Empirical Study On Impact Of Microcredit To Rural Women Empowerment

Microcredit programs are of excessive interest to economists and policymakers as a consequence of their prospective for reducing poverty and empowering the poor women by proving them opportunities to access microcredit program.Microcredit programs have fascinated considerable thoughtfulness from researchers,since their initiation in Bangladesh.These are small-amount credit programs that offer making credit and other facilities to rural poor women.Many of the microcredit programs in Bangladesh exactly target women according to the view that they are more probable to be credit-inhibited than men,have limited access to the wage labor market,and have discriminatory share of power in family decision making.The literature delivers that the influence of microcredit on women's empowerment still remains provocative.While some studies stated that microcredit helps women to improve their income earning capabilities,leading to better power to overcome cultural unevenness.In others studies stated that small loans allotted to women are generally controlled by their spouses,which consequences in further subordination of women and leaves them weaker to the patriarchy system within the family and/or at society level.However,the impact of microcredit on rural women empowerments are not well documented.Therefore,the present study was carried out to better understand the effects of microcredit on empowerment of women households in rural Bangladesh.In addition,it inspects the determinants persuading the accessibility of microcredit by rural women households in Bangladesh.An empirical analysis utilizes logit model and empirical data were collected through interviewing 300 women households including borrower and non-borrower women households.A survey conducted through well-structured questionnaire between July 2018 to October 2018 at four villages of Jamalpur and Mymensingh districts in Bangladesh.The results of the study showed that the above secondary school and higher annual income have negative and significant impact on accessibility to microcredit program by rural women households whereas family size of the women households have positive and significant impact on accessibility to microcredit program.The outcomes of the results exhibited that microcredit has an important impact on different dimension of women empowerment indictors.The empirical results indicates that borrower of microcredit have greater control over their own savings.Moreover,women microcredit borrower also playing vital role in the family decision making process such as decision in family expenditure,decision in family planning,decision in child education and decision in social development program.Notably,the regression outcome exposes that microcredit has a positive and significant influences on enhancing women's legal awareness especially on protection against domestic abuse.It is therefore suggested that policymakers in Bangladesh should be fortified to review the program planning and redesign loan products by pushing more importance on targeting women obviously.This is because women in rural area of Bangladesh usually have less entree to economic resources,as well as credit and confront restrictions unique to their gender.Reforms on microcredit programs in Bangladesh should pay more consideration to women's need and their financial competence in repaying loans.Additionally,credit distribution should be mutual with non-financial facilities contained by the programs such as training on cash flow and risk supervision and building up social networks which are not available in the Bangladeshi microcredit programs but are fundamental for women's assimilation in the social development.As a result,the strengthening of rural women economic and social condition accelerates the developments of rural family socioeconomic status as well as country socioeconomic condition in Bangladesh.