Microcredit Within The South Asian Context: Women's Empowerment

“Before defining the women empowerment we have need to know the word “empowerment”.
Empowerment in its broader sense refers to an individual’s or group’s increased “power” whereas power means get in touch with and have power over material, intellectual and ideological resources. The World Bank describes empowerment as “the process of increasing the ability of individuals or groups to make choices and to transfer those choices into most wanted actions and outcomes. (Hussein, 2009) defines empowerment as to give a power to the people and independence. He quoted Empowerment builds independence and strength in women, preparing them towards meeting the ability to establish the choice of life. Microcredit provides empowerment to the women. Microcredit

Within the South Asian context, women empowerment is a process in which women challenge the existing norms and culture, to effectively improve their well-being. Most microcredit programs target women with the clear goal of empowering them. However, their primary premises are different. Some argue that women are amongst the poorest and the most weak of the underprivileged. Others believe that investing in women’s capabilities empowers them to make choices, which will contribute to greater economic growth and development. Finally, some proponents stress that an increase in women’s resources results in higher well-being of the family, especially children (Empowering women through Microfinance: Evidence from India). The great effort against the lack of credit markets and thus against the high interest rates demanded by the money-lenders is not new. Money-lenders use the power of information about possible borrowers and demand different rates from different people. Usually the poorer one was more one would have pay. Since the fifties, Governments realized that a large number of people did not have any other choice than being occupied by those monopolists. Many developing countries programs were implemented in which governments and subsidized credit delivery to small farmers. Development financial institutions and international donors

1.2 Research Questions

The function of the research questions is to help the researchers to attain the objectives of the researcher. By developing research questions the researcher becomes more clear and specific in his vision about what exactly he/she wants to infer from the study.

Following questions have been developed in the context of this study that aim to explore the relationship between use of microcredit activities and women empowerment.

Q1: Is microcredit playing an important role in empowering women?

Q2: Is there any relationship between microcredit and women empowerment?

In order to answer the above mentioned questions a case study approach has been selected. The women clients who took microcredit from a well-known bank named Tameer Microfinance Bank Limited (Bahawalpur) are chosen to be studied for analysis.

1.3 Objectives of the study

Following are the major objectives of the study:

• To find out the association between microcredit and social awareness of women.

• To distinguish the role of microcredit in economic liberty of women.

• To explain the role of microcredit on living standard of