Microfinance and The Empowerment of Women "A self-sustainable approach towards gender equality"

Women have always been a victim of injustice, inequality, and the domination of men all over the world and still today, women are being deprived of developmental, financial or educational opportunities. The empowerment of women is one of the most challenging goals the world is trying to achieve in terms of development. The goal of this thesis is to give an overview of the role of microfinance in the empowerment of women, discover whether microfinance is a self-sustainable approach towards gender equality and examine how microfinance institutions are able to provide financial services to people, who are defined as unbankable by commercial banks. Therefore, the business concepts of microfinance institutions, as well as their impacts on borrowers, especially women, are analyzed by taking a qualitative secondary data approach. The results show that MFIs can successfully substitute financially valuable collateral by issuing loans to interdependent borrowing groups. Furthermore, microfinance shows significant positive impacts on the financial and non-financial empowerment of women, although they are facing tough challenges to get access to women in patriarchal structures, targeting the poorest of the poor and still remain self-sustainable. Successful examples, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh show the possibilities of microfinance. However, further research has to be conducted regarding the customer base of successful MFIs, that do not have to rely on external financial aid. Analyzing the customer base can verify that those MFIs are not just successful because their target group shifted to wealthier borrowers, demanding higher loan amounts. Though customer data is confidential and therefore challenging to access