Poverty and Access to Microfinance with Gender Dimension
This paper examines the development of microfinance market from the household perspective as it relates to poverty alleviation. It therefore attempts to assist the concerned policymakers and institutions to make use of the results in here in formulating policies and programs that can improve the performance of the countrys microfinance market. The paper performs comparative analysis amongst the following:
- Between beneficiaries of community-oriented financial institutions (COFIs) and non-beneficiaries;
- Between male-headed and female-headed households;
- Between male-headed and female-headed beneficiary households (BHHs);
- Between male-headed and female-headed non-beneficiary households (NBHHs).
To test these four hypotheses, this paper makes a comparison of the extent of poverty of COFI BHHs and NBHHs as well as their relative contributions to various measures of total poverty like the head-count index, poverty-gap index and the P2, which is measure of the severity of poverty.
Results show that there is a large disparity in poverty incidence between COFI beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries while the results on the comparison between male-headed and female-headed households reveal that there is hardly any difference between these two groups. Among COFI beneficiaries, female-headed households appear to be poorer than male-headed households while among non-beneficiaries, male-headed households appear to be poorer than female-headed households.
