The Impact of Microfinance Services on Women Empowerment: a Case Study of Kikuyu Division

Abstract

The focus of the study was to establish the impact of microfinance services to the empowerment of women in kikuyu division. Targeting women from women groups in kikuyu was purposeful for it is an upcoming region with a bit of cosmopolitan inhabitants who would be a good representative of a typical third world region and also being a predominantly a patriarchal society. An attempt was made to identify a few key indicators of women empowerment such as control of household decisions, conflict resolution, participation in social campaigns and loans and their uses. Quantifiable benefits in terms of diversification of livelihoods, income gains and acquisition of assets which are addressed satisfactorily through this instrument. Theories concerned with women empowerment and microfinance which include Women‘s empowerment theory, financial sustainability paradigm and poverty alleviation theory were looked at. Several empirical studies were reviewed A sample of 386 respondents, gave 250 usable questionnaires which were analyzed. Analytical tools such as maximum likelihood factor analysis; a data mining tool was used to recover the hidden factors and the corresponding sensitivities. Prior to using MLFA, scree test and proportion of variance method were used to determine the optimal number of common factors to use, where seven components were extracted. Correlation analysis was done amongst the variables which were used in this research study. The findings revealed that there was a high correlation between incomes earned, improved family relationship and leadership potential. These findings were consistent with the literature review where it was observed that empowerment had contributed to improved social and economic well being of the respondents