Increasing Gender Equity in the Nigerian Microfinance Market

Female microcredit recipients are more likely to productively apply loans and less likely to default. In the Nigerian market, however, studies have revealed stark gender disparities in both loan approval rates and mean loan amount. This paper uses reported data from FY2015-FY2019 from all licensed microfinance institutions (MFIs) to assess the importance of four structural components of MFIs (total asset value, the existence of nonfinancial women’s empowerment services, the percentage of female loan officers, and the percentage of female managers) in lending to women. Data limitations resulted in significant unexplained variance in all statistical models, while also revealing few relationships between the variables and the percent of female borrowers in an institution’s portfolio. This work intended to offer recommendations to Nigeria’s regulators and MFIs, but concludes that recommendations are not feasible from aggregated data; rather they must be derived from local studies wherein subtle influences may be accounted for