Empowering Women through Microfinance: Evidence from Pakistan

The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between microfinancing and women empowerment. To achieve the objective, data was collected from 350 women of rural areas of Shaheed Benazir Abad district using simple random sampling technique. Structured questionnaire was adopted from previous studies to collect the data. As per Kolmogorov- Smironov and Shapiro-Wilk tests the data was not normal. Therefore we used Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests to test the hypothesis. Income saving, living standard, household wellbeing and social status were used as the indicators of women empowerment. Tests were run based on the presence of microfinance usage, loan amount and loan duration. As per the results, there is a positive significant relationship between microfinancing and all of the indicators of women empowerment during loan amount and loan duration. Thus it is concluded that there is strong association between microfinancing and women empowerment.