Open AccessPosted Content
Microfinance and Gender Empowerment
Thi Minh-Phuong Ngo,Zaki Wahhaj +1 more
TLDR
In this paper, a simple model of household bargaining is proposed to examine how providing women with credit affects production and decision-making power in the household, and the authors show that the introduction of a micro-credit programme is likely to have widely heterogeneous impacts, and can adversely affect the bargaining power of some women.Abstract:
In the past 30 years, microfinance has carried many promises of social and economic transformation, with the shift towards targeting women being seen as a major strategic move through which the promise of social development could be most effectively delivered. However, ethnographic studies have shown that many women relinquish the use of their loans to male members of the household, belying the empowering promise of microfinance. We propose a simple model of household bargaining which examines how providing women with credit affects production and decision-making power in the household. Following Bergstrom (1996), we account for the roles of both divorce and non-cooperation in the household as relevant fall-back options in the bargaining strategy of each spouse. We show that the introduction of a microcredit programme is likely to have widely heterogeneous impacts, and can adversely affect the bargaining power of some women. We demonstrate that access to credit allows a woman to strengthen her bargaining position through an expansion of her autonomous activities (the causal mechanism hoped for) only in a limited number of cases: when she is able to invest her new capital profitably in an autonomous activity, and her husband has no alternative activity in which the same capital would generate comparable returns, or lacks the power to overrule her preferred investment choice. The two cases in which it is most likely that the availability of credit would enable the woman to strengthen her bargaining position within the household are (i) when capital can be invested in a cooperative activity to which both spouses contribute in an important way, and (ii) when a large share of the household budget is devoted to expenditures on household public goods.read more
Citations
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Are Women More Credit Constrained? Experimental Evidence on Gender and Microenterprise Returns
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed data from a randomized experiment on mean returns to capital in Sri Lankan micro-enterprises and found that the gender gap is explained by differences in ability, risk aversion, or entrepreneurial attitudes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empowerment Through Microfinance: The Relation Between Loan Cycle and Level of Empowerment
Olaf Weber,Adnan Ahmad +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared women in higher loan cycles of a Pakistani micro-finance institution with those in the first loan cycle regarding their empowerment, using a survey and multivariate statistical methods, such as propensity score matching.
Journal ArticleDOI
Gender Equality and Economic Growth in Brazil: A Long-Run Analysis
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil, and showed that women's time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production may have a substantial impact on long run economic growth.
Journal ArticleDOI
Developing microfinance: A survey of the literature†
Carlo Milana,Arvind Ashta +1 more
TL;DR: Most contributions in the fast-growing literature on microfinance seem to agree that all the stakeholders (borrowers, lenders, communities, government and regulators, interested third parties) should become fully aware of the potentiality of the joint value creation achieved through cooperation.
References
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Book
The Economics of Microfinance
TL;DR: A comprehensive survey of micro finance can be found in this paper, where the authors provide an overview of micro-finance by addressing a range of issues, including lessons from informal markets, savings and insurance, the role of women, the place of subsidies, impact measurement, and management incentives.
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