Posted by: Taea Calcut
In a previous post, “Defining MFIs’ Gender Mandate,” we noted that 77 MFIs from a sample of 134 MFIs submitting social performance data to MIX reported that “women’s empowerment” ranked among their top objectives. This begs the question – what are some concrete steps MFIs might take in order to empower women?
The MIX Social Performance Report identifies non-financial “empowerment services” as a way in which MFIs can meet their women’s empowerment objective. Empowerment services include:
- business training to enhance women's market opportunities
- women's leadership training
- training on rights and responsibilities as leaders in participative models
- women's rights education or gender issues training for men and women
- counseling and/or legal services for women victims of violence
An “other” category is also available for MFIs that provide a different service than the options listed.
Graph 1: Women’s Empowerment Services by Type from a Sample of 59 MFIs
Our recent analysis of MIX Social Performance reports indicates that 59 (77%) of the 77 MFIs claiming to have a women’s empowerment objective offer a total of 163 different non-financial services. As shown in Graph 1, the most common service is business training (provided by 45 MFIs), followed by leadership training (provided by 35). Counseling and/or legal services for women victims of violence is the least common empowerment service, offered by only 13 MFIs. 19 MFIs also report offering a different type of service than those listed within the report. Some of these services include literacy and IT classes as well as workshops on accessing government services.
As described above, the majority of MFIs claiming to have a women’s empowerment objective offer at least one non-financial empowerment service. However, it is interesting that the other 19 (23%) do not. This fact gives rise to a host of questions. For example:
- Is the act of simply giving women access to credit and other financial products considered a sufficient means to empowerment, given women’s traditional marginalization from formal financial institutions? Or, are non-financial services necessary to enhance women’s ability to effectively take advantage of their newfound financial access?
- What else do MFIs consider acts that promote “women’s empowerment”? Is group formation and increased economic well-being believed to automatically enable women to empower themselves? Or does empowerment require explicit support for women to challenge gender discrimination?
- Is it possible to achieve a cost-effective integration of microfinance with non-financial services tailored to women’s needs? Or are these services too expensive given their perceived impact?
- Are non-financial services directed toward women only necessary in certain environments? If so, what services are most important in what environments?
Your question of whether access to finance is sufficient for women’s empowerment is an important one. Development economists from Innovations for Poverty Action and Financial Access Initiative (http://financialaccess.org/) published a study that you might find helpful in your work: "Female Empowerment: Impact of a Commitment Savings product in the Philippines." Using household bargaining power as a metric for empowerment, they found that a savings product caused an increase in household decision-making power for married women, measured both in women’s own reporting of how household decisions were made, and in the household purchases of goods typically used by women. The paper went on to make a critical distinction: Marginal increases in income for women may be bargained over similarly to existing income, and are therefore not guaranteed to lead to gains in bargaining power. Rather, it may be access to additional sources of income flows that promote female ‘empowerment.’
Posted by: Cecelia Tanaka | Dec 17, 2009 at 12:47 PM