Impact of Microfinance Services on Rural Women Empowerment: An Empirical Study

Abstract

This study basically attempts to analyze the impact of microfinance services in empowering the rural women. The study is also meant to obtain insights regarding factors empowering rural women through microfinance services and which factors influences most and what extent. For that, 205 respondents out of 248 questionnaires yielding a response rate of 82.66% residing in rural areas of North Gujarat Region, Gujarat state are approached with structured questionnaire by following a non-probabilistic convenience sampling technique. After computing the reliability of scales, correlation and multiple regressions was used to test hypotheses through SPSS version 16. The results indicate that four of the five factors (i.e. socioeconomic status upgradation, autonomy for life choices, women position in the family/society and positive approach towards child development) have significant impact on rural women empowerment. The limitation of the study relates to the population of rural women only used for the study, which limits the generalizability of the findings. The findings of the study are likely to be important to microfinance institutions, govt. and NGOs in designing policy to empower rural women socially and economically. This study makes the valuable contribution by providing a base to the microfinance institutions for strengthening and expanding their support to rural poor women.