Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh: Credit is Not a Panacea

Gender relations are deeply embedded in the Bangladeshi society. Therefore, changing gender relations is difficult and requires a long-term process. This paper seeks to assess the impact of credit on women's empowerment. The specific objectives of the research are to explore the following key questions:

• What are the impacts of credit on women's economic, social, political and psychological empowerment, taking account of the possibility of different impacts on different groups of women?
• What explains these impacts?
• What are the policy implications of these findings?

The paper finds that there has been an exaggeration regarding the gender empowerment impact of credit. In practice, credit provision is only a step on the long road of empowering poor rural women. The credit schemes of the MFIs are not a panacea to women's empowerment in Bangladesh. MFIs alone cannot bring about the required change in the society to empower women; all other sectors including government agencies and NGOs have to bring changes in all their policies to create a suitable enabling environment to reverse the age old gender related societal systems.

[Based on the author's abstract]