Empowering Women through Microcredit: a Case study of Tameer Microfinance Bank, Bahawalpur

Abstract

In an effort to alleviate poverty and empower the national human resources, many institutions are providing microcredit to people. The essence of these microcredit provisions is empowerment for better standard of living. The study attempts to identify the role of microcredit in empowering women. Four arenas of empowerment viz economic, personal, family and public/political empowerment have been used to define women empowerment. Primary data was collected from the women micro-credit users of Tameer Microfinance Bank (one of the famous microfinance institutions with 34 branches in Pakistan) Bahawalpur. A sample of 94 women microcredit clients of the bank was taken for data collection. The collected data was quantitatively analyzed using the econometric tools of means and correlation. The results of the study reveal that microcredit is related to women empowerment in positive direction and women are getting empowered on economic, personal, family and political levels after using micro-credit taken from the institute and the level of economic empowerment is seen to be influenced the most. Keywords: Microcredit, women empowerment, impact