assumption, we collected data from 508 women working in women groups in Addis Ababa. Besides the economic dimension, five other dimensions of empowerment were studied (familial, legal, psychological, political and socio‐cultural). Findings show that the relationships between these six dimensions of empowerment are weak and that the psychological dimension is most central. The economic dimension is hardly connected to other dimensions. Hence, a broad package of interventions seems needed to achieve empowerment in all respects. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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