Microfinance and Empowerment of Rural Women: A Study of North Bihar

Abstract

Microfinance refers to provision of financial services which is provided to poor people or unemployed or groups especially for women to enable them to raise their income levels and also to improve the standard of living. Microfinance plays a very important role in removing the poverty and creating job opportunities. Women empowerment means to give power to women to do something in her life. There are mainly five types of empowerment which is required to empower the women; these are social empowerment, political empowerment, education empowerment, economic and financial empowerment and psychological empowerment. It is very difficult to measure the empowerment of women but on the basis of experience, knowledge and behaviour of women, measurement can be done. The study posses the two objectives: (i) To identify the role of microfinance in the empowerment of rural women of North Bihar. (ii) To know the different policies, programmes and schemes for the empowerment of rural women. This study has been conducted in the two districts (Vaishali and Muzaffarpur) of North Bihar. Out of 32 blocks only 6 blocks (3 blocks each from both the districts) have been selected for study purposes. Both primary and secondary data have been used to collect information from 212 rural women respondents. Both multi-stage sampling and simple random sampling technique have been followed and simple statistical tools have been used to analyze and interpret. The study concluded that microfinance is playing a very important role in empowering women in terms of social and psychological employment but not much in terms of economic empowerment. After analyzing the different programmes and schemes introduced by government, it is found that there are so many programmes and schemes which is helping to rural poor women and marginalized section of the society to come out from poverty.