Microcredit and Women's Empowerment in Dry Zone Area, Myanmar

Abstract

Microcredit (microloans) has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. As a tradition in Myanmar society, women often take the back seat and are not active in decision-making despite working hard in all aspects of the economic sphere. The improvement in women’s economic empowerment has the potential to lead to positive changes in both social and psychological dimensions. An important institution for promoting microcredits in Myanmar is Pact INGO, which is implementing a savings-led economic empowerment program for women, under the WORTH model. Since its launch, Pact has provided WORTH technology to over 2,000 saving groups with more than 60,000 members in Myanmar. The main research aims to analyze how the savings-led microcredit approach can promote women-led microenterprises and how different pathways of empowerment (material, cognitive, perceptual and relational) can lead to women’s multidimensional empowerment. The objectives of the study are to explore the relationship between the savings-led microcredit approach and the multidimensional empowerment of women; and to analyze the microcredit-driven empowerment processes of women under the context of development programs. This study discusses microcredit’s economic, social, and psychological impacts on women through the different pathways of empowerment. The study uses a qualitative method including focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with rural women members of saving groups. The study area was in Budalin Township, lower Sagaing Region, Dry Zone under the Shae Thot (Way Forward) project implemented by Pact INGO. For this study, the primary concept of empowerment is used, in particular, the specific definition characterizing it as economic security, ability to purchase, involvement in major household decisions, self-confidence, mobility of women, and participation in community development activities. Empowerment is a non-linear, multidimensional process, which evolves along different pathways – material, perceptual, cognitive and relational. By analyzing the change processes through different pathways, the study finds that financial literacy and business management skills as well as access to microcredit are important factors in promoting women-led microenterprises resulting to women’s economic empowerment. It is also found that women’s social empowerment can be achieved through the social interactions within saving groups under the relational pathway. Noticeably, changes under perceptual pathway which lead to women’s psychological empowerment are outcomes of changes in other pathways. It was concluded that the cognitive pathway is the leading pathway and material pathway is the second leading one to reach women’s empowerment.