Is Microfinance a ‘Magic Bullet’ for Women’s Empowerment? Analysis of Findings from South Asia

By N. Kabeer. 2005

512 citations recorded by the source corpus.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/652dbf6d67b78c6adf1722f629aeaf76e6c0e926

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. Maren Duvendack
2. J. Copestake
3. R. Palmer-jones
4. L. Hooper
5. N. Rao
6. Y. Loke
7. K. Imai
8. R. Gaiha

Citations in the corpus

• The Impact of Lending to Women on Household Vulnerability and Women's Empowerment: Evidence from India (2008, unknown): “It is anticipated that such programs will contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals which, among other things, aim to promote gender equality and empower women (see Kabeer, 2005).”
• Women Empowerment Through Microfinance: Empirical Evidence from Ghana (2017, background): “Kabeer (2005) establishes women empowerment as the processes by which women take control and ownership of their lives through expansion of their choices [28].”
• Women’s Empowerment and Prevalence of Stunted and Underweight Children in Rural India (2014, background): “However, there are many other factors, such as women’s own asset holding, income, consumption or production skills, which would also lead to women's empowerment (Doss, 2013; Kabeer, 1999, 2005).”
• Women, Work, and the Economy:Macroeconomic Gains from Gender Equity (2013, background): “In many LICs, the availability of microfinance has helped to reduce the gender productivity gap (Kabeer, 2005), with higher credit repayment rates among women than among men.”
• SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth – A gendered analysis (2019, background): “risks repeating these same mistakes (see Altan-Olcay, 2014; Kabeer, 2005).”
• Women, girls and world poverty: empowerment, equality or essentialism? (2016, background): “Without addressing the constraints on female agency posed by patriarchy and other forms of structural inequality, it is obvious that microfinance is no ‘magic bullet’ for female empowerment (Kabeer,1999,2005).”
• Systematic Review. What is the evidence of the impact of microfinance on the well-being of poor people? (2011, background): “…on the grounds that improved returns to assets, especially labour, power and entrepreneurship, are neither necessary nor sufficient grounds for improvements in health and education developments, may not exist, or may anyway be captured by males (Goetz and Sen Gupta 1996, Kabeer 2001, 2005b).”