Exploring the Impact of Microfinance on Socio-Economic Development: Empirical Evidence from Balunnaghar Village

Micro-credit was designed to organize poor people's tiny savings into funds that could be accessed by the poor, particularly rural women. Microfinance is a powerful technique for affecting the socio-economic condition of respondents and their family members to generate more cash for personal purposes. The additional money enables the respondents' families to purchase nutritious food, land, and construction houses, have access to contemporary health care, multiple cultivations, and small business, and send their children abroad as well as to school. The objective of this study is to explore the reasons for the received microcredit and the impact of microfinance on socio-economic enrichment based on primary and secondary data by using previous studies and direct personal interviews, in-depth interviews through open-ended questionnaires conducted with microcredit receivers from BRAC, Grameen Bank, and ASA as well as field staff respectively at Balunnaghar in Cumilla, Bangladesh in 2021. Both random and Snowball sampling technique was adopted to select respondents. This study highlighted that microfinance has brought a lot of positive changes in respondents' income, family status, and overall socio-economic condition but somewhere few borrowers were unable to mobilize the credit appropriately; therefore, some bad loans arise. So, some recommendations are given for reducing the misuse of loans and also to be self-reliant