Microfinance and Women Empowerment A General Framework for Assessment of Women Empowerment

This study attempts to provide a framework for assessing empowerment in the context of microfinance programmes and is based on literature review related to microfinance and women's empowerment. In the first stage, it provides a conceptual understanding of empowerment and then explains the role of microfinance in empowerment of the poor In the second stage, it identifies the contextual variables/indicators of empowerment in the context of microfinance programmes and then integrates these into a framework for the assessment of women's empowerment. In the process, the study draws heavily on the experiences documented in the case studies on microfinance and literature on women's empowerment