Role of Microfinance on Women"s Decision Making Power: An Empirical Study

Even if women constitute around 50 per cent of the Indian population, their social status particularly in rural areas is very low. Almost in all the matters, the role of women in family decision making is insignificant, where the male member of the family is the final decision maker. It is mainly found in the poor families of the developing countries like India. There are so many indicators of women empowerment such as income, employment, education, mobility and so on. Decision making capacity is one of them. In the present study, financial decision taking by the women in family is considered as capacity building. The study shows how the rural women gain decision-making capacity through the participation in the microfinance programme in Darjeeling district, West Bengal. Kharibari block of Darjeeling district, West Bengal has been selected for study purpose. Primary data were collected from 186 rural women who are engaged with microfinance programme. Thus the sample size is 186. To measure empowerment through decision making capacity, three point scale such as always, sometimes and never has been used to information from 186 respondents and their husbands. Tabular analysis and Chi-square test are applied to get a meaningful interpretation of the collected data. From the study it is found that before joining the SHGs only 12.37 per cent of the respondents always involved in financial decision matters at personal as well as family level and 55.38 per cent of the respondents never took financial decision in the family. But after joining the SHGs, it is found that 40.86 per cent of the study women always took financial at personal as well as family level. Chi-square test shows that a significant change in financial decision making of the participant is found after joining the SHGs. It is also found that education of the family head has a significant effect on decision making process. Moreover, higher the education, higher will be the participation of the women in personal and family matters