EFFECT OF MICROCREDIT ON SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN BENEFICIARIES INVOLVED IN ASA

Abstract

The objectives of this study were (i) to assess the nature and extent of the social empowerment of women beneficiaries through microcredit programme under ASA (ii) to explore the relationship between the selected characteristics of rural women and their social empowerment through ASA microcredit (iii) to identify the problems faced by women in utilizing microcredit. The selected characteristics were age, education, family size, annual income, cosmopoliteness, duration of involvement with ASA, credit received, savings and attitude towards ASA. The study was conducted with the women beneficiaries of one union under Dinajpur sadar upazila of Dinajpur district. Data were collected from a sample of randomly selected 102 women beneficiaries from a population of 255. Social empowerment of a respondent was measured by considering three dimensions: a) decision-making ability, b) social participation, and c) social mobility. The overall social empowerment score of a woman beneficiary was obtained by summing up her scores of dependent variables. Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) was computed to explore relationship of the women’s individual characteristics with their empowerment. A pre-tested interview schedule was used to collect data from the women beneficiaries of ASA, which took place from 23 to 30 August, 2012 and final data collection was done from 1 September to 15 October, 2012. The majority (79.4 percent) of the respondents had medium social empowerment while 12.8 percent had low social empowerment and only 7.8 percent had high social empowerment. Among the nine independent variables, three variables namely cosmopoliteness, savings and attitude towards ASA had significant positive relationship with women’s social empowerment while age, education, family size, annual income, duration of involvement with ASA and credit received had no significant relationship with their social empowerment. Main problem of the women beneficiaries was ‘the amount of loan depends on the saving of the respondents’ followed by ‘non-getting credit at the time of need’.