Abstract
This study focuses on women’s participation in microfinance institutions (MFIs) and the promises and challenges that this entails. Based on data collected from 11,162 households selected from 43 districts, our results indicate that women’s participation in MFIs is fairly low (only 17 percent); 75 percent of them used borrowed money for income generating activities. This result is substantiated by data collected through focus group discussions and key informant interviews with village elders and microfinance institutions’ staff members. Our logistic regression analysis shows that some household and individual variables such as educational status, size of landholding, age, religion, job status, husband’s education level, family size and use of informal credit sources are the main determinants of women’s participation in microfinance services. The main challenges faced by women in participating in microfinance services include high loan requirements, poor resource mobilization by service providers, high withdrawal rates, a big gender gap in loan disbursements and insufficient entrepreneurial training in skill development and financial outlays. These problems lead to mass dropouts from the system.
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Notes
- 1.
Associations where friends, relatives or some community members contribute a fixed amount of money every month or week and the collected money circles around every term.
- 2.
Communal associations where the people mainly gather to help each other in time of need (joy or sadness) and contribute in cash or kind for as a part of the service.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the Bureau of Women, Children and Youth Agency (BoWCYA) for its financial and technical support for conducting this study. We would also like to recognize the contribution of Hawassa University in facilitating and coordinating the research activities.
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Kebede, M., Regassa, N. (2019). Women’s Access to Microfinance Services in Southern Ethiopia: Assessing the Promises, Impacts, Challenges and Gaps. In: Nilsson, P., Heshmati, A. (eds) Efficiency, Equity and Well-Being in Selected African Countries. Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11419-0_7
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